"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.
Last month I went to the Kennedy Center to see the Broadway musical "Come Fly Away," a dance revue choreographed by Twila Tharp and set to the accompaniment of Frank Sinatra's recorded voice and a live big band on stage. I went with my good friend Phil (reason enough to enjoy the evening), and while it was a good show, we were both somewhat underwhelmed. The rest of the audience felt the same, as evidenced by the rather reluctant, slow and gradual standing ovation - the kind in which the applause is sustained and everyone looks at everyone else for a cue to stand. As we walked out into the night, neither one of us had much to say.
I wondered why; it was a brilliantly performed, perfectly executed show, packed with nonstop, amazing dancing and a whole company that made it look effortless. The dancers were good-looking, the costumes were attractive, and the set was wonderful. The music was - well, Frank - come on! The band played flawlessly, as if Sinatra were live and on stage with them. So why was the audience so restrained in its enthusiasm?
Today it finally hit me, after my workout, in the shower (where I have thought of short story plot lines, solved Lotus Notes application development coding problems, and composed music). Yes, there is strength, power, and flexibility in dance. Yes, dancers' feet do leave the floor. Yes, people want to see excitement and come away wowed. But for this dance lover, anyway, the dancing in the show was too - athletic.
Just like in figure skating, dancing has been becoming more and more athletic over many years. Tuxes and floor-length gowns are out, and now dancers leap, throw each other, spin both vertically and horizontally, flip in the air, whip each other around violently, and do things that make you go "ouch" and feel imaginary back pain. But whereas figure skating is actually an Olympic sport (which Scott Hamilton tried to emphasize by wearing only athletic stretch wear), dancing is arguably not. Which is not to say it is not athletic - because it certainly can be - just that it is not a sport in the sense of competing and winning against an opposing player(s), reality/competition shows notwithstanding. Why, then, does it have to continually increase in technical difficulty, at the expense of artistic expression?
Of course the same debate rages on in the figure skating world and probably always will. Triple this and triple that are ho-hum, and now at least one quad jump is required to win. Those on the sport side argue that scoring for artistic impression should count less; after all, no other Olympic sport has musical accompaniment (except the floor exercise in gymnastics) or has an artistic component at all. Those on the artistic side recall the classical roots of figure skating and lament the fading of Tchaikovsky and sequins on the ice.
So it goes.
Fast forward to the 21st century and the glut of competition shows on TV, such as "So You Think You Can Dance." The more outrageous the physicality, the greater the displays of strength and speed, the more violent the movement - the more excited the judges get, screaming their approval louder the more the sweat flies under the lights and the more revealing the lycra.
Maybe it's just that appetite thing: the more you get of something, the less satisfying it becomes and the more you need it to be more. Everything has to be increasingly extreme, because anything less is ordinary.
I guess I've always been old school. Give me Fred and Ginger any day over anyone else you can see today. Now there was style. There was grace. There was humanity. With dancers today, you get excited at their physical prowess and feats of strength. With Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly you were stirred emotionally.
Maybe I'm a slow adopter. Maybe I don't like change. Maybe I'm too nostalgic. Or maybe I just like dancing the way I saw it on "The Carol Burnett Show," back when I wanted to grow up to be the next Fred Astaire.
"Hi, I'm Ben." His kind, gentle face seems to belie the deep bass voice he used in the PEN/Faulkner reading he has just finished at the Folger Shakespeare Library on Capitol Hill. He smiles and shakes my hand, which is cold from nerves. Benjamin Percy is one of the "it" writers of today, appearing in ads for workshops and conferences, interviews in lit journals, and magazine articles, and I enjoy keeping current with emerging, promising talent.
I had not wasted any time getting to the book signing table when the reading ended and had even bought my book before the event started. Now, waiting for the writers to get there, those of us who had formed an indistinct line wondered which seat Percy would take and which his co-reader, Dagoberto Gilb, would take. Most PEN/Faulkner readings feature one well-established writer and one lesser known but promising writer, and the book signing lines are often embarrassingly lopsided. Having never heard of Gilb, I wasn't sure which writer was which, but watching people's restlessness, I felt I was about to find out.
