Sentences

[Stacy]

The Sentence is a Lonely Place

Thoughts? Observations? Sentences?

[thelunarfox]

I am a complete philistine. I cannot relate.

I've always been very against picking and prying things apart (it's why I couldn't major in English). When I look at a story, I see the whole and enjoy examining it that way. I never just focus on one part, including sentences. It's like looking at a painting and only seeing a dot. Maybe that's one well painted dot, but you won't see the entire picture unless you pull back and look at the entire picture. That's what amazes me. Sometimes, once I've taken in the entire picture, allowed myself to be blown away by the work, I will then start to examine how it's put together looking at the lines and how they connect and the shading to see how it suggests the light.

Maybe it has to do with the way I was raised. That author discusses how words were rare in her home, well in my home we always had books around, and they weren't even all in English. We had quite a few in German and some in Spanish, and I carted those around too like I knew what to do with them. One of my favorite past times was listening to books on records and reading along with the story (or at least pretending to). I'd even tell myself stories when I was a kid before I could read by just looking at the pictures and making stuff up.

So words have always been a part of my life and I claimed them as early as I could. Maybe because of that I'm not impressed by the words alone but the ideas they are trying to present to me.

[celebkiriedhel]

I think how you learn your words matters. And that he had a pretty dire place linguistically has made a huge impact on how he reads and writes.

I get where Lunar is coming from, and to a certain extent where this guy is coming from.

There are sentences that I absolutely love - and generally ones with adverbs too! Take that! Story Nazis!

OK - being completely immodest here - here is the starting paragraph of a short story I did a few years ago:

Her form caressed the outcrop of stones. It felt spicy and tasted warm to her. The morning sun excited the atoms of her surface tension and the energy radiated towards her core. She swam faster.

The thing I love about this paragraph - 'It felt spicy and tasted warm to her.' Both familiar and alien, lots of labial sounds (the front of the mouth) and there's a symmetry about it, although I find it hard to explain. I love that sentence. But part of what I love about that sentence is not just how it's constructed and how it sounds, but how many layers upon layers of meaning there is in it.

Sentences can have a beauty of their own, but to me that beauty is secondary to the story. That's what happens when I edit - I start with the story, and then edit the beauty in the language, adding deeper meanings, and thematics.

Like Lunar says, to concentrate on just the dot - you miss the big picture. But as a reader/writer, and lover of poetry, once you've got the big picture, the thing that can jump out at you is the beauty in language and how we form it.

I think they can go hand in hand.

[lepifera]

I really enjoyed reading "The Sentence Is a Lonely Place".

Beautiful sentences to me taste like a good cup of tea, there is a lingering flavor. I would put aside my curiosity about what happens next aside, and go over them a couple more times. I wish I could write sentences like those.