A Quote by Louise Erdrich
When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.
Related Quotes
It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.
A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it—in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry.
Writing is linear and sequential; Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn't the writing; it's the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?
I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe in them. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine . . . "Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved; do not presume: one of the thieves was damned." That sentence had a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters.
A dependent clause (a sentence fragment set off by commas, dontcha know) helps you explore your story by moving you deeper into the sentence. It allows you to stop and think harder about what you've already written. Often the story you're looking for is inside the sentence. The dependent clause helps you uncover it.
The first sentence of the truth is always the hardest. Each of us had a first sentence, and most of us found the strength to say it out loud to someone who deserved to hear it. What we hoped, and what we found, was that the second sentence of the truth is always easier than the first, and the third sentence is even easier than that. Suddenly you are speaking the truth in paragraphs, in pages. The fear, the nervousness, is still there, but it is joined by a new confidence. All along, you've used the first sentence as a lock. But now you find that it's the key.
A real friend is someone you say a sentence to and they know ten thousand words behind that sentence.
When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
I'm a very laboured writer. I hammer it out sentence by sentence, and it takes a long time. That's what the work is, right? To make the reader think it is not hard to do.
And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.
When I was a kid, we used to play this thing called 'the writing game' with our father. My brother and I would play it - where first person writes a sentence, and the second person writes a sentence, and the third person writes a sentence, and so on until you get bored and have to go to bed.
I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.
I like to think of the individual words, then you put the word in the sentence, then you have to think about what that word means in the sentence, then you have to read the sentence in the paragraph - you're sort of building up like that; that's my philosophy.
Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum:one No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly. Make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it.
I have a hard time revising sentences, because I spend an inordinate amount of time on each sentence, and the sentence before it, and the sentence after it.
Related Authors
Ayn Rand Quotes
Russian
Writer
C. S. Lewis Quotes
British
Writer
Francois de La Rochefoucauld Quotes
French
Writer
Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes
English
Writer
H. L. Mencken Quotes
American
Writer
Haruki Murakami Quotes
Japanese
Writer
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
American
Writer
Leo Tolstoy Quotes
Russian
Writer
Mark Twain Quotes
American
Writer
Mason Cooley Quotes
American
Writer
Ray Bradbury Quotes
American
Writer
Samuel Johnson Quotes
English
Writer
Seth Godin Quotes
American
Writer
Sherrilyn Kenyon Quotes
American
Writer
Suzanne Collins Quotes
American
Writer