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.


Monday, April 11, 2011

Images of life and death


Thanks to Ken Ledford for sending this gorgeous opening passage from The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy:

"May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun."

We start with a macro view that sets the time, place, weather, and mood. Then Roy's camera zooms in on specific images: crows gorging, "dustgreen" trees, overripe fruit, flies drunk on the abundant life--and then, abruptly, dead. I love the assonance of "dissolute bluebottles" "fatly baffled" and the echo of "stun" and "sun." And I like the way Roy varies her sentence length--some are snapshots, some movie scenes. 

I listened to the audio version of this book when it came out, and I had trouble following it. The more poetic a writer's style is, the more I need to see it with my eyes. 



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1 comment:

  1. Geoff M. PopeApril 25, 2011 at 10:57 PM

    Hello, Jan. I just finished reading your article in the March issue of The Writer. Outstanding! I may have seen you quoted by Mignon Fogarty or maybe Bonnie Trenga, but “In Search of the Perfect Sentence” is definitely the first complete piece of prose by you that I’ve come across; it must have been exciting to craft and then finally see published with those tumbling piles of alphabetical graphics, which fit great with one of my favorite sentences in the article: “Variety of sentence lengths and openers is easily achieved; just start paying attention to how many ways a sentence can land if you throw it up in the air.” Wonderful!

    Lovely lines too, I agree, by Arundhati Roy above. I like the opening two lines with an exotic as well as religious sound and look of “Ayemenem” after “May” and then additional attractive assonance with “days” between “brooding” and “humid.”

    Glad to have “met” you, and I look forward to reading more of your writing here—and elsewhere.

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