Skip to main content

I will write a sentence.

A maxed out tweet contains 140 characters. Along with tweeting, I am learning how to write sentences, sentence by sentence, tweet by tweet. I think tweeting logic helps me write sentences in the real world too.  Tweets corral self-contained thoughts into a small, restricted space.  There is little room for complex structures.  Advanced users can pull off all kinds of things with this format, but I am very much an amateur at both tweeting and sentence writing.  

Tweets can be deleted. They can be immortalised. They can ruin a career or make one. They can send chills down your spine or give you insight in ways a whole book might not be able to. The same goes for sentences.  They both can be taken out of context. They do not tell the whole story, but they are structures that build something bigger than themselves. If they are flawed, the whole rest of what they constitute can fall apart.

Lately, I find myself reading books scouring them for good ones. Ones that stand alone.  Lionel Shriver is a particularly good sentence writer.  Her good sentences add up to sensational books.

Sentences are the bones of paragraphs and essays and the joints that build plot lines.  I may never get past them. The sentence is as far I can see.  I write a sentence. I write another one. I will write another one after that. I will go from there.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I entered August without you.

 I won't visit you this month.  You won't call. I will raid your garden and you won't get any of the vegetables. I will make plans without telling you about them. We'll go to the store and not buy you one single thing. Whole books will be read and I will not tell you which ones. I will watch movies and not inform you. The nasturiums will ripen. Last month was different. I changed my schedule and took time off work to be with you.   I dropped all kinds of plans for us to be together. You sent me messages, I received them. I picked up food that I thought you would like at the store and sent you pictures of every beautiful thing I saw. I sang with you. We watched the Great Canadian Baking Show. You chose the recipe for the garlic scape pesto and gave me instructions for making the gooseberry jam. I am in August without you. You are in July.
1 comment
Read more

Keep telling yourself that.

We talk to ourselves everyday, all day (and night) for the whole of our lives. We started talking to ourselves before we knew we were a self, we forget what we said because we forget everything from before...when we were too young and busy developing our brain to remember those early years. There is still lingering residue of long forgotten conversations I have had with myself as a toddler sitting around in the crevices...sloughing off occasionally into words I tell myself still.   We talk non-stop, and not just with dialogue.  Our goosebumps communicate to us, our tingly feelings, our neurons, our peripheal vision.  They are all submitting data into our self and expecting us to react, respond or all to often, expecting what they are sending us will be ignored. After all that talking, you'd think we'd know what we think about most things, but occasionally we are stumped.  Unless we stop what we are doing and really concentrate sometimes that voice(s) ...
1 comment
Read more

Shake your Bummy

In recent weeks, two things have come to my attention, this article by Mary Beth Williams,  T he real key to good health  and the viral hit created by Dr. Mike Evans,  23 and 1/2 hours: What is the single best thing we can do for our health?  Both coincided with when I was turning my attention to new years resolutions and reflecting on the year that was. Thanks to both,  a reckoning came to be.  Mary Beth Williams' candid advice was to get your heart stronger because you never know when you are going to need it.  She herself has been receiving treatment for lung cancer. Dr Mike Evans' way of putting the exact same thing? "Try to limit your sitting time to 23 1/2 hours a day".   In my day job, I sit a lot. I occasionally rise to retrieve something from the photocopier or to make a coffee, but an awful lot of the time, I'm on my bum.  This is in steep contrast to my night job. At the end of the work day, occasionally in the middle, I h...
5 comments
Read more