When they arrived at the table and chose their seats, the line almost immediately shifted over to Gilb. I found myself the first in Percy's line - which made me glad - but also the only one, which made me uncomfortable. Didn't people know he was one of today's literary darlings?
He had read from his latest book, The Wilding, in a shockingly deep voice that recalled James Earl Jones as Darth Vader. The discordance between his young, sweet features and this dump truck rumbling sound reminded me of singer Josh Turner. It was well-suited to his material, which is dark, mysterious, and creepy.
(In fact, there is so much blood and unexplained death in the three stories I read yesterday from his collection Refresh, Refresh that I had to stop because I had started feeling ill. I should have gotten a clue from the fact that Peter Straub wrote one of his jacket blurbs.)
My jury is out until I've read enough of his work to form an opinion, but I noted a few things from the evening:
1) Storytelling as art
There's reading words off a page or news items off a teleprompter, and then there's infusing life into every spoken word of a story so that you are sucked in and experiencing what the characters are going through. Garrison Keillor, of course, is the penultimate storyteller, expert at holding the attention of an audience. Of all the readings I've attended, Percy's came the closest to hitting that mark. The booming of his voice, shaded with latent menace, combined with the dark nature of his writing, reminded me of the "Radio Mystery Theater" I couldn't help listening to on WCCO after turning the lights out (against my better judgment). I would lie in the dark, the covers pulled up to my chin, telling myself "Turn the radio off! Turn it off now!" but unable to stop holding my breath waiting to hear what happened next.
I'm not saying writers should do sound effects when they read their stuff or have musical interludes to play when they reach space breaks. But reading can be performance art if one spends the time practicing a piece and thinking about how the way one reads will affect the audience. Whether one chooses to take this approach is a personal decision, but I think if you can increase your hold on the audience and make it more memorable and - dare i say - entertaining*, that can only be good not only for your story and you as a writer, but literature in general.
*(Entertainment may sound lowbrow relative to what writers want to achieve, but maybe it is a necessary prelude to enrichment.)
2) A new form
Percy referred to a 120-page story as "my..." , paused for the perfect length of time, and said "shnovel." It was funny and cute, and Percy is disarming in his way of putting the cute right after the macabre, so everyone laughed. It's nice to have a new term for something that's too long to be a short story (or even a long short story) and too short to be a novel; the term novella is so freighted with negativity and awkwardness that I've become hesitant to use it. Injecting a little humor into a new term for this form might just get people to relax and let it be!
3) What Lies Beneath
I was struck by how easily and quickly Percy moved from the disturbing to the comic, how he could set you on edge one moment and in the next make you laugh and want to share a cup of coffee and ask about his kids. It made me wonder whether he was a dark person with surprising moments of levity or an easygoing guy with disturbing issues lurking underneath.
Of course, this is a continuum, not a simple dichotomy, and we probably all move along it one way or the other at various times in our lives. It isn't important as a reader to know where the author is, but this spectrum is what keeps me reading and certainly what keeps me writing.
What happened to the word an? It feels like an old friend gone missing. One day I woke up and no one was using it anymore.
"I think there's a apple in the fridge."
"That's a old version."
I even heard someone say - no kidding - "I was a English major!"
Really?
Can a word fade into obscurity from disuse? When did someone first decide it was okay to say a before a word beginning with a vowel? Or did so many people lack an understanding of the rule that a critical mass was eventually reached, rendering the word an helpless to stop its being relegated to a dusty drawer as the newest companion to forsooth, verily, and yoicks?
People butcher grammar all the time in conversation, but standards are higher for written English; "proper" English is what distinguishes civilization from - well, whatever you have without it (Terra Nova?). Yet I have been more than dismayed to find that using a for an is now seen even in newspapers and magazines. (Does this mean editing is more lax, or there is less editing?)
