Writing great sentences

Francine Prose wrote a fine book about writing, Reading Like a Writer, which includes a chapter on Sentences. (Chapters are titled with names such as Words, Paragraphs, Narration, Character, Gesture, Dialogue, and more.) In her book she celebrates the sentence and crafting wonderful ones.

To talk about sentences is to have a conversation about something far more meaningful and personal to most authors than the questions they're most often asked, such as: Do you have a work schedule? Do you use a computer? Where do you get your ideas?

Prose goes on to show an example of what a writer can do while ignoring the advice of writing craft books. Not just any writer, but Virginia Woolf, writing in her essay, On Being Ill. Not just any sentence, but one 181 words long, which appears at the opening of the essay. (It's shown at left; just click on it show a full-sized, readable page). Woolf's sentence is something I share with our weekly workshop members during our eight-week sessions. "It's not the sentence's gigantism but rather its lucidity that makes it so worth studying and breaking down into its component parts," Prose writes.

A good sentence is the meat on the bones of good writing. Prose writes, regarding the revision of sentences

Writers need to ask themselves

• Is this the best word I can find?
• Is my meaning clear?
• Can a word or phrase be cut without sacrificing something essential?

Perhaps the most important question is, "Is this grammatical?" A novelist friend of mine compares the rules of grammar, punctuation and usage to a sort of old fashioned etiquette. He says that writing is like inviting someone to your house. The writer is the host, the reader the guest, and you, the writer, follow the etiquette because you want your readers to be more comfortable, especially is you're planning to serve them something they might not be expecting.

Prose adds that she revisits Strunk and White's The Elements of Style from time to time. But most craft books like this tell a writer what not to do. Learning from reading is a way to enter a new league of writing, once the fundamentals of grammar are in your toolkit. Literature shows us what kind of great sentences are possible to write.

Submissions, Part 2

Some literary publications never make it to paper. The Web world hosts untold numbers of what are sometimes called "zines." It may not be any easier getting your writing published in an online lit mag. But there are more of them out there than the printed versions — and getting a look at the finished editions happens much faster. The lag between reading time and publication is shorter when there's no printer or distribution in the process.

One of the pieces of paper from my 2006 AWP tour:








Just a simple business card, instead of a postcard printed in four colors.

Carve is named after the short story titan Raymond Carver. You can read their magazine online at carvezine.com. They have a yearly contest, judged by a PEN Award winner, with a top prize of $1,000. Unlike paper lit mags that are run by college students, Carve and these online pubs don't have a formal reading period.

The odd part of the story: Carve Magazine doesn't accept online submissions yet. Yup, postage and paper to get you in the door. For now, as most of the lit mags say.

Submissions, Part 1

I'm doing some reorganizing of my office studio this month — so I'm chucking out a lot of paper in the process. A lot of what's going made its way into the office after the 2006 AWP conference, held in Austin. Much of the departing paper was printed to inspire submissions of more paper.

Imagine a space the size of two football fields, side by side, lined with 10-foot-long tables, each representing a small press or smaller lit journal. Each has a stack of books or issues to sell. Sycamore Review was one of those. I scraped up the details on the twice-a-year fiction and poetry journal that prints just 1,000 copies for each issue. It's pretty typical of the lit mag submission dance.

Sycamore has an eye toward what it calls "stories that have a ring of truth, the impact of felt emotion." Its entry in the 2008 Novel and Short Story Writer's Market uses the word "emotion" several times. You can offer up your writing to the publication only by printing paper and mailing it, but at least the Sycamore staff has let go of the No Simultaneous Submissions commandment.

They have an annual contest, the Wabash Prize, which accepts fiction entries until March, and Poetry entries in the fall. Don't forget to send along your $10 reading fee. (By the way, some lit mags don't charge a submission fee, like Farfelu here in Austin.)

