Are you a reader who values a writer's style as much as the meaning it conveys?

Are you a writer who seeks to refine your own style?

Would you like to improve your understanding of the techniques writers use to create beautiful sentences?

Welcome to the search for the perfect sentence!


Most readers and writers focus on the content of a piece--the ideas it conveys, the story it carries, the events it chronicles. "So many books, so little time" we readers chorus, rushing through our stories, newspapers, websites. "Is it finished?" we writers ask. "Have I written enough words? Have I gotten the content across?"

Here we'll focus on the style of writing more than its content. We'll slow down. We'll read very short passages, sometimes single sentences, and we'll savor their wordcraft. We'll examine why each word was chosen, how they were arranged into sentences, and how those sentences evoke our responses. In the process, I hope we'll become more careful, perceptive readers and more effective writers.


Beautiful writing is everywhere--on the sports page of the morning paper, in the novel that relaxes you at night, in your grandmother's love letters found in the attic. If you would like to contribute a passage for close reading, with or without your own interpretation of its techniques, please email me at jtarasovic@gmail.com.


Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Great Writers Make It Look So Easy

My friend John Bruns is a retired engineer who is only now finding his true calling as a writer. It’s a joy to witness his excitement and exuberance as he creates an ever-expanding cast of characters for the novel he is writing. John has a way of tossing words onto a page without apparent effort, and then using them to produce sentences both understated and brilliant. I love his opening passage:

“Into the warren of cubicles at the Pasadena Messenger, into the monkey house of telephones and keyboards and aggravated people wanders Cap Riley, who has worked there seven years but still seems a little lost. He matches his cubicle, or perhaps his cubicle matches him: disheveled, coffee-stained, a step or two slower than the prevailing pace of things. A round, bearded man, he is twenty pounds overweight, going gray, eyes mild and heavy-lidded behind steel-rimmed glasses. Cap's cubicle is also overweight….”

John’s writing style never shouts; it maintains the same even, temperate tone as his voice does. So it’s easy to miss the things he does to make his sentences more interesting. Inverting normal word order, for one. Instead of the usual who-what-where opener, John starts with a pile of prep phrases that tell us quickly where we are and what it’s like there. Into the middle of the scene, and the sentence, comes our non-hero, Cap Riley. The placement of the verb “wanders” before the subject tells us that Cap is reluctant to enter even before we read that he’s “lost.”

In the second sentence, John evokes a smile by using a type of repetition the Greeks called a chiasmus:  echoing a phrase with its opposite: "He matches his cubicle, or perhaps his cubicle matches him." The descriptors that follow go from a single word, “disheveled,” to two to a dozen, a pattern that gets our attention and moves us forward. The third sentence opens with an appositive phrase, “a round, bearded man,” rather then the less interesting “he is” that many writers would have started with.

John’s varied sentence structure provides the scaffolding for the words he uses to draw the picture of Cap Riley and his office. Every word contributes to the effect. I can find a “say-nothing” word to cut in almost every sentence I read (except possibly my own, not for lack of need), but in this paragraph I find none. It’s a deceptively ordinary piece of writing that turns out to be perfect.

Was the writing as easy as he makes it look? Not exactly, says John. "I revise a lot, but a lot of it is unconscious. As you learn to write, you hear the music."

2 comments:

  1. Hello Jan,

    I just finished reading your article in the Writer. It was very enjoyable and has given me a lot to think about. Keep up the good work!

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  2. Jan, I also enjoyed your article in The Writer. I plan to read passages from it to my teen writing workshop students, since your excellent examples and comments focus on the same stylistic jewels that I continually stress. You even use many of the same expressions I use! I wish you lived in my area; I could really use a like-minded teacher to whom I could refer students on my waiting list. As you know, the majority of teachers do not focus on what I call "poetic prose," as we do.

    I also wanted to comment on your friend John's words about hearing the music as we write: those words struck a resonant chord in my own music-filled soul. Each of my two current book projects (one MG and one YA novel) are founded upon and filled with music.

    Looking forward to following your blog and reading/hearing YOUR books.

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