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Several Short Sentences About Writing, by Verlyn Klinkenborg
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An indispensable and distinctive book that will help anyone who wants to write, write better, or have a clearer understanding of what it means for them to be writing, from widely admired writer and teacher Verlyn Klinkenborg.
Klinkenborg believes that most of our received wisdom about how writing works is not only wrong but an obstacle to our ability to write. In Several Short Sentences About Writing, he sets out to help us unlearn that “wisdom”—about genius, about creativity, about writer’s block, topic sentences, and outline—and understand that writing is just as much about thinking, noticing, and learning what it means to be involved in the act of writing. There is no gospel, no orthodoxy, no dogma in this book. Instead it is a gathering of starting points in a journey toward lively, lucid, satisfying self-expression.
- Sales Rank: #25291 in Books
- Published on: 2013-04-09
- Released on: 2013-04-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .60" w x 5.20" l, .54 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 224 pages
Review
Praise for Verlyn Klinkenborg's Several Short Sentences About Writing:
“No other book, old or new, is as well reasoned as this, as entertaining or as wise. . . . Best book on writing. Ever. . . . To paraphrase Voltaire’s statement concerning the Almighty, ‘if Verlyn Klinkenborg did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.’ Because having read Several Short Sentences About Writing, I do not think that it would be possible to not have this book on hand. . . . Indeed, no other book is as filled with as much grounded, practical advice for putting words to the paper or electronic page or gives better, more helpful exercises.”
—New York Journal of Books
“Powerful . . . each sentence miraculously contains an idea or insight that lesser writers would have milked for several pages.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“An exceptionally interesting and useful book about writing.”
—Tom McGuane
“A fresh perspective on writing that goes against conventional classroom theory.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Klinkenborg does away with much of the traditional wisdom on writing and dissects the sentence—its structure, its intention, its semantic craftsmanship—to deliver a new, useful, and direct guide to the art of storytelling.”
—Brain Pickings
“Expertise and zeal are required for an established writer to offer genuinely useful guidance to aspiring writers. It also helps if the writer teaches writing, as Klinkenborg has for many years. . . . The result is a unique anatomy of the sentence and the writing mind and a clarifying and invigorating ‘book of first steps.’”
—Booklist
"This is a very interesting little book about writing. Modest. Learned. Good-natured. Direct and sympathetic to its readers. You don't even have to read it front to back (probably you couldn't, anyway). You can just open it anywhere—as I did—and take away something useful."
—Richard Ford
“There have been good books on grammar and style, some classics, but none to compare to this one for understanding where sentences come from in the first place, where their vitality is found, and what distinguishes their energy, their authenticity, and their prospects for life after birth—that is, the art of revision. This book's long future will be a testament to its author's principles.”
—Tom McGuane
About the Author
Verlyn Klinkenborg is a member of the editorial board of The New York Times, to which he also contributes meditations about his farm in upstate New York, collected in The Rural Life. His other books include Making Hay, The Last Fine Time, and Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile. Klinkenborg has a Ph.D. in English literature from Princeton University.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
*
Your job as a writer is making sentences.
Most of your time will be spent making sentences in your head.
In your head.
Did no one ever tell you this?
That is the writer's life.
Never imagine you've left the level of the sentence behind.
Most of the sentences you make will need to be killed.
The rest will need to be fixed.
This will be true for a long time.
The hard part now is deciding which to kill and which
to fix and how to fix them.
This will get much, much easier, but the decision making will never end.
*
As you practice noticing, notice how thickly particled
with names the world around you is.
This will gradually become part of your noticing,
looking not for words to make us see the way you saw--
But for the names of what you've noticed.
Names that announce the whatness of the world to a single species.
It's hard to grasp at first the density, the specificity
With which the world has been named.
This is a planet of overlapping lexicons,
Generation after generation, trade after trade,
Expedition after expedition sent out to bring home
Name upon name, terms of identity in endless degrees of intimacy,
And all at hand, if you look for them.
*
In the syntax and rhythm of sentences,
In the page of thought, the intensity of movement,
The crescendo and decrescendo,
The trustworthy reader learns the writer's habitude and how to move with it.
You converse, in a sense, with the voice on the other side of the ink.
The kind of reading is the pleasure of being summoned out of ourselves by the grace,
The ferocity, the skill of the writing before us.
How else to explain our love of even difficult writers?
Their agility evokes our agility.
We move at their speed, elliptically, obliquely,
However they move.
Most helpful customer reviews
44 of 47 people found the following review helpful.
Klinkenborg's poem that celebrates prose
By Richard Gilbert
How to foster a certain quality of mind, the writing mind, which notices, lies at the heart of Several Short Sentences About Writing. As the quotes below show, Klinkenborg's writing advice is presented like poetry. Technically it IS poetry, as he's controlling the length of his lines. This compulsively readable declarative poem runs for149 of the book's 204 pages, the balance being examples of prose, good and bad, and concise commentary. Here are some of his gnomic stanzas that struck me as interesting:
"If you notice something, it's because it's important.
But what you notice depends on what you allow yourself to notice,
And that depends on what you feel authorized, permitted to notice
In a world where we're trained to disregard our perceptions. . . .
"Is it possible to practice noticing?
I think so.
But I also think it requires a suspension of yearning
And a pause in the desire to be pouring something out of yourself.
Noticing is about letting yourself out into the world,
Rather than siphoning the world into you
In order to transmute it into words."
. . .
"The longer the sentence, the less it's able to imply,
And writing by implication should be one of your goals.
Implication is almost nonexistent in the prose that surrounds you . . .
"Try making prose with a poetic seriousness about its tools--
Rhythm, twists of language, the capacity to show the reader
What lies beyond expression,
But with the gaits of prose and a plainness in reserve
That poetry rarely possesses, an exalted plainness."
It's up to you to decide for yourself in the crucible of your practice whether Klinkenborg's opinions are true. He calls them conclusions, not assumptions. But he urges wariness about all dogma, even his. Contrary to so many process-based writing theorists, including the influential Peter Elbow, he says the creative and critical functions are not separate. They occur simultaneously. Since I am one who polishes as I go and seemingly cannot follow vomit-it-up advice, I was heartened.
This is a classic! Very inspiring.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
A gem
By Elizabeth Hein - author of How To Climb The Eiffel Tower
In this little book, Klinkenborg discusses how education and precedent lead people to write overly long, complicated sentences. He stresses writing clear sentences that say what you mean them to say. All the rest will fall into place from there.
I'm not sure if writing clearly is as simple as Klinkenborg makes it out to be but I did cull a few gems from the text that I'd like to share -
You can't revise or discard what you don't consciously recognize.
A cliche is dead matter.
It causes gangrene in the prose around it, and sooner or later, it eats your brain.
Your job as a writer is making sentences.
Your other jobs include fixing sentences, killing sentences, and arranging sentences.
This book will motivate you to focus on writing at the sentence level and not worry about the piece of writing as a whole.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
May be especially useful to experienced writers
By Ross V
Certain books provide a solid foundation for new or aspiring writers: Strunk & White's "Elements of Style" (useful) and Susan Shaughnessy's "Walking on Alligators" (excellent) both come to mind. As we gain experience -- and perhaps fall into bad habits -- books that deliver deeper thoughts can help us put our writing on a new path. In "Several Short Sentences," Klinkenborg delivers a wealth of non-obvious perspectives that come from a place of deep thinking -- the type of thinking suggested in the book. His wisdom has helped reinvigorate my writing, and that is perhaps the highest praise I can offer.
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