Does Francine Prose not have the perfect writerly name? I continue to love Reading Like a Writer; there’s enough meat in here for me to have a year’s worth of entries. I’m well into the “Paragraphs” chapter, but wanted to quote one more thing from “Sentences.”
I can’t quote all the fabulous sentences of many lengths from lushly long to crisply brief from various writers Prose uses to illuminate her points, but I will say that they are varied and fabulous, and the book is worth buying just for her brilliantly clear-sighted explications.
But back to the quote, which struck me as apt, as true, but also something I’d never really thought about before, in terms of reviewing other people’s work or when writing my own stuff. “…the sentence should strike us as the perfect vehicle for expressing what it aims to express, the sentence should seem ideally suited to whatever story or novel or essay it happens to appear in.”
After I read this sentence, I reflected on one particular novel I’ve recently finished. Did the author do that? Yes, by goddess, she did! And it added immensely to the power of her story. I am not sure if this is a natural thing, if a writer’s voice naturally goes to subjects that match it, or if this perfect marriage of sentence to aim is something that has to be labored over and learned anew with each fresh piece of work. Whatever the answer, I know that I will be rereading my drafts from now on with this perfect alignment of sentence and story in mind.
I’ll be back next year. Until then, I’m off to the North Pole, or what passes for it in Michigan.
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