Verlyn Klinkenborg

Come out from behind your disguise

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?

Verlyn Klinkenborg’s secret to successful writing

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.