What We’re Reading: Several short sentences about writing

Several short sentences about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg (Vintage Books 2012)

I was in Denver last week on vacation, and gleefully checked off my number one must-do item for that city: visit Tattered Cover Book Store. If you ever have a chance, please go in and experience this treasure. It’s a beautiful bookstore, and large—the kind of bookstore you can spend hours meandering in through the multiple levels and sub-rooms to find a book to flip through while relaxing in a comfy armchair. I love large independent bookstores like this, because you can browse books at random and are guaranteed to stumble upon some gems you hadn’t heard of before. Such was the case with my discovery of Several short sentences about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg.

As someone who enjoys the lifelong act of learning and thinking about writing, I am constantly on the look-out for insightful writing about just that: the act of writing. Yet, quality books on the subject are hard to find. Rest easy: Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences takes the top of my list, challenging the conventional writing styles taught in our educational system and our own perceptions about writing.

Written entirely in short sentences as the titles suggests, with lots of line breaks for pause, the format of the book itself challenges what we expect from writing. As a journalist, writer, and teacher, Klinkenborg has tested the limits and preconceived lessons of writing time and time again. In his introduction, he asserts that this is a book of first steps. He also cautions the reader with this: “There’s no gospel here, no orthodoxy, no dogma. Part of the struggle in learning to write is learning to ignore what isn’t useful to you and pay attention to what is.” This is a book brimming with powerful insights that are impossible to fully express in a review. The things I paid attention to and found most helpful will likely be different from yours, so please get this book for yourself—you won’t regret it.

Klinkenborg wastes no time breaking down the act of writing to its most basic, yet arguably the most important level: the sentence. As he asserts that our job as writers most clearly put it to create sentences. He cautions us to “Never imagine you’ve left the level of the sentence behind.” Framing out the rest of his topics with the sentence, he goes on to probe into the tropes and misconceptions as well as new tactics about the act of noticing, creativity, flow, chronology, and much more.

A lot of his assertions have to do with letting go of things we’ve been taught to pay attention to, such as grammar and syntax:

Thinking in terms of grammar and syntax is also a good way to make your sentences seem less familiar.
Suddenly you’re looking at their bones and muscles,
the way they’re joined and the kinetics of their movement.

But notice.
The point of learning the fundamental language of grammar and syntax
Isn’t correctness or obeying the rules.
It’s keeping the rules from obtruding themselves upon the reader
Because you’ve ignored them.

Throughout, Klinkenborg asserts that once we know the rules, set them aside and let our instincts surface, with an attentive eye to the sentence. Just a page later, he talks about flow, and how the process of writing doesn’t need flow:

Your job as a writer is making sentences.
Your other jobs include fixing sentences, killing sentences, and arranging sentences.
if this is the case—making, fixing, killing, arranging—how can your writing possibly flow?
It can’t.

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.

A writer may write painstakingly,
Assembling the work slowly, like a mosaic,
Fitting and refitting sentences and paragraphs over the years.
And yet to the reader the writing may seem to flow.

He also urges us to not worry about style and voice so much. These shouldn’t be products of a conscious effort of those words themselves, but rather should come organically as “It’s as likely to appear in the character of your thinking, the shape of your ideas, your sense of humor or irony, as it is in any “stylistic” markers in the prose itself.” But this can only be achieved through clear prose.

Towards the end of the book, you’ll find experiments and exercises that actively stretch our minds in a different direction from conventional writing exercises. He uses examples from other writers, and poses questions about these excerpts to help us re-wire our brains in the way we approach writing and reading. This is a book that I plan to keep by my side when writing to remind me to ignore unhelpful impulses that have been ingrained in me. It’s also a book that can be re-read an endless number of times for it all to sink in. I highly recommend it for yourself, and as a gift for any other writer in your life.

Do you think our educational system is flawed in the way it teaches us writing? What other books about writing do you find most helpful as a writer?