Graham Stewart

Writing to discover what I think and believe in increasingly fractured times

Just Writing

Stop hiding behind mannered writing

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Come out from behind your disguise

“Still learning”: Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash

The more I read Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing, the stronger it resonates. I am even reading the book front to back. Richard Ford, in a review of the book, wrote “You don’t even need to read it front to back (probably you couldn’t, anyway).” I took that as a challenge, obviously, because I’m an overgrown teenager when it comes to that sort of thing. (Then again, I tend to read books front to back.) And from what I’ve read of the Klinkenborg, I think it’s meant to be read from the start, following the sentences like a carefully crafted argument. The sentences build one upon the other. One after the other. Dipping into the book at random would offer meagre rewards unless the book had been previously digested whole.

Klinkenborg has at last made clear to me why I love reading Anne Lamott and Natalie Goldberg on writing. It’s not just the subject matter. What Klinkenborg has explained in his wonderful little manual on sentences is how sentences can express sincerity and honesty. How they are used to build trust. And with Goldberg and Lamott trust is what I feel when reading them. I trust them because I believe them. I believe the sentences they build. I recognise in their sentences and the vocabulary and structure within those sentences that they are sincere.

I can look to apply this to my own writing. The most frequent criticism I had about my writing when I was younger — much younger — was that it was mannered. Mannered writing is a sure sign that the writer is trying to both hide emotion and to make extra claims for his writing at the same time. The sentences read as if they were written to sound like writing rather than to express thought honestly and openly. Mannered writing, in short, fails to convey sincerity.

This was true, of course. I was writing in a style that I thought made me look clever. Made me look and sound like a writer. It was more important to look flash than to say what I meant in a form that allowed people to discover what I meant. Writing, in other words, as a form of disguise.

And the bad habit of mannered writing is a hard habit to kick.

There is a certain irony in this. One of the freelance writing jobs I’ve done from time to time in the past twenty years or so is as a consultant helping business executives break away from ‘corporate speak’ in emails and websites and press releases. Coaching them to find their voices. To try to be both genuine and human enough to connect with their readers, whether inside or outside the company. Anyone who has ever read ‘official’ company emails or scrolled through yet another corporate website full of ‘services’ and ‘offerings’ without ever quite discovering what the company does will understand the problem.

But, as with many things, it appears it is easier to teach than to learn.

It is both heartening and distressing to realise that at my age I am still learning things. Heartening because learning gives you new life; distressing because some of the things I learn I feel I should have learned a long time ago. Many of these things make me sit back, sigh, and say to myself “how come you didn’t know this?” The only way to move forward from that is to shrug.

Is it a good sign that I’m doing a lot of shrugging these days?

The only essential tool you need for writing

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And you can take it everywhere

Photo by Sonika Agarwal on Unsplash

I think you’re finally on the road to successfully writing — not to be confused with being a successful writer — when you switch from thinking of all the things you need in order to write to realising all the things you don’t need.

Judging by many of the posts on Medium and in other writing forums, many neophyte writers get quickly hung up on everything ranging from types of pen to computer operating systems and whether Scrivener is better than Word. What type of chair to sit in or should they stand? What time of the day is best for writing?

Is it better to write drunk? That’s surprisingly common. (And I’m not going to poke too much fun at that because I used to think that drink and writing went so well together that I spent a lot of time drinking and no time at all writing.) The answer to the question — and I can only speak from my own experience — is a resounding ‘No’.

A quiet place or a coffee shop with ambient noise? Lockdowns just about everywhere are making that one a bit redundant. So quiet or listening to music. If I listen to music, I soon drift off into the music and forget about my fingers and the keyboard.

The truth is — especially until you are so successful that you get to order your days around your writing and have the luxury of choosing when, where, and what to write on a given day — that the only thing you ever need to write is you. Your unique brain with all its unique thoughts.

Stop worrying about all the incidentals. You can write with a pencil on a pad or just create sentences in your head and worry about putting them on paper later. Every time you refuse to write because of tools, location, noise, or time, you’re telling yourself that other things are more important than your writing.

