Do You Like Sentences?

Books & Culture, September/October 2007

RUMORS OF GLORY

Sentences

By Alan Jacobs posted 10/08/07

In her wonderful book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard tells this anecdote:

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, 'Do you think I could be a writer?'

"Well," the writer said, "I don't know … . Do you like sentences?"

Since I first read this story many years ago, I have thought that the unnamed author—was it Dillard herself?—gave one of the best possible answers to that eternal question. For writing, the writing of prose anyway, is largely a matter of making sentences: hammering one together, connecting it to another, eventually framing a whole edifice. But one sentence at a time is the only way you can do it.

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I love sentences. The problem is I love long complicated convoluted sentences with plenty of adjectives, verbs, nouns, and an ocassional pronouns. To allow my reader to draw a breath while reading my sentences, I sometimes insert a comma.

I know, I know. It drives my editors crazy. Sentences must be short and simple. Like Earnest Hemmingway's. Last time I looked, I am not Earnest Hemingway and I will not be able to contain all the thoughts I want to convey in a short sentence like his.

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