A Kernel on Beautiful Sentences
and how to write them
“I can make it pretty in revision.” This was my go-to motto with all my first drafts and then with each subsequent draft of every story I’ve written in my adult life. But then the day came when my drafts felt unworkable. The ugly, ugly sentences were getting in the way. Rather than conveying meaning, I was doing the one thing we don’t want to do as writers—losing the reader. Sometimes bad writing is just bad writing. So I’ve undergone, what you might call, an education in beautiful sentences. The work of a truly beautiful sentence is not to eclipse the meaning, but rather, to help it along. I’m not saying all my sentences are beautiful now, but I believe in their value. And once you see the value in something, you try to find ways to replicate it.
My prose degrades when I prioritize meaning over form. In my reading, too: poetry makes me cringe. I cry “cliché” at “gazes” and “soft whispers” and luxurious phrases. I trained myself to be skeptical of pretty sounding sentences: “that sentence just suggests meaning, but does it actually mean anything?” Under the guise of meaning, my barebone and direct language made for careless writing and ineffective storytelling. This is obvious to me now but felt noble to me then.
The truth is, meaning is inseparable from materiality. By materiality I mean the shape, sound, and form that ideas take. Even Samuel Becket, a playwright suspicious of the meaning of language, believed in the power of the beauty of language: “As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.”
In my search for meaning in literature, I had set up a false dichotomy between the meaning of words and the shape, sound, appearance, or as a dear friend of mine says, the word surface. While I still believe that relying on a beautiful word surface without a robust meaning to back it up is a monstrosity, I understand that it goes both ways. The dream is to marry meaning and materiality so that the least we can do is not contribute to language “falling into disrepute.”
Realizing how important it would be for my writing to wield this tool, I educated myself on how to write a beautiful sentence. So feel free to try out the two exercises below that have helped me get my sentences from unmoving to inspiring.
Find a sentence (or phrase or paragraph) with a beautiful word surface (and, in my case, that necessitates meaning as well). If you don’t know where to start, try this one from Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge: “He was as much a stranger up here now as any tourist might be, and yet gazing back at the sun-sliced bay, he noted how familiar it felt; he had not expected that. The salt air filled his nose, the wild rugosa bushes with their white blossoms brought him a vague confusion; a sense of sad ignorance seemed cloaked in their benign white petals.” Take the sentence and repurpose it for your story. How can you fit your characters in the situation of the sentence? Change the verbs, the adjectives, the characters. Use this as a launchpad to make yourself think on the sentence level. How does this sentence function in a specific interaction or moment in your story?
Start with a plot point of your story. Write it in a direct, simple, clear way. Then put pressure on it and ask yourself if any of it can or should be expanded and why. For example, I had a sentence that communicated a family was coming to visit their daughter. But I also wanted to communicate the weight of that visit. So I expanded the sentence into a rumination about the preparations the daughter would have to make. I allowed myself to be in that moment, and it produced a more story-like sentence.
I’m sure my journey towards beautiful sentences is only just beginning, but I warn against what I was doing: dismissing them. People often say just read more and read beautiful things and your writing will blossom. But doing this wasn’t enough for me. I needed to make myself notice. I needed to write them down. To see why a sentence felt falsely beautiful and when one hit right. It’s okay that when I read I notice other things (I hope this speaks to the strengths my writing does have), but I should never neglect the syntactic elements, especially one so crucial to the experience of the reader and the success of my storytelling. So now I’m paying attention to the things I neglected. Follow along if you dare.
My kernel of advice: Care about both levels of the sentences you write—the meaning and the materiality.
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
This week Natalia read Story Engineering and took so many notes. She is excited to apply some of the new plot logic to her own writing as she plans out before she writes. She’s always done this a little (general character arc and a few scenes she knows need to happen) but never like this. She is hoping it will take away some of the stress of rewriting and editing (if that’s possible). On other fronts, Infinite Jest is surprising her left and right with its ability to invite her into deeper philosophical places without feeling inaccessible (especially for such a long book).
Sarah just finished Claudia Piñeiro’s A Little Luck after reading about it in this wonderful interview with Sarah’s friend, the writer William Boyle. She’s not surprised he had rhapsodic things to say about it, because the book—about a mother who abandons her young child for twenty years following a horrific accident—is gut-wrenching, poignant, and structured for maximum impact. Piñeiro seamlessly weaves past and present, and uses a surprising device: the repetition of a single page of text through the entire novel, adding minute revisions each time. This repeated passage alters how the reader interprets the main character’s decision to flee and the understanding of what really happened. Sarah hopes to make use of this brilliant device some day.
This week Neidy caught up on the last two months’ worth of The Shit No One Tells You About Writing, a podcast she highly recommends for aspiring novelists. She’s also been combing through the publicly available presentations from the 2023 AWP conference posted on AWP’s YouTube channel. Though she is dreading the actual writing, Neidy has been researching how to craft a successful statement of purpose because she is (once again) applying for MFA programs this fall.
Shelby has been writing every single night for the past 12 days and is excited about her novel's progress. She’s realizing how important it is to stay connected to her novel in order to move forward—even if that’s working towards a small word count each day. Additionally, she read a book she didn’t care for (but feels like it would be mean to name the book here!), and she’s gearing up for a staycation during which she plans to spend her time doing writerly things and the odd household project or two.