And they may be. So be honest. Do you want to write or do you want a beer?

The Shipping Forecast

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Yesterday’s post was the first since the start of 2021 that I haven’t published simultaneously on Medium. There was good reason for that. In any sensible world I probably wouldn’t have posted it to this site, either. The fact that I did is part of a useful lesson for me.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a fan of Seth Godin and his belief that the vital part of creating is shipping. Putting it out there. This is what, in the end, makes the difference between a diary and a blog.

At the same time, as much as publishing every day is a worthy aim, there comes a time when publishing for the sake of it — with material that is plain poor — is verging on the self-centred. An ego trip, even. It may also fall into the category of abuse. Ok, maybe not quite that far.

I want to post every day and I want to make my posts worth reading. At the very least I want to make them worth writing. Yesterday’s failed on both scores. And yet I had nothing else. By putting it up solely on my personal site, I was able to accept that the post was not something I needed to advertise. Visitors to this site are few and far between. And I have to remember that anyone finding themselves in this internet backwoods can choose to read or not to read.

But posting was important because I have committed to post.

So, the post fell neatly into a grey area between shipping and hiding. That suits me.

And at least it has given me some fuel for a topic today. This post won’t be making it to Medium either.

Back to normal tomorrow. That’s what the forecast says, anyway.

Sentence by sentence

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Verlyn Klinkenborg’s secret to successful writing

Photo by me

To write a book about sentences may sound like overkill. Or a symptom of some strange obsession. Anyone reading a book ostensibly about sentences may be forgiven for thinking that the author’s intention was to lure them in with an intriguing idea and then soon enough, disclose his real purpose.

After all, most books, while not exactly about sentences, are at least composed of sentences. Surely, a book about sentences would be like reading a book on the architecture of great buildings and concentrating on the bricks. Or studying great works of art by focusing on the individual brushstrokes.

And, in effect, the close study of the brush stroke is exactly what Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing comes close to being. It’s also true that, while the title promises ‘several short sentences’, there are close to two hundred pages of sentences. Some short and some a little longer than would be traditionally considered short. But the focus never varies; the sentence and how a writer builds sentences is what this book is about.

Klinkenborg makes his purpose clear right at the start:


Here, in short, is what I want to tell you.
Know what each sentence says,
What it doesn’t say,
And what it implies.
Of these, the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says.

Page 1

Part of the book’s charm is the almost poetry-style layout of the sentences and the way the sentences are grouped into stanzas of aggregated purpose, which gradually impose a hypnotic state of acceptance. Concentrating on the sentence affords a release from the tension of ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’. The paradox is, that with the focus on the individual sentence, meaning accrues by default. It need not be forced by the writer.

James Joyce knew about the importance of sentences. There’s a story that, during the composition — and there’s a word that suggests a more atomised approach to writing — of Ulysses, he met an acquaintance on a Zurich street. The man asked Joyce how his writing was proceeding. Joyce responded with enthusiasm, saying that he had had a very successful day. Expecting to be told that Joyce had turned out hundreds, if not thousands of words, the man asked why the day had gone so well. Klinkenborg would have understood Joyce’s response. Joyce told his acquaintance that he had swapped two words in a sentence that he had been working on for a week.

Ulysses took Joyce seven years to write. Sentence by sentence.

As Klinkenborg says (as if speaking to Joyce),

Your job as a writer is making sentences.
Your other jobs include fixing sentences, killing sentences, and arranging sentences.
If this is the case—making, fixing, killing, arranging—how can your writing possibly flow?
It can’t.

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.

Page 67

The feels counter-intuitive to many writers, who settle into the magic of scenes and beats and story and plot and character arcs. To focus on the sentence may also feel like being unmoored or drifting at sea far from the sight of land. But with each sentence, the promise of landfall is closer.

Trusting to the individual sentence is like finally accepting you can float in the water.

Morning rituals and early rising are all very good but…..

