Several Short Sentences about Writing
Ratings15
Average rating4.4
Most of what you think you know about writing is useless. It's the harmful debris of your education'a mixture of half-truths, myths, and false assumptions that prevents you from writing well. Drawing on years of experience as a writer and teacher of writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg offers an approach to writing that will change the way you work and think. There is no gospel, no orthodoxy, no dogma in this book. What you'll find here isn't the way to write. Instead, you'll find a way to clear your mind of illusions about writing and discover how you write. Several Short Sentences About Writing is a book of first steps and experiments. They will revolutionize the way you think and perceive, and they will change forever the sense of your own authority as a writer. This is a book full of learning, but it's also a book full of unlearning'a way to recover the vivid, rhythmic, poetic sense of language you once possessed. An indispensable and unique book that will give you a clear understanding of how to think about what you do when you write and how to improve the quality of your writing.
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The first half is pretty tedious and a bit repetitive. It seems he is trying to say that we should distrust everything we've been taught, but that we should trust him. And while I normally don't like creative writing that focuses on sentences, the way he presents his argument works most of the time. (But when it fails, it fails pretty badly, usually because of stylistic choices where he is either trying to sound like the tao te ching, or structuring the text so it looks like free verse.)
It is in the second half where the book saves itself. The author takes examples from other writers, and encourages the reader to explore why the writing is effective. He then takes (unattributed) example of less effective writing, and uses them to illustrate what he was talking about in the first half of the book.
Overall, the first half of the book was not particularly effective, but if the reader can tough it out, the second half brings it all together.
This is the first ‘how to write' book that's truly resonated with me. Klinkenborg proposes a sentence-first method, where syntactical rigour and accuracy of vocabulary are the keys to good writing, and together beget more and better ideas. I really liked that: that every sentence should have a reason for being the way that it is, and no other way, and that you should know why and consider every element fully. He eschews ideas of ‘flow' and ‘naturalness' in the writing process, arguing that ‘flow' is something the reader experiences, not the writer, and that writing isn't natural and should demand your effort.
Klinkenborg's method is a sort of discovery writing, though it's never called that in so many words, and it encourages patience and deliberation before you even put a word to the page. Knowing the right words and trusting your own powers of observation are more important here than outlining or drafting. If that all sounds very abstract and internal, it is, but the vigour and clarity of the author's argument are strong testimony.
You see some practical applications in the last section of the book, where Klinkenborg critiques example sentences from student writers. Some are just slightly off and others are barely intelligible, and he rewrites, restructures or discards them with a dry humour and easy efficiency that I enjoyed. Many other writing books wimp out of discussing sentences – even though to me, as a reader, they are the experience – so I appreciated reading one in which sentence-level confidence and craft are instrumental. A really motivating and thought-provoking read.
