![austinkleon:
Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One
Louis Menand, writing about Donald Barthelme: “The visual artist can deal with almost every kind of material, even sound, but the writer deals with only one kind of material: sentences.”
Fish’s approach is the same: sentences are the writer’s material, and if we pay close attention to the sentences of other writers, if we analyze them and imitate them, we will see that sentences are just different forms that we can plug our own content into:
Form, form, form, and only form is the road to what the classical theorists called “invention,” the art of coming up with something to say….[You can use forms] not simply to arrange thoughts but also to create thoughts. Creativity is often contrasted with forms to the latter’s detriment, but the thrush is that forms are the engines of creativity….This then, is my theology: You shall tie yourself to forms and the forms shall set you free.
What I like most about this book is its emphasis on reading, copying, and constraint as the ways towards creativity. It would be nicely bundled with Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer and Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences, maybe even Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences.
I really liked the beginning of this book and took copious notes, then I mostly skimmed through the rest. (I’ve noticed that the Kindle makes it very easy to do that.)
PS: Looking back through my archives, I noticed that a lot of the material in this book probably sprang from this blog post by Fish on teaching writing: “The Game of Writing Sentences.”
Filed under: sentences + my reading year 2012](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lx6lbtNZe71qz6f4bo1_400.jpg)
Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One
Louis Menand, writing about Donald Barthelme: “The visual artist can deal with almost every kind of material, even sound, but the writer deals with only one kind of material: sentences.”
Fish’s approach is the same: sentences are the writer’s material, and if we pay close attention to the sentences of other writers, if we analyze them and imitate them, we will see that sentences are just different forms that we can plug our own content into:
Form, form, form, and only form is the road to what the classical theorists called “invention,” the art of coming up with something to say….[You can use forms] not simply to arrange thoughts but also to create thoughts. Creativity is often contrasted with forms to the latter’s detriment, but the thrush is that forms are the engines of creativity….This then, is my theology: You shall tie yourself to forms and the forms shall set you free.
What I like most about this book is its emphasis on reading, copying, and constraint as the ways towards creativity. It would be nicely bundled with Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer and Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences, maybe even Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences.
I really liked the beginning of this book and took copious notes, then I mostly skimmed through the rest. (I’ve noticed that the Kindle makes it very easy to do that.)
PS: Looking back through my archives, I noticed that a lot of the material in this book probably sprang from this blog post by Fish on teaching writing: “The Game of Writing Sentences.”
Filed under: sentences + my reading year 2012
