On writing—and on writing about writing that’s a joy to read.
I spend an inordinate amount of my waking life turning sentences around. Come to think of it, it’s not just my waking hours: I often fall out of slumber in the middle of the night to find a phrase tickling my mind. In such states of groggy consciousness, I know, on the one hand, that I won’t be able to retrieve in the morning the words I’ve just woken to if I don’t capture them before I drop back to sleep; and, on the other hand, that those phrases aligning themselves unbidden in the wee small hours often unravel knots of expression I’d fumbled with for hours at my desk—which means the one hand meets the other in the dark to grab the pad and pencil that are always on my bedside table.
In plainer words, the shaping of sentences shapes my attention most midnights, noons, and mornings, even when I am not, strictly speaking, attending to them. As a consequence, my perspective on books about writing is a blend of interest and skepticism, the former sometimes avid and the latter generally severe. Most books about the subject, I’ve found, are not about writing itself but about hacking composition for the purposes of clarity or protocol, like cramming to do well on a test with no concern for acquiring knowledge.* But to be under the spell of sentences in a way that—by habit or necessity, perversity or inspiration—describes one’s purchase on the world is to write with a different purpose, to see writing not as a vehicle for conveying what we have decided to say but as a road along which we make our way to meaning. The path is exploratory rather than direct, ruminative rather efficient, pondering (and, alas, sometimes ponderous). “Truth happens to an idea,” William James asserted; in the same way, meaning happens to sentences.**
“And should you always be clear about what you are going to say before you say it?” asks Joe Moran in First You Write a Sentence, the best book on writing I’ve ever read:
More useful might be the way of classical rhetoric: learn how a good sentence sounds and mimic it. Instead of draining some finite pool of sense, write in a way that engenders sense out of nothing. That is how Shakespeare learned to write at grammar school—rote learning the art of verbal ornament, getting to know words as sounds and shapes before they calcified into meaning.
Alertness to the weight and tone of words (what I like to call, in my scientific ignorance, their specific gravity), and to the way this presence resounds through the past and future of a sentence with the melody of thinking, is one of the most salient lessons of Moran’s teaching, which, we learn by anecdote as well as advice, he has clearly internalized: “I haunt the corridors of my university building, speaking sentences under my breath.”
If Moran is especially good on the primacy of sound in both composition and expression—“Train your ears,” he tells us in the third of the “Twenty Sentences on Sentences” that close the book, “for how a sentence sounds in the head is also what it says to the heart”—he offers valuable perspective, and applied intelligence, on everything he views through his pedagogical lens: the use of adjectives and punctuation, abstraction and its discontents, the streaky windowpane of the plain style and the high-wire act of the long sentence. Pleasure of reading is the book’s first virtue: Moran writes with élan, his chapters carrying their cargo of advice with a wit that leavens its weight. He has a Geiger counter for apt quotation and the field it sweeps is wide, his range of reference extending from the Trappist monk Thomas Merton to the contemporary memoirist Maggie Nelson; from William Tyndale, whose early English translations of the Bible infused our language with a grace and will it still wears, to Virginia Woolf, who refreshed and elaborated both; from Ernest Fenollosa, student of the Chinese ideogram, to Frank Sinatra, who, Moran aptly notes, sang in sentences.
Studded with examples from industry, advertising, science, technology, and history as well as linguistics and literature, First You Write a Sentence employs a fox’s method in the service of a hedgehog’s focus. Underneath it all runs a modest but eloquent apologia for a life spent assaying the substance and spirit of words on a page (Moran’s first chapter is called “A Pedant’s Apology”). By the author’s estimate, I suppose I belong to “the last generation in a long era—let’s call it the printocene—when writing was meant to be read much later than it was written.” While more people are “writing” now than ever before—“All over the world people are writing,” Moran observes, “tapping out e-mails or texting friends with that familiar, two-thumb dance”—their efforts mimic speech rather than rhetoric, prizing messages in the moment rather than reflections beyond the reach of the day’s ticking demands.
We’ve been warned a lot in the past decade about the end of reading, but maybe it’s the end of writing that is more imminent, as the world—“Hello, Alexa,” “Hey, Google”—becomes all ears. To speak one’s thoughts eliminates the friction of having to compose them in the service of expression, to wrangle words, rhythms, and time into some semblance of meaning; it eliminates as well the friction of parsing on the reader’s part, of riding waves of clauses into seas of knowledge, of puzzling through unknown territories of discovery, danger, difference, longing. A life too user-friendly, powered by a cloud that’s all-knowing, may end up leaving us little to live for, much less write about.
What is the end of all this writing, anyway? What’s the point of that notebook on the nightstand? Moran proves helpful here as well, invoking what the Japanese call shokunin katagi, which is “about much more than skill”:
It bears the social obligation to make something for the joy of making it, quietly and beautifully. It invests the simplest daily acts with artistry, whether it be making tea, raking Shirakawa gravel in a garden or curating that work of art and lunch that is a bento box. The point of life is to infuse the quotidian with the pleasure of creation and the pursuit of perfection.
The art of sentence craft seems ideally suited to this artisanal spirit.
And so I type this Reader’s Diary on the morning of January 31, 2020.
❦
NOTES:
*For a stimulating reflection on how the hackability of tests derails learning, with corollary larger lessons, see Paul Graham’s The Lesson to Unlearn, which I highly recommend.
**“Political groups have almost no sense of irony,” Richard Rodriguez once told an interviewer asking about his critics. “For them, language has to say exactly what it means.” Which, the author of Hunger of Memory didn’t but might have added, is like expecting life to tell us exactly what it means, when we, alone, can give that words.