Larry M. Coleman

The sentence is the site of your enterprise with words, the locale where language either comes to a head or does not. The sentence is a situation of words in the most literal sense: words must be situated in relation to others to produce an enduring effect on a reader. As you situate the words, you are of course intent on obeying the ordinances of syntax and grammar, unless any willful violation is your purpose—and you are intent as well on achieving in the arrangements of words as much fidelity as is possible to whatever you believe you have wanted to say or describe. A lot of writers—many of them—unfortunately seem to stop there. They seem content if the resultant sentence is free from obvious faults and is faithful to the lineaments of the thought or feeling or whatnot that was awaiting deathless expression. But some other writers seem to know that it takes more than that for a sentence to cohere and flourish as a work of art. They seem to know that the words inside the sentence must behave as if they were destined to belong together—as if their separation from each other would deprive the parent story or novel, as well as the readerly world, of something life-bearing and essential. These writers recognize that there needs to be an intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds, the forms and contours, of the gathered words. This intimacy is what we mean when we say of a piece of writing that it has a felicity—a fitness, an aptness, a rightness about the phrasing.

—Gary Lutz, “The Sentence is a Lonely Place”

This is an extremely long passage for a “beautiful sentence,” and will probably always be one of the longest I ever include here. One of the things that usually makes me find a particular passage beautiful is an ability to condense something powerful into a small crystallized phrase. In other words, something like his last sentence here about felicity, fitness, and apt rightness of phrasing.

In this case, however, Lutz’s writing here is a tour de force that manages at the same time to be both dryly analytical and lyrical. If you let your brain break out of the quick-reading mindset social media has reduced most of us to and read it closely and with the attention it deserves, chewing on its bones to glean the marrow, you’ll see that its message is powerful: what makes a beautiful sentence a Beautiful Sentence?

The answer is the same thing that seems most lacking in the world today, even though this is from a lecture he gave in 2008, before social media had started to erode away already-regrettable attention spans to mere nubs. What makes a sentence beautiful is the same thing that makes a painting beautiful or a sculpture or a piece of music or the restoration of a classic car or anything that involves art: time, care, attention, and the refusal to accept “good enough” and move on.

A magical sentence doesn’t come from magic, it comes from craft. Craft comes from intuition. Intuition comes from not just working a lot (although that is important), it comes from working hard. Chewing, thinking, assembling, disassembling, and not “seem[ing] content if the resultant sentence is free from obvious faults and is faithful to the lineaments of the thought or feeling or whatnot that was awaiting deathless expression” and writing until the words meet as if by destiny.

Last week: Francine Prose and what books can still do better.

Next week: Colleen Doran and the gap the size of the universe.

See the index for what’s been posted and what’s to come.