LINE LEVEL #1

My mother’s favorite thing to say to me was “I am not your friend.”

A few years ago, I lived with poets. I highly recommend everybody try it at least once. Besides being great cooks and teaching me how to answer the question “how’s your heart,” living with them made me a better writer. It was special to be in a house where everyone had committed to language craft.

I remember they had a quote from a writer I’m now forgetting framed on the wall. It read, “a word, then a word, then a word, that’s a sentence.” It continued to say a few sentences strung together, that’s a paragraph. A couple of paragraphs, now you have a chapter.

This is a simple idea that helped me get through finishing up my first book.

The idea of writing can be scary. And I think much of what is so scary is, often times, we think of a final product or an end goal and not the process. When you want to be a writer often you’re thinking about stories, or books. But when I am most connected to the process I am thinking on a much more micro level.

To me being a writer is crafting and conducting sentences. Making choices and music out of language. This is the foundation. Over time I’m excited to also think about the more macro appreciations of being a writer with you here on this platform. I am, for example, extremely concerned with character. I’m also interested in setting and plot, point of view, stakes and so much more.

But all that said, when I am in the act of writing and when I am teaching writing I try my best to remember that message I saw every day. Writing happens one word at a time. So don’t worry about writing a bestseller, or winning a contest. Let your worry and your curiosity be about this word. Then the next, then the next. And then you’ll have a sentence. Let yourself sit with each one. How does it feel?

This work of writing fiction, of spinning truth from imagination is a magic art. And the material we manipulate is the sentence. This is fundamental to my approach.

I can’t tell you how to write a beautiful sentence. I am sorry. Part of why I’m talking to you today is I’ve seen a lot of bullshit on the internet promising to make you a better writer in 5 steps. Or to magically get you to write a bestseller. That’s bullshit. Writing, like living is a growing process. A living process. An evolution that is spurred by close reading and serious attention, and vulnerability and energy and a lot of things I can’t name. But I should also mention there are great accessible resources as well. My mentor George Saunders is one of the most popular writers on this platform for a reason, and I’m glad that his genius has grown more accessible here. #1000 words of summer has helped me immensely, Brandon Taylor’s page and Sarah Thankam Mathews’ Substack are wonderful too.

In this series I want to get into the practice of looking closely, retroactively at my own work and also the work of others and think about how the sentences work. For now I’ll call it LINE LEVEL but the branding part of this world always makes me cringe a little no matter what we call this. But yes, we’ll do some close reading, as that is the most important tool in your toolkit as a writer as far as I’m concerned.

My work is feels best and is best when I allow my focus to be on the sentences and their music. In my experience, the only way to get better at writing sentences is to read sentences closely and think about them. To feel them. Those written by other people and those written by you. You should learn to feel sentences in your person and learn to let them live in your bones. If you do this enough, with enough seriousness and attention, you’ll grow your capacity to make your own linguistic “music.”

So let’s start with the first sentence in a story I wrote while back when I was in MFA. It’s the shortest story in my first book and it’s called Thing My Mother Said.

Let’s start at the beginning.

“My mother’s favorite thing to say to me was “I am not your friend.”

What does this sentence do? What does it literally mean? If it’s your first time seeing it say it out loud.

And then what does it make me feel? There’s some kind of feeling. Maybe it’s curiosity? It’s hard for me to imagine not knowing this sentence as I’ve read it many, many, many times, but even if it was my first time, I’d feel connected to it. Not just because I wrote it. But because my mother really often said that.

Practically, as a story’s start, in just the first two words (My mother’s) the story’s subject, main character and point of view is set up. “My mother” is also set of words that contain feeling. Most of us do not have a neutral emotional relationship to the thought.

This first sentence here begins with a dependent clause. A clause is a part of a sentence that contains a subject and a verb. A verb being an action and a subject is the who/what of a sentence. The subject is often the doer of the action.

To more specifically identify the dependent clause of the sentence it is, “My mother’s favorite thing to say to me was…” The reason it is dependent is this clause is an incomplete thought. My mother’s favorite thing to say to me was…. What. This is important because from the very beginning of the story even within the sentence a rhetorical question is being asked and answered. Imagine the dependent clause abruptly was cut short. There’s a tension that asks to be resolved. Understanding and identifying tension is important for us as readers and writers. Unresolved tension is potential energy.

To zoom in even more, the dependent clause alone has a kind of tension. “My mother’s” is followed by the phrase “favorite thing to” which word by word grows and sharpens our expectations. Sometimes I try to note what my mind is doing one word at a time as I read.