I accept that usage of words changes over time, and with it, meaning. I use the word hopefully a lot. Technically, it's an adverb, like angrily, quickly, or gracefully - a descriptive word modifying a verb. At some point, however, it became accepted as an introductory word describing the attitude about whatever follows in the sentence: Hopefully, I would win both the Veg-o-Matic and the Thighmaster. I didn't even realize until today that I'd been misusing the word.
Is this bad? Should I be as inflamed about my own grammatical error as I am about an's disappearance? They are both wrong, but they both appear to be acceptable.
The same goes for the word broke. Who said we could lose the n? Every time I hear it misused, I cringe and want to say, "Fie! Whencesover didst that come?" Broke is the past tense of the verb to break: break, broke, broken.
I know he will break my heart, but I'm going to ask him out, anyway. He broke my heart even though I waited until the third date to propose. He has broken my heart, but soon I will join Match.com. Broken is also the state of disrepair: My heart is broken, but it's nothing my friend Johnny Walker can't fix!
Broke as past tense is only fitting as dialect: Dang nabbit! Pappy's hooch machine in the holler down yonder's still broke!
Otherwise, as far as I'm aware, broken is still the correct word: Damn - the nozzle that foams the milk for morning espresso is still broken!
From where I sit, using language as my art, it's hard not to feel sad about the decline of proper English, the gradual, apathetic casting off of grammatical rules. Is it stuffy to want to construct sentences following long-accepted guidelines? Should one relax and follow the masses in resignation to the tides of popular practice?
I'd hoped to draw some pithy conclusion warning against degenerating into a Lord of the Flies existence in which we only use the grade school communication exercise vocabulary of fa, pa, and ba, - but, faced with my own participation in changing the rules, I am left with only my belief in what I learned in school.
The poll results are in: out of eleven respondents, four (36%) believe that fiction writers and poets write primarily to communicate with others, while seven (64%) believe that those writers write first for themselves as artistic expression.
When applying the same question only to themselves, just two (18%) said they write primarily for others, while nine (82%) said they write for themselves first. The response rate was just under fifty percent, with eleven out of twenty-four writers answering (including myself).
As I mentioned before, the questions can become more complex as they are discussed, and judging by the comments (thanks, Andi and Jane), the answers can be quite involved. Although the poll may have seemed simplistic and inadequate, I believe many qualified answers can actually fall into one or the other category.
For instance, writing to preserve history can be considered writing for others, since this really goes to the title of this and the previous blog entries; if history is recorded but no one reads it, is it really preserved? One may write down one's family history and not care at the time if it remains hidden in a desk drawer or forgotten in an attic, but if no one ever discovers and reads it years or decades later, would the writer have considered the effort worthwhile?
Or consider writing to make sense of an experience. This could fall under writing for oneself, since the person benefitting from bringing order out of chaos is the writer. It may subsequently affect or enrich others, too, but the making sense part is coming from the writer, primarily for the writer.
Personally, I write to express myself as a creative outlet. I would like others to read my stories, but if no one does, that's okay; it does not devalue what I have written or diminish my experience of writing, and it's not why I write in the first place. If I were on a desert island with no chance of being rescued or of my work being discovered on the island years later, I would still write (provided I could re-create the pen, ink, and paper).
Thanks to my friend Guy for asking an important, relevant question and sparking discussion among my writer friends far beyond the casual lunchtime chat that gave birth to the poll!
A friend asked me a philosophical question today: Do writers write primarily for themselves, or do they write for someone else's benefit?
I have a strong opinion about this, and we discussed this question for quite some time. I am going to assert my position later, but my friend's belief is that writers' primary motivation is to communicate, to pass on to others something they want to say, and that that is the whole point of writing. If no one reads your writing, there is no point in having written.
When we finally had to get on with our separate afternoons, I told him I would poll my writer friends and let him know the results. This is where you come in!
