Read William Gass’s essay “Finding a Form” as my priming text. The collection it’s in has been glaring at me from the shelf for a couple of years now, and given my sense that I haven’t fully cracked my own mss’s form yet, it just seemed like the thing to grab.
It scared the shit out of me. Gass is a fanatic for sentences. They are, he argues (rightly, IMHO) the irreducible units of both sense and the sensibility of any text. They are not simply the sum of what the words in them say; how they sound, what they evoke, their rhythms carry all the overtones and undertones that turn a sequence of words into meaning. Or, as Gass puts it:
“In any event, and after many years of scribble and erasure, I came finally to the belief that sentence were containers of consciousness, that they were directly thought itself, which is one thing that goes on in consciousness, but they were other things as well in more devious, indirect ways.”
I’m thinking about sentences today, and how much attention I should give to shining up each one as I fight through this first draft. I’ve found that I’m really working harder than I expected just keeping the mss pushing ahead at a reasonable rate. There are more moving parts than I had realized in the genre-mandated glibness of the proposal, and trying to get the combination of facts, character, ideas and plot elements to work together has been…tricky. The writing group catechism lauds shitty first drafts4 and the virtues of just getting the text down, damn any polish or elegance. But though I’d like to get to the fix-it-in-rewrite mindset, I find it hard to let go ofloose or rough and above all imprecise sentences. I get tripped up by the sense that the