I let through a sentence yesterday I wasn’t happy with.
Not that I think everything that appears in the diary is ideal, smooth or even finished.
But this one caused me annoyance and shame.
What I wrote was —
How great a writer is judged as being depends almost entirely on how much of a deformative influence they become on their successors.
and I could already see better ways of doing this, but it’s like that moment when I look at a student’s sentence, in a story I’m marking, and think, ‘I could set to work here, and make a suggestion, but that’s going to take eugh — it’s going to — five minutes — no — ’
And then I type —
The syntax here is awkward. How could you fix it?
I’m going to go into the not-good sentence in some detail because what I feel about it, heart-sinkingly, is the kind of moment by moment drag and nag that writers spend their desk-lives ignoring (first draft) or being driven insane by (final draft).
If you want to get better as a writer, these are the humiliating fixes you have to accept are nobody’s job by yours.
The problem with that sentence about Harold Bloom’s canon-formation is that it needs to do some time travelling back and forwards.
In this, it’s like this sentiment from Wrestliana that I never felt I’d expressed as well as I should.
What motivates an aging boxer’s hopeless comeback is exactly what, when they were young, enabled their greatest victory. Without the one, there would never have been the other. To understand it properly, you have to reverse time and make what happens later the cause: The true sign of a future champion is that, one day, they will make a hopeless comeback.
I’m sure there’s a better way of putting this, it’s just I’ve never found it. Even since delivering Wrestliana, I have occasional other goes, in notebooks, in my head.
A version of the problematic Bloom-sentence, taking this as an influence, might say —
The future potential of a writer depends almost entirely on how much of a deformative influence they will eventually become on their successors.
Although interesting, that’s not what I want to say. (Remember, I am paraphrasing Bloom here, not expressing my own thoughts.)
What I want to do is get rid of the word pile-up that is ‘writer is judged as being depends almost entirely’.
It’s abstract, inelegant, and I feel the argument is hitting quag.
As I am now going to rewrite it — starting from sentiment, not statement — I will begin by junking the whole contraption and trying to picture the most basic vehicle for transporting what I want to say, in the simplest, most efficient form.
So —
The greatness of a writer is expressed by their capacity to crush their successors.
That’s sort of it, but not really.
The greatness of a writer is expressed by their force in deforming their successors into greatness.
Meh.
I don’t mean by their or in their. More like through their force. But again it’s becoming too clotted.
Simplify further —
Great writers cause great damage.
That’s too simple and suggests not just stylistic and psychic but moral and social damage. As an expression of writerly destructiveness and guilt, it’s a bit like Robert Lowell’s line from ‘Dolphin’ —
my eyes have seen what my hand did.
Which, in Bloomian terms, is the Shakespeare of the Scottish play coming powerfully through and warping an American writer even as late as the early 1970s.
Maybe an elaboration of the five word sentence would start to get somewhere closer to acceptable —
The greatest writers cause the greatest damage to the great writers that follow them.
But, yes, what about —
The greatest writers are the biggest bastards to the great writers who follow them.
That suggests both bullying cruelty and having escaped their own paternity.
The example Harold Bloom likes to give is Milton, who annihilated several successive generations. The only way they could survive as poets was by retreating into neoclassical politeness or clipped satire. Dryden, Pope. Milton was a massive bastard — but, of course, his own paternity couldn’t have been clearer. He was fleeing Daddy-Shakespeare by running towards the two dozen Stepdaddies that wrote the relevant bits of The Bible and made the King James version.
Let’s try the sentence out in the paragraph within which it needs to live.
It’s a boys’ club, embarrassingly so. And Bloom’s main lineage is what he calls ‘strong poets’. The greatest writers are the biggest bastards to the great writers who follow. If no-one after you can ignore you, even if they hate you — if, in some ways, they all owe their existence to you — then you are canonical. See James Joyce.
This should obviously become —
It’s a boys’ club, embarrassingly so. And Bloom’s main lineage is what he calls ‘strong poets’. The strongest poets are the biggest bastards to the strong poets who follow. If no-one after you can ignore you, even if they hate you — if, in some ways, they all owe their existence to you — then you are canonical. See James Joyce.
No, I’m still not happy, because although I’ve improved the sentence’s shape, and re-integrated it, I’ve lost the important idea of deformation — that you become a writer by trying very forcefully not to be the writers you would wish to have been.
But I won’t put you through any further drafts.
I’ll just leave this as an example of the work always to be done.
Going back and forth between truthful (but clumsy) and simple (but wrong).
I let through a sentence today I wasn’t happy with.
I let through a sentence today with which I wasn’t happy.
Today, I let through a sentence that will bug me tomorrow.
Ooh, that's a toughie!
In my day job, I look after webpages, which sometimes involves rewriting sentences because we're supposed to aim for a reading age of 16. Ooofff, it's not easy. Maybe, though, it's easier when you're not the poor sod who wrote it to begin with! And on a website, there's website grammar (if words are blue and underlined, they're link; can we chuck in some headings; this sentence is a long list which looks better as bulletpoints) which you don't have in a novel. Unless you're being post-modern!
Thank you for sharing your process. I know what you mean - some sentences are tricky to rewrite! As Stephen King says, 'The most important things are the hardest to say.' And 'One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.' I'm just about to head into a writing workshop with students and I always tell them this because they think good academic writing is all about long words and longer sentences.