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.

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‘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.