As with most polls, there's a whole lot wrapped up in the questions and answers, but I tried to make it as simple as possible. Let's assume we are only talking about fiction and poetry. The water gets murky very quickly, once we even start talking about the questions, let alone the answers.
Just two questions. The first is your belief about most creative writers in general, while the second is the same question applied to yourself:
This is my first Poll Daddy poll, so I'm not sure how this works, but I did set both polls to allow commenting (good luck with that). If all else fails, send me an email if you have other thoughts to share.
I'll post my own thoughts after allowing some time for response. Thanks for your help!
After three consecutive 13- to 14-hour days at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference, I hope you are readjusting to life back home. I myself feel unmoored and am trying to regain my bearings. Yes, it was wonderful being with 8,500 writers, agents, publishers, students, teachers, and editors, all focused on the art of literature. But for me, it is more than coming down off the high of community; it's dealing with the same question that arises after attending a week-long workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in Provincetown: what am I doing with my life? What should I be doing with my life? And if it's something different than what I'm doing now, do I have the guts - and the resources - to make the change?
The central question is that of the MFA, which has become the bachelor's degree of the writing world. You and I both feel the private sting of our perceived, though unspoken, snubbing at this seeming deficiency, even if our detractors exist only in an unidentifiable aggregate. (I am just waiting for the day when the first question people ask is, "And where did you get your MFA?")
We have both been through at least five writing workshops, which is equal to the requirement of many MFA programs. And you have certainly exceeded the coursework requirements as a former creative writing and literature professor and chair of an English department. You have also completed (and submitted for publication) a book-length manuscript, which is the same as an MFA thesis. You are missing only those three letters after your name.
I, however, am lacking the literature part of my education, try as I might to address it by reading on my own and using the resources now available on the Intranet to help me understand. Another FAWC classmate sent me the reading lists from her program at the Bennington Writing Seminars to help me out, but I'm not sure how I could ever read everything on those lists, as well as the works on my own lists.
So yesterday I once again struggled with The Question, one which becomes harder to answer the older I get. And beyond getting the degree, what is the financial tradeoff of a post-MFA career (assuming I could identify non-teaching options), and is it feasible to even consider in DC? That question is pretty easily answered, so the next question is whether I would be willing to relocate to a place with a lower cost of living.
More fundamentally, the question that becomes not only harder but more insistent with age is: what do I want to spend the rest of my career doing? Over the past three days, we were surrounded by many people who spend their time reading people's writing and considering, discussing, and arguing questions of competence, meaning, and relevance, as well as asserting subjective assessments of whether a story is good. Wow, I wonder what that's like, I thought.
But as the editor of Tin House said in one session, "we are you"; that's what we all do, and they are no different from us. At the time, I thought that was a nice thing to say but that as editors, they were on a different plane. Sitting here reflecting on it today, though, I realize that is indeed what we do in workshop: analyze a piece, discuss its merits and shortcomings, provide feedback to the writer, and privately decide which stories we think are the best, which show potential, and which aren't quite ready yet. While we don't do it full-time, we already do know the meat of at least the art side of what they do, and it is indeed wonderful. How many times during a week in P'town have I felt consciously aware of how great it is to spend our days reading and talking about each other's writing?
You don't get paid much to edit and publish fiction. But as Daniel Slager, publisher of Milkweed Editions, said in that same session, he gets paid to read, and he loves it. Though not by the world's standards, it's a privileged life.
And in the end, aren't ours the only standards that matter? At the end of our lives, how will we ourselves judge what we have done with them? Who cares what anyone else says about it?
So, Dianne, in my opinion you can be proud of all you have accomplished. As I've said before, enjoy your retirement. Take satisfaction in what you have done, not only for yourself but for so many young people (especially in opening their literary worlds beyond the white male canon).
The possibilities in my own life remain open, waiting for me to act. I hope and pray for the courage to do whatever is right for me. Thanks again for calling my attention to AWP being in my own backyard this year, thus spurring me to re-examine the bigger questions.
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.
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.
