Adam Lively: Writer – Literary Mentoring and Coaching

In Reading Like a Writer (which I highly recommend), Francine Prose recounts this amusing anecdote:

Not long ago, a young writer told me a story about being taken to dinner by his successful, high-powered agent. The agent asked him what he wanted to write about, what subjects engaged his interest. To which the young writer replied that, to tell the truth, subject matter wasn’t all that important to him. What he really cared about, what he wanted most of all was to write. . . really great sentences.

The agent sighed. His eyelids fluttered. After a moment he said, “Promise me that you will never, ever in your life say that to an American publisher.”

Sentences. Here, in the first of what I hope will be an occasional series (and in defiance of publishers), I want to offer some initial reflections on these fundamental building-blocks of writing. Now sentences are of course made up of words (plus punctuation, of course – of which more in a later blog). But the meanings of words are only fully realized when they become active in relation to other words, in the engineering of sentences.

Talk of the engineering of sentences immediately brings to mind the dread word grammar (or its slightly more technical and nerdy cousin, syntax). I say “dread”, because grammar will, for many, trigger memories of being admonished by teachers or others for not knowing, or not obeying, “the rules”: grammar is one of those words that seem to demand, as a necessary adjunct, the words correct or incorrect.

For the creative writer, this is a very limited and unproductive way of looking at grammar: grammar is far too important and rich a field merely to be corralled into neat binaries of correct and incorrect. Quite apart from the general point that, for the creative artist, rules are there to be broken (with the large and important caveat that in order to break rules creatively, one should both know the rules and know why one is breaking them), to reduce grammar to correctness vs incorrectness leaves unexplored the truly creative problem of how to choose between different possible grammatical constructions, each of which may be equally “correct”.

Crucially, grammar is “imagistic”: different grammatical constructions prompt different ways of “seeing” the subject-matter of the sentence. Take these two sentences:

(a) My cousin Gavin looks like Ricky Gervais.

(b) Ricky Gervais looks like my cousin Gavin.

From the point-of-view of a purely objective approach to meaning, it might seem that the two sentences say the same thing. But subjectively, in terms of how they (unconsciously) affect a reader, there is between them a subtle difference of perspective, of what is placed in the foreground and what in the background. (One might, for example, imagine (a) as an aside at a family gathering, and (b) as an aside while watching TV.) It is precisely these kinds of subtle differences of perspective, of effect on the subjectivity of the reader, that are the stock-in-trade of the writer, and that go far beyond simplistic questions of correctness or incorrectness.

In his theory of “cognitive grammar”, American linguist Ronald Langacker has explored, in fascinating (if highly technical) detail, the ways in which different grammatical constructions afford different ways of looking at the same action or state of affairs. To take one of his quirky examples (from his book Concept, Image and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar (1991)), one might compare the following two sentences:

(a) Bill sent a walrus to Joyce.

(b) Bill sent Joyce a walrus.

In (a), the use of “to” shines the spotlight of the sentence on the path of the walrus from Bill to Joyce. In (b), the emphasis is on the end-point of that path: the immediate juxtaposition of the two nouns (Joyce a walrus) highlights Joyce’s reception and possession of the walrus.

(Langacker backs up this interpretation by pointing out that while the sentence I sent a walrus to Antarctica is fully acceptable, the sentence I sent Antarctica a walrus is odd-sounding, because one doesn’t normally think of a continent as being in human-like possession of things. The sentence I sent the zoo a walrus is similarly odd if one thinks “the zoo” as simply a geographical place, but is in fact acceptable because “the zoo” can also be taken as referring to a social institution, and we tend to personify institutions.)

Langacker’s big takeaway for creative writers is that we should be attuned to the ways in which using different grammatical constructions makes us see in a different way. Take these two sentences:

(a) The hill falls gently to the bank of the river.

(b) The hill rises gently from the bank of the river.

The same objective content in both sentences, but different ways of seeing.

One of Langacker’s most fascinating insights – one that I’ll return to in future episodes of this occasional blog-series on the sentence – is that different grammatical constructions involve different kinds of mental processing in the reader. Take these two sentences:

(a) There is a road across the desert.

(b) The troops marched across the desert.

We process the same words across the desert in different ways in the two sentences. In the case of (a), in a process that Langacker calls “summary scanning”, we see the scene synoptically: we simultaneously see the road at all points across the desert. With (b), by contrast, the words across the desert trigger in our minds a dynamic serial process, “sequential scanning”, as we envisage the small body of men moving across the landscape.

It might seem that this kind of minute attention to the nuances of grammatical construction belongs more to the realm of the poet than the fiction-writer. But as Francine Prose’s anecdote suggests, even the fiction-writer, in their yearning for the perfect sentence, has their inner poet. I’ll return to Langacker in future on this blog, because his analyses help sensitise one to grammar, and a writer needs not just an objective knowledge of grammar, but a feel for it, just as a violinist or a pianist needs a feel for their instrument.

Oh, and by the way, I haven’t got a cousin called Gavin, and he doesn’t look anything like Ricky Gervais. . .