Karl Whitney: Is it better to let ideas fumble on the long route or set them in stone?

Etching into stone implies permanence, and that requires an eye on the eternal. When a sentence is for life, it’s best to keep it short, writes Karl Whitney

The great comic actor Jack Lemmon’s gravestone reads: ‘Jack Lemmon in’; there's nothing like a gravestone to limit the word count. Picture: Barry King/WireImage

I was walking around a graveyard the other day — a good place to think about writing, particularly concision.

Nothing like death to focus the mind; nothing like a gravestone to limit the word count.

The term lapidary is sometimes applied to concise, elegant writing that’s suitable for inscription on monuments. It comes from the Latin for stone, lapis.

Etching your writing into stone implies permanence, and permanence requires an eye on the eternal.

It’s a lot of pressure, sitting there chiselling away, eternity watching over your shoulder to ensure that you don’t get it wrong.

No wonder some people tend towards conservatism when choosing what to put on a gravestone, often just a name and date.

Graveyards, the ultimate filing system.

Others, though, roll the dice and go for the personal and idiosyncratic — perhaps a saying or phrase that characterised their loved one.

Others risk humour. Few succeed. My personal favourite is the great comic actor Jack Lemmon, whose gravestone reads: ‘Jack Lemmon in.’

I’ve been thinking about sentences while reading James Geary’s The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, which is being reissued in expanded form in November by Chicago University Press.

It’s an accessible and funny guide to millennia of aphorisms, those kernels of wisdom compressed into a few brief lines, or even a single sentence.

(“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money” — Samuel Johnson.)

One of the aspects of Geary’s book that interested me was that, having spent years compiling the aphorisms of others, he began to compose his own and, while living in San Francisco, printed out his aphorisms on slips of paper and had them baked into fortune cookies. A novel twist on self-publication.

Geary spells out the essential aspects of a successful aphorism: It must be brief, it must be definitive, it must be personal, it must have a twist, and it must be philosophical. 

It needs to provoke the reader into thought rather than reassuring them about what they already know.

Again, it’s a lot for one sentence to bear. Nevertheless, it’s useful to think about how effective a single sentence, or a couple of lines, can be, even if our own sentences will only occasionally contain such wisdom or provocation.

American editor and writer James Geary spells out the essential aspects of a successful aphorism: It must be brief, it must be definitive, it must be personal, it must have a twist, and it must be philosophical. Picture: Colin McPherson/Corbis via Getty

When I encounter a book in which every sentence desperately strives for significance — not just novels, but often novels — I question the judgement of the author and invariably put it aside.

As I mentioned in my previous column, I’m trying to cut back on the number of books I have. A recent house move showed me that I was dragging too many around. 

Nevertheless, I’m always interested in recommendations from others — particularly when it comes to books about writing.

Last year, novelist Keith Ridgway recommended to me a book I hadn’t heard of, Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing (published in the USA by Vintage but available to order online).

Flicking through it, I was immediately struck by the layout: It looked more like poetry than prose.

Each sentence occupied its own line — not even each sentence. When the sentence or clause finished, the author moved to the next line.

For example:

• You probably don’t remember learning to talk as a child;
• You probably do remember learning to shape letters and spell words;
• Talking is natural;
• Writing is not.

(Klinkenborg, p71)

In this way, the whole book acts as an object lesson in sentence construction and structure.

The author is explicit about how long sentences are merely short sentences coupled together like train carriages, and that learning to shape a single sentence is central to the act of writing. 

He advocates varying the length of your sentences to avoid monotonous drone. 

And when you look at each of his pages you see his ideas in action: A visual reminder of the variety of sentence lengths one can use.

You pay more attention to the rhythm of prose when it’s laid out in this way.

The emphasis on the sentence in Klinkenborg’s book is also an emphasis on thought. 

He believes that a major part of writing is thinking, and that a process of thinking things through will involve, in the first instance, not writing at all but turning things over in your mind.

Perhaps you’ve read a book or a few books that sparked something in you. An idea. Then will come notes that you might expand over time: Rewrite, redraft, tweak. 

All the time, as you’re doing this, you’re thinking once more, revisiting, seeing what works and doesn’t work.

Perfecting what’s on the page so that it makes sense, looks good, sounds good, works in the way you want it to work.

There’s a sense that your writing is fumbling in the dark looking for direction, and he’s asking you, instead of setting down plans for where it will go, to continue to stumble towards what you want to say rather than structuring it ahead of time.

To take a longer route rather than the shortest possible route. It will enrich your thought and, ultimately, your writing.

I find it a compelling way of thinking about writing.

There’s always the danger of getting too obsessed at an early stage with what form a piece of writing (Klinkenborg’s favoured phrase for writing of any length) will ultimately take. 

Will it be an essay? A book? In my experience, imposing that vision too quickly can hinder your writing.

Non-fiction writing is typically sold to publishers on the strength of a proposal that might merely skim the surface of a subject.

You might have given a chapter-by-chapter summary of what you want to do with the book.

If the publisher decides to commission the book, you then need to write it. And the clock is now ticking down towards deadline.

Do you fumble your way through the subject sentence-by-sentence in a process of discovery that will ultimately enrich your writing? 

Or do you take the shortest route across the subject, guided by your proposal, because time is now of the essence?

Klinkenborg’s emphasis is very much on the former. While reading it, I found myself thinking about my own writing process and how I might be able to take heed of at least some of his advice. 

No writer is an island — we absorb the discourses of productivity that trickle down through our culture.

If we aim for a certain word count every day — say, the classic 1,000 words a day — then what does it mean if we achieve that target while having nothing worthwhile to write about?

Perhaps, then, a sentence of worth, or a few lines that express an idea or feeling that we can, potentially, expand into a work of a larger scale at some point in the future, is more valuable than a thousand words that we might never read again.

An aphorism can show us how much a single sentence might contain.

We don’t have to write aphorisms, but we can pay more attention to our writing, craft each sentence, think about what we want to write and why, and enrich our work and, indeed, our own experience of writing by doing so. 

A sentence doesn’t have to be worth etching in stone to be worth something.

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