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….they’re not enough on their own

It’s easy to rise early when you get to my age. The drive to visit the loo first thing is just one of the things that makes starting the day at 5am less of a chore than it was in my younger years.

I have learned, too, thanks to a combination of age and sobriety, that I need to keep busy once I’m awake. Busy in the sense of either knowing what tasks I have down to accomplish next or at least having books to hand that I am enjoying reading and want to return to. As my kids were growing up, whenever they said they were bored, I told them to read a book. “It’s impossible to be bored surrounded by books,” I would tell them. You may be surprised to know that my children — now adults — spend very little time reading books. Go figure.

But that’s enough about them; back to me. I have been an early riser for many years now. And I have used a bullet journal for the last few years to make sure I know what I am supposed to do next. In theory. Unfortunately, I have yet to master putting tasks in sequence in my bullet journal beyond the few tasks I repeat each morning and which form what can be called my morning ritual. By the time breakfast arrives, I have a list of tasks and I get to pick and choose what to do when. Which means, of course, that by the end of the day, many tasks are rescheduled for the following day (ad nauseum) as I scrabble to make at least a dent in the list of tasks outstanding. Ho hum.

But at least I’m not bored because I always have some books to turn to (even if they are not the ones I have tasked myself with reading at that time).

Here’s the thing. When I have a lie-in and get to my desk at 9am, say, instead of 5am, I feel that I have wasted four hours of the day. Any productive business person or prolific creator would feel the same, no? But what I produce at the end of a day in which I start at 9am is remarkably similar to what has been produced in a longer day. Not just similar: identical. Nothing.

My wife, after almost thirty years of marriage is, as you would expect, not only puzzled — and increasingly exasperated — by my need to ‘start work’ at 5am but also by the evidence of the great nothing that results from these long days of so-called labour.

I should add here, in case you think I’m some sort of man of leisure pottering about reading books and tending to my smoking jackets, that I do also have a ‘real job’ out there — or, more recently, at home — in the real world. But I do carve out a lot of time for myself.

Which brings me to 2021. I have the early start mastered. That’s a life-hack I don’t need any more help with. I even have the writing down tasks and some sort of morning ritual down pat. I’m a self-help superstar for at least the first thirty minutes of every day. Then it all dissipates.

What I want to do this year, therefore, is plug this early morning success into a better ritual for producing stuff. Any stuff. Stuff I can show my wife and say, look, here’s what I did today.

Have I tried this before? Possibly. OK, most of the past ten years at least. So? Can’t a man dream?

Do I have a plan? Yes. It’s more of a tweak than a radical overhaul. Assigning times to task is a big part of the plan. And making sure I deal in priorities. I can’t believe — given what I know about priorities and urgent tasks and the difference between urgent and important tasks and all that 7 Habits matrix stuff — that I don’t apply this to my own life.

One of the things I want to do is write a daily post. I have been reading Seth Godin for over a decade and he has banged on about writing posts daily for as long as I have read him. I have nodded at the wisdom of such a statement. I know that writing is the best way to discover what you think about something and I know that writing is also the best way to uncover the real me.

That is priority number one for this year, then: a daily post. Scary.

Four Words To Blow Away The Doubts

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It’s amazing what a kind word can do. An encouraging word. Or four.

In my last post, I wrote about the crash that often comes after things appear to be going well.

This is where beta readers can be helpful. In my case, these are really gamma readers. These are readers who combine affection for me (I hope) with a certain critical nous. They encourage while letting me know where things are going wrong.

I call them gamma readers because they read the first edited draft. Beta readers get to see something closer to the final cut.

I have two gamma readers at the moment. One of them is my wife, Laura.

Today, after having read chapters two and three of the revised draft (“a few times”, she said) she told me it was good.

“I would read it,” she said.

Putting aside the emotional bond and the fact that I was offering chocolate as a bribe at the time, those four words mean a lot.

And now I get back to work.

(Dryer photo courtesy of Ryan McGuire at Gratisography)