So, you want to write—or to write better. Perhaps you dream of producing a novel or memoir so compelling that major publishers will fight over it. Perhaps you hope to have your poems accepted by a small press. Perhaps an essay in The New York Times is your goal, or perhaps you want to self-publish your work. You may be enrolled in an MFA program in writing; you may be learning to write on your own, or with the help of a writers’ support group. Or perhaps you are someone who has always yearned to write but has never quite dared to take the first step. Wherever you stand now as a writer—whether you are just getting started or have been writing for some time—this book is for you.
It will provide you with something you can’t get anyplace else: a focused, classroom-tested training program that will teach you to write spellbinding sentences.
“Sentences?” you may ask. “Why should I care about sentences? I’m not interested in all that boring grammar stuff!”
But this is not a grammar book; it’s a book about the power of words. It will teach you—in a down-to-earth, practical way—how to make that power your own.
You may not believe you need that power. You may have been told that what really counts in writing is story, or the ability to dig deep inside yourself and be totally honest about what you uncover. You may believe that if you can only come up with a riveting plot, some editor will “fix” all the writing for you. But the truth is that story, by itself, is just not enough—and professional literary agents and editors, being busy people, would much rather work with writers who’ve mastered their craft.
These days, most writing instruction focuses on large-scale craft: characters, plot, setting, and so on—and, yes, you certainly need this knowledge. But if you can’t communicate your story to readers, if you can’t use language with such skill that readers have to keep turning the pages, then no one will spend more than a few minutes with your work. If you want to keep your readers spellbound, then you also need to learn the “small” craft of writing: the skills of choosing words and arranging them into coherent and powerful sentences. This book will teach you these skills.
As a guide to improving skills, this is not a book just to read: It’s a book to do. You can’t become a better violinist or tennis player simply by reading about those activities; you must put bow to strings or racket to ball on a regular basis. So it is with writing: If you want to develop your skills, you must practice. There’s real work involved. This work doesn’t require a lot of fancy equipment—not even a computer. And you don’t need long stretches of empty time. What you do need is an eagerness to learn, and a willingness to put some attention and energy into writing practice.
In the pages that follow, I will be your writing coach. Like a violin teacher or tennis coach, I will show you how to develop your skills, provide you with exercises, and explain how to do those exercises. Like any coach, I will repeat important principles over and over, because repetition is essential to learning. Just as a tennis or baseball coach continually reminds his students, “Keep your eye on the ball!” I will tell you again and again to relax, to listen to your words and sentences, to pay attention to how professional writers use language.
When a professional writer is at work, his mind is busy making choices, choices about content—What do I want to write about? What material shall I use? Will this piece of writing be a poem or an essay? Who is my audience?—and choices about language—What word do I need here? How can I make a picture so my reader will see it? Is this sentence too long? Some of these choices are the result of conscious thought, but many of them, especially in the realm of craft, are the result of training. Training is what creates professionals. With a baseball game on the line, for example, a professional center fielder can track a fly ball perfectly and make the catch, because his mind and muscles have been trained to choose the right moves. In the same way, when an experienced writer drafts and revises a piece, her mind can come up with effective words and sentence constructions, because she has trained the mental "muscles" that make those choices.
Even more important: Because they have consciously trained themselves in the craft of making sentences, professional writers have far more choices available to them. Without that training, aspiring writers are stuck in a rut: They use the same words, the same sentence structures, over and over, without even realizing it. This book will open your mind to a world of possible word choices and sentence constructions, so that you, too, can write like a professional.
The book is organized like my workshop, The Art of the English Sentence, which I teach in an MFA in Creative Writing program. Its chapters will take you, step-by-step, through information and practices that will increase your understanding of how words and sentences work. The two main sections of the book focus, in turn, on diction (the skill of choosing words) and on syntax (the skill of arranging those words into effective sentences). Having practiced these skills, we’ll then explore some more advanced compositional techniques.
My approach here is both highly specific and generously open-ended. All the practices are designed to be equally available—and helpful—to both beginning and more experienced writers. So you can use them in whatever ways you wish, and you can keep returning to them over time, as your needs and desires change.
What I offer here is not a collection of rules (that’s what grammar books are for), but a selection of basic tools that skilled professional writers use to craft sentences. I have not included every possible technique; rather, I have tried to present this material in such a way that any interested writer, beginning or experienced, can develop a solid foundation in sentence-making skills. With this foundation in place, you can easily go on to explore more advanced or experimental approaches. At the end of the book you’ll find a list of resources for further learning.
A journey towards mastery, in writing as in any other field, is a source of pleasure. To acquire expertise is to gain confidence in oneself and one’s abilities, to feel a sense of power. And when you have learned how to wield that power with words, then the pleasure will not be yours alone: It will also be your reader’s.