On Craft…
Having ideas feels awesome. Expressing those ideas feels even better. You feel like some type of magician or alchemist when you can bring what is swirling in your head onto the page in a coherent way. But there is more to writing than high-level structuring and expression. Often, I’m so excited about an idea, I forgot to make the writing work on the sentence level. That’s not to say my sentences are shit, but it is a self-assessment that I can be caught up choosing style and sonics over meaning. Today, I try to get us all to break the habit.
Working through your sentences is a valuable exercise. As much time as you spend thinking on the entirety of your piece, so too should you be spending time thinking on each individual sentence. Self-editing, for me, has largely been developmental. I ask myself if my ideas are flowing, if there’s rhythm to my words, and if my thesis makes sense. Rarely—until very recently—have I sat down and asked myself if each word in each sentence is serving the sentence, and if the sentence itself is serving the piece. This exercise takes time and honesty to execute well.
I’ve got a few tricks for editing the sentence. The first of which is simply reading it out loud and isolated several times over until it feels like mush. From there, move on to the next sentence, and make it mush, too. Now that nothing really feels like it makes sense, stop reading out loud and re-read your paragraph. Do the parts start to come together as they become foreign to you and appear more like tools and less like darlings? If yes, you’ve got some great sentences. If no, you need to do some line-editing.
Sentence length also matters. We all have patterns and tricks we employ so naturally, we forget to double check and make sure our pieces aren’t just a graveyard of our habits as writers. But there’s nothing dazzling about three listing sentences in a row. I would know, I do it all the time. Be prepared to cut down your clauses. Be prepared to realize your style isn’t as attractive as you once thought. While voice is critical to writing, clarity is even more important. Again, honesty is key here. A sentence may be perfectly in your voice, but it could be doing nothing for your piece. It has to be reworked or cut altogether.
When reading, try to zero-in on the sentences from the writers you admire. Pay attention to how they arrange their words, and when they go long versus keeping things concise. A lot of this is instinct—eventually. But it only gets to that point after a long series of conscious decisions to make each sentence matter. You can judge your growth as a writer on the sentence level just as much as you can judge it based on your knack for injecting voice into a piece. A good writer knows how to develop and restrain themselves at once. They know how to craft a sentence you’d never think of deleting, but also how to backspace entire passages without taking it personally in service of the greater sentences to come. Could that be you? Surely.