Building Great Sentences? Zzzzzz....

"Building Great Sentences" is an audio course offered by Great Courses, a "lifelong learning" catalog company which sells CD/DVD recorded lectures on a wide variety of topics by esteemed professors.  Even though I am a writer, when I've seen it in the catalog, I've had a hard time thinking of a more boring subject.  I couldn't believe their pitch that it was one of their most popular courses.  All I could see in my mind's eye was diagramming sentences in tenth grade English class and trying to learn all those tenses.


In college I hated English Comp.  I had a TA named Gordon who was boring, and the class was boring.  (Gordon himself was probably not boring - maybe just bored; he may actually have just been another MFA student gutting out a Teaching Assistantship required for tuition remission.)  The writing we did in that class was not what I called creative, and I just saw it as getting my card punched.


Then I happened to remember my writer friend Dianne telling me that revision was her favorite part of writing.  And what is revision but taking sentences apart and putting them back together?  It's rearranging ideas, finding just the right words, and building great sentences to create exactly the meaning you want to impart to the reader.  As we writers already know, and as it is explained in the first lesson of the course, sentences are more than just their content; the way they are constructed carries their meaning.


The idea of listening to twenty-four lectures about it might not have excited me initially, but since I was already constantly striving to build great sentences, how dull could the course actually be?  (It also helped that it was on sale at five percent of the regular price.  That was the sale price, not the discount!)


I'm finally reading Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert*.  Just today I read this great sentence, in which Emma Bovary and Monsieur Leon find themselves discovering an intimacy they each privately acknowledge yet cannot discuss:

Future joys, like tropical shores, project over the immensity that lies before them their native softness, a fragrant breeze, and one grows drowsy in that intoxication without even worrying about the horizon one cannot see.

Could I ever HOPE to write such a gorgeous, evocative sentence that so wonderfully captures the emotion of the characters using so rich and relatable a metaphor?


Or consider this sentence from The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich (the context of which is not needed to appreciate the beauty of its language):

Then he stilled his heart, his breath, his thoughts, and leaned into her until his heart knocked hard and his breath tore through his lungs and thoughts turned into shifting colors that ripped softly into many pieces and rained down all around them as ordinary light.

Sometimes the writer in me gets in the way of the flow of a story, as I am compelled when coming to a sentence like this to stop and read it over and over, marveling at its beauty, deconstructing it to demystify its creation, and wondering if I could attain the vision necessary to emulate this level of writing.

Clearly, this course is just right for me, and if the first lesson is any indication, it will most definitely not be boring.

 * From a new translation by Lydia Davis, 2010