Writing Exquisite Sentences

I had the great pleasure to attend a one-day workshop through Writers Victoria run by Emily Bitto, author of the Stella Prize winning The Strays. The subject of the workshop was very promising: Writing Exquisite Sentences. The day did not disappoint.

Exquisite sentences give pleasure, Emily said, they are controlled, specific, aware of rhythm and musicality. They evoke and awaken the senses, especially the visual sense. Joseph Conrad was quoted: “…by the power of the written word, to make you see.” Exquisite sentences should surprise, be rich in meaning or symbolism and have some subtext.

Clearly not every sentence can be exquisite, the effect would be an overloaded confectionery of sorts. Everyone knows that moment, however, when you just have to stop and re-read a sentence because it is so artfully expressed, so exquisitely formed it sings off the page.

Among the authors discussed, Emily quoted two of my favourites in Cormac McCarthy and James Salter. In the days following the workshop I re-visited McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Salter’s Light Years, both annotated with those sentences that bade me stop and wonder.

***

‘The sun was just down and to the west lay reefs of bloodred clouds up out of which rose little desert nighthawks like fugitives from some fire at the earth’s ends.’

‘The other boy was from Missouri. They were in good spirits, scrubbed and combed, clean shirts all. Each foreseeing a night of drink, perhaps love. How many youths have come home cold and dead from just such nights and just such plans.’

‘The stars burned with a lidless fixity and they drew nearer in the night until toward dawn he was stumbling among the whinstones of the outermost ridge to heaven, a barren range of rock so enfolded in that gaudy house that stars lay awash at his feet and migratory spalls of burning matter crossed constantly about him on their chartless reckonings.’

Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy.

***

‘The wide afternoon bed, the dark of drawn curtains. He was escaping from his clothes, they fell in a heap. She lay there waiting. She seemed quiet, remote. He touched his forehead to her like a servant, like a believer in God. He could not speak.’

‘Viri and I are good friends, good friends. I think we’ll always be. But the rest, the rest is dead. We both know it. There’s no use pretending. It’s decorated like a corpse, but it’s already rotten.’

‘Things had somehow changed between them. She would always have affection for him, but the summer had passed.’

Light Years – James Salter.

***

‘I looked at Heloise, she was absorbed in a secret game of her own. Her lips were moving, and she was pecking at the loose gravel with the beak of her thumb and fingers.’

‘The household found its way into its own peculiar form of dailiness. There was an architecture to it. Not precise, but an architecture nonetheless, as if everyone was a door or a window pulled from old houses and assembled into a new one.’

‘I remember that morning with Jerome in the garden. The soft clarity of six a.m. when the day is going to be hot, as if the sun has not yet thrown off its white sheets.’

The Strays – Emily Bitto.

Words maketh the monster.

Couples. John Updike

“…his toenails were hideous: ingrown, gangrenous, twisted toward each other.”

Clearly, the reader is not supposed to like this character. This is just one sentence from John Updike’s, Couples, where the character of Freddy Thorne is described. The story follows the affairs, rivalries and domestic rituals among ten couples living in the fictional New England town of Tarbox. In the story, Freddy is the anti-hero to the main protagonist, Piet Hanema, who, despite being the most active participant in the adulterous games being played out, is the character to whom the reader’s sympathy and interest is aligned.

Here is a small selection of the less than favourable words used deliberately by Updike to describe Freddy in disparaging terms.

In an early scene, Freddy speaks in close proximity to a female character, and his breath is described as “meaty.”

In another scene, he uses his “crooked forefingers” to make “quick horns at his scalp”. Presumably, we are meant to see him as some kind of devil.

“Freddy looked up. His eyes were monstrously enlarged by the magnifying glasses that supplemented his ordinary glasses.”

While, later in the story: “Freddy’s hairless face became very ugly, the underside of some soft eyeless sea creature whose mouth doubles as an anus.”

Quite an accumulation and a none too subtle set of indicators from the author to inform our disposition toward Freddy Thorne.

Couples is a pacey and entertaining read, set in 1963, in a society managing post-pill promiscuity against the waning influence of religion. “Welcome to the post-pill paradise” is one of the more famous lines from the book. It’s a farcical, at times comedic, romp. John Updike, author of some twenty-one novels, is renowned for his Rabbit Angstrom quartet of novels, 1960-1990, he also wrote The Witches of Eastwick, 1984, but it was Couples that put him on the cover of Time magazine.

Couples.

John Updike. 1968, Penguin.

The Write Stuff

Randy Newman. Singer, songwriter, composer, pianist.

So you want to write?

Here’s a simple truth I’ve garnered from reading about how writers work:

You’re going to have to commit time to put fingers to the keyboard. Or, in the case of Stephen King and James Patterson, put pen or pencil to paper.

You can’t wait for the muse to arrive – your muse may not turn up. He or she may be indisposed.

You can’t rely on technique or experience – previous endeavour is no guarantee of future success.

You can’t hold back writing because the thought isn’t yet perfectly formed – you can always come back to craft and finesse a rough draft, the caveat is you need to commit to rattling off the raw version.

You can’t necessarily know where the time will take you, but you have to have faith that if you are strict about putting the time in, the ideas will follow.

I was reading an interview with Randy Newman, American singer /songwriter / composer / pianist. Over a prolific fifty-year career, he’s brought us ‘Short People’, ‘You’ve got a friend in me’, and has composed the soundtracks for Toy Story 1, 2, 3 as well as the upcoming Toy Story 4. Randy talked about the importance of a strict work schedule – just putting in the hours. He works from eight till five if he’s working on a movie or from eight till noon if he’s writing songs. Here’s how he expressed his faith in the process:

“I’m just sitting at the piano, trying to find something I can get a ride on.”

Randy Newman, January, 2018.

Here’s a link to the full interview the Guardian conducted with Randy Newman:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/jan/21/randy-newman-trump-ivanka-song-toy-story-smiths