The Secret to Writing Good Sentences
Lately, I’ve been judging my sentences as too clunky. They get to the point but there’s no inspiration. So I thought about what books in the past inspired me to write interesting sentences. European greats like Tolstoy, Hugo, Balzac, Dickens, James. And then contemporary writers like Anthony Doerr, Richard Ford, Haruki Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Don DeLillo, Richard Yates, E.L. Doctorow, Ta Nahesi Coates. Why did I just list all men? There are plenty of women: Joyce Carol Oates, Barbara Kingsolver, Tracy Chevalier, Ann Patchett, Alice Munro, Sarah Waters, hell, even…
Why Kazuo Ishiguro Gives Me Hope
The British writer Kazoo Ishiguro has now released a fantasy novel called The Buried Giant. It was actually the first novel he attempted many years ago but later set aside. He said he had trouble forming it fully. Now, as a seasoned writer, he returned to the eerie story and fulfilled the vision that he’d probably originally had. It’s an interesting work, dealing with memory and spells and wounds from the past. In reading it, I haven’t marveled at the story Ishiguro decided to write (which is compelling from the…
