We begin! You’ll receive five stunning sentences each day this week from both fiction and nonfiction published work. This is a chance to play and stretch beyond your intuitive or “default” way of writing. As singers train their voices for a wider range, we can train as well by trying out a wide range of syntactic architectures, rhythm and sound, schemes and tropes, diction and imagery, and feeling the texture of our own and other writers’ prose.
In the beginning, we may sound a bit like someone else, but then we absorb that influence and move on. If your natural voice is lyrical and lush, you’ll become aware of different registers, the jaggedness of small phrases, for instance. If your natural voice is plain and straightforward, you’ll learn to create music through sound and rhythm. The more we learn about other styles, the more we find we are far more than we thought, able to inhabit different ways of writing. And if you’re a fiction writer, it means rendering a variety of different characters’ voices.
Similar to our weekly practice, you’ll use the architecture of the stunning sentence and flow in your own content. Or not. Maybe you jump off a piece of the architecture and run with it. Maybe you have a work-in-progress, and the sentence feels like a perfect design for a spot in your manuscript. Maybe you will start a new story or a new nonfiction creative writing piece.
If you post your sentence, please comment on someone else’s sentence so we can build a thriving writing community. I ask you to be kind, generous, and pay attention to the strengths of the sentence. Having taught creative writing for years, I know this pedagogy is necessary and vital for the creative spirit.
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