Bibliopath #27: In which we get down to the bone
Dear reader,
Here's our topic sentence for today:
I stay downstairs while the family breathes above me and I write it down, I lay them out in nice sentences, all my clean, white bones.
This sentence from Anne Enright's The Gathering, which I admit I haven't read yet. But pulling it open, the pages fell open to these words, this sentence.
The power of the sentence comes from three contrasts, the first between the two clauses of the sentenceseparated by the "and". The family's life—as they 'breathe'—is distinguished from the funereal act of writing, laying down "bones". Upstairs, downstairs, breath and bone, life and death.
The "bones" do double, even triple, duty here. The second contrast is between them and the "nice sentences". Sentences are of course like bones, just as an artist should know anatomy, a writer should know something of the bone structure of the sentence. Sentences form the skeletal structure of meaning.
But did you notice the "nice"? Your inner grammar teacher may be telling you that "nice" is a weasel word, one of the first words that we should eliminate from our written bone structures, as it rarely means as much as is intended. One last contrast: the 'niceness' of the sentence is parallel with the 'cleanness' of the bones.
The writer laying down her bones is an allusion to both the internal work of writing: writing always proceeds from within you. And yet also the work of bringing out the relics of the past, and sometimes, exhuming the things we'd prefer to keep hidden. As nicely as we might present either sentences or bones, as clean as they might be—there is an elegance if we do it right. As well as a little of the macabre.
Last letter, my friend Dave asked, "How do you learn to write well?" And I have many answers to that question, and I will continue to do so. But here is one answer: look at your sentences, and strip them down to the bone.
From within my own skull,
Guan