They also want "fiction that breaks new ground." On the pub's Web page, the sample story Exposure begins thusly:

Wednesdays and Saturdays are my days off at the pharmacy, but Saturdays my wife is off too, so I do my flashing on Wednesday afternoons.

Edgy, as they like to say in Hollywood (a place where not much writing is going on for TV, since the writer's strike remains unsettled. But I digress). Exposure was also this year's Wabash winner. The Sycamore editors read until March 31, and they just put an issue to press this month, so they're reading for their first 2008 issue. You can submit to

Sycamore Review
Purdue University
Department of English
500 Oval Drive
West Lafayette, IN 47907

And if you wonder why Sycamore Review, like most literary magazines, demands the paper on ink plus stamp and envelope ritual, the answer is: they're a little magazine, with old computers, and they read paper. Oh, and taking the trouble to submit through the mails, um, that's part of the weeding-out process. It eliminates the riff-raff, according to the world as one editor described it during 2006.

There’s something about having to actually print out submissions, write a cover letter, get stamps, and go to mailboxes that weeds out the dilettantes. With emailed submissions, every high school student whose creative writing teacher praises him would be sending submissions. (I’ve seen this happen, the hordes of emails not hardly worth reading…But I’m not knocking high school students, creative writing teachers, or you in any way.) You can’t just walk onto American Idol—they have a screening process. Similarly, you can’t just write your way into Sycamore Review—there’s a built-in screening process called “submitting” that allowing emailed submissions takes away.

Computer budgets and tiny staff aside, the handsome postcard at the top of this entry is part of the Sycamore Review budget, one of several hundred printed for the AWP show. Paper for the journal issues is even more dear, apparently: there's only enough pages for five stories and eight poems in the most current issue. The good news? There are thousands more publications out there to send your paper to, including a $10 check. A couple of football fields full of them.

But a lit mag with two issues per year, payment of two copies to successful contributors, and a yearly contest with a $1,000 first prize? That's about what you can expect. Do the math. $200 a year will get your five of your stories considered by four journals. Or you could spend the money on a good editing job for a novel. That kind of work sells here in Austin for about $800 for a novel.

But that's another kind of submission, one that puts you on your way to being in print.

Just off the press: Austin's own lit journal

Just tonight I heard beautiful writing, a first chapter of Donna Johnson's in-progress memoir about growing up under the largest revival tent in the world. The Utter Reading was at our biggest independent bookstore, Bookpeople. So I was really not that surprised that the creators and editors of Austin's own literary journal, Farfelu, were in the appreciative, rapt audience.

I met Elisabeth McKetta and Kim Pyle afterward, and they have just put out Farfelu Issue 9, their latest in a quarterly publication of poems, short fiction and art. It's all done in a cozy undersized format, to make it stand out. Best of all, it's got color or monochrome art in each issue, so it's not one of the literary journals that "look like a socialist manifesto," to quote the creators of the lit mag Tin House.

Elisabeth and Kim have this to say about their latest:

Issue 9 features eight black and white photographs by Clayton Cusak. In his own words, Cusak photographs “the rich visual subject matter of dilapidated, obsolete, and otherwise transformed structures and the relics they contain from previous inhabitants.” This issue is heavy in poetry, featuring work from five poets: Marcelle Kasprowicz, John Grey, Brian Brown, Misti Rainwater-Lites, and Erin Feldman. The two short stories in this issue, written by Ann Hillesman and Liliana Blum, depict two conflicting archetypes of Father: father as hero, father as villain.

As they point out in a friendly e-mail — coincidentally, sent today — books and magazine subscriptions make great holiday gifts. Their Web site makes it easy to order, and yes writers, there are submission guidelines there, too.

If you write in the Austin area, or even if you write much father afield, you ought to send Farfelu an offering, either of your writing or of a subscription. And a tip of the hat to the small journal, birthplace of many a burgeoning career. Harrison Cheung, who wrote in a Workshop series with us, had a funny short story published in Farfelu. These are the places you can stretch the wings of your writing.