Craft—Valuing the Sentence

M. F. K. Fisher at Work

Yesterday’s New York Times published Jhumpa Lahiri’s essay, "My Life’s Sentences” as the first in “Draft, a new series about the art and craft of writing.” In it, Lahiri reveals a life-long love of the sentence, a regard that supports her careful, very focused writing. As a reader, she recognizes that “the best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail.”

Acknowledging that not all compelling writing brightens at that level, Lahiri defines the vibrancy of the most effective writing at the sentence level:

But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates.

She talks about the magic that seems to occur in certain combinations of words (the same words available to all of us). But lest you think it is magic, she reveals the power of revision:

Over time, virtually each sentence I receive and record in this haphazard manner will be sorted, picked over, organized, changed. Most will be dispensed with. All the revision I do—and this process begins immediately, accompanying the gestation—occurs on a sentence level. It is by fussing with sentences that a character becomes clear to me, that a plot unfolds. To work on them so compulsively, perhaps prematurely, is to see the trees before the forest. And yet I am incapable of conceiving the forest any other way.

Lahiri describes her process of revision. Every writer’s is distinctive. There is no rulebook for revising. There is only the imperative for revision. It’s a requirement and a joy. Both a task and a pleasure.