Do You Like Sentences? Books Are Made of Them

The question is, are the sentences any good? How do they make you feel? Sentences: words put in a certain order to achieve a pre-determined effect. Or, as Merriam-Webster says, “A group of words that expresses a statement, question, command, or wish. Sentences usually contain a subject and verb. In written English, the first word of a sentence is capitalized and the sentence ends with a period, question mark, or exclamation point.”

In Catholic school grammar class, I learned that sentences “express a complete thought.” Hold that thought.

Lately, people have been asking me how I produced Undertow. And how long it took to write it. In my case, it “took” about ten years, but if I gathered up the scattered bits of time spent thinking about it and scribbling notes, ten years stretches into twenty or more. I can tell you I began “writing it” in on napkins, in black and white composition notebooks, and on blank pages at the end of books I was reading at the time … you hear this about writers, we are scavengers when it comes to using whatever materials we can get our pens on.

In 2004, which is twelve years ago already… yikes … a slim volume of stories written by women who attended Rollins College was published by Red Pepper Press. It was titled, Shifting Gears: Small, Startling Moments In and Out of the Classroom. Included was a mini version of my story about my former life in what I view as a fundamentalist cult, The Way International.

But that mini version irked me. I wasn’t finished! Something poked at my ribs, made me press my lips, pushed me like a wave down the shore, compelled me to write a longer story, one that could spread its arms and breathe.

Keep Writing Sentences

Some people (not my family) told me to forget about it. Get on with your life, Charlene. Put the past behind you. It’s old news now. But I could not stop. Why? Who knows? I can say one thing, though. I wanted to show people who had never been in The Way, especially new friends I was making in my post-Way life, what it feels like in a closed-system group, in the kind of sect that starts off wonderful, loving, purpose-driven, but uses fear to motivate and condemns anyone who leaves it as someone who “turns their back on God.” Yes, it was that rigid. I was a narrow person, as if bound in ropes, in psychological ties nearly impossible to break. Some never can.

A Whale of a Writing Resource

My bookshelves are crowded with books about writing. Too many! But I love them as friends. Here’s one: How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One. The author? Stanley Fish. The title makes the subject sound oh so simple! Ha! In his opening chapter, “Why Sentences?,” he talks about one of my favorite writers, Annie Dillard. He writes:

In her book, The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “Well,’ the writer said, ‘do you like sentences?'” If you like sentences, then you can begin to write.

You gotta LIKE them to spend so much time with them. Like a person. Like a pet. With words, you wander around on the page (or computer screen), write one word, erase it, cross it out, use another, look up words in a dictionary, change their order on the page, on and on. Thank you, Stanley Fish, for your marvelous book. And thank you, Annie, for all of yours.

Special note to Orlando, Florida residents: Undertow will be available next week at The Writers Block Bookstore in Winter Park.

Ciao for now,

Charlene