The Plain Sentence That Took All Day

On the disproportion between the visible labour of prose and the actual labour of prose

We are trained to see labour where labour displays itself. In most fields the assumption holds. The visible difficulty of a thing is a reasonable proxy for the difficulty of making it. Effort and the appearance of effort travel together. In prose, they often do not.

The sentence that announces its difficulty, the long one, the elaborate one, the one whose syntax draws attention to its own architecture, may have arrived by facility. The familiar registers are sitting in the language waiting to be used, and a writer with the relevant reading behind them can produce a passage in those registers without much resistance. The sentence comes. It looks expensive. It may not have been.

The sentence that took all day is usually somewhere else on the page. Often it is the one a reader passes over without noticing. Short. Plain. Made of small words. The kind of sentence that looks as if it could have been written by anyone. This is the disproportion. It follows from how prose actually gets made.

A writer who is working seriously moves through many versions of a sentence before settling on one. The first version often reaches for the register that signals weight, or seriousness, or beauty, or whatever the moment seems to require. The reach is not dishonest. It is the language offering itself in the shapes the writer has read most often. The sentence sounds like writing. It announces that something is happening.

The writer reads it back and feels the pressure that begins this kind of work: the sentence is doing the wrong job. It is producing the texture of significance rather than producing the thing the moment actually contains. The performance is in the way. The writer cuts the elaboration. The next version is plainer. It still over-reaches in some small way, a word that is trying too hard, a rhythm that is borrowed. The writer cuts that too.

What remains, after enough of this, is a sentence that has stopped making claims on behalf of the writer. It is the sentence that no longer needs to announce its own seriousness because it has begun to contain it. The labour does not show because the labour was the removal of everything that showed labour.

The mechanism is subtraction. The plain sentence is not the first sentence minus decoration. It is the last sentence standing after the decorations, the clarifications, the clevernesses, the emphases and the small evasions have been set aside.

The refusal can repeat itself for hours. One version makes the feeling too legible. One sharpens what should stay blunt. One explains what the sentence only needs to place beside something else. One is beautiful in the wrong way. Each is close enough to tempt the writer, and each is put aside. By the time the sentence is plain, it has the form of something that survived.

But subtraction is not an aesthetic. It is not minimalism, restraint, or the cult of the spare. A sentence is plain only when the moment requires plainness. A different moment might require three clauses and a buried pulse. That sentence too would be the result of refusal, just refusal of a different set of available versions. The mechanism is constant. The surface varies.

Take the opening of In Another Country:

“In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.”

The sentence is plain in the most obvious sense. Short words, no subordination, no figural language, only a single conjunction turning one flat fact toward another. A reader could pass over it without registering it as a feat of any kind.

You can feel, inside the sentence, the kinds of sentences it is not allowing itself to become. A version that sharpened the irony of “always there but we did not go to it”. A version that loaded “the fall” with seasonal weight. A version that announced the trauma the line is sitting on. A version that explained the distance from the war. A version that gave “we” a contour, a grief, an attitude. Each of these versions is available in the language. Each would have produced a sentence that registered as written. The kept sentence has refused all of them.

What survives is the placement of two flat facts next to each other. The war was always there. We did not go to it. The comma gives the turn a little room. The conjunction “but” does almost everything else. It marks the relation without describing it. The reader is left with the relation, in the place where a worse sentence would have given them the relation interpreted.

The sentence reads as if no choices were made. Every word in it is a choice that refused other choices. The reader cannot see the rejected versions, which is what makes the sentence work. If any of them had been allowed to stay, the sentence would have begun to perform what it is now containing. The plainness is the form the containment takes.

The writer who has spent the day on a single sentence does not look like a writer who has worked. There is no manuscript thick with crossings-out, no stack of pages, no visible quantity to point at. There is a page that had a sentence on it in the morning and has a different sentence on it now. The two sentences are roughly the same length. To anyone who is not the writer, the difference between them is small to the point of being invisible. The writer closes the document and goes downstairs. The family is in the kitchen. The day continues. No one asks how the writing went, and if they did, there would be nothing to show.

This is the contract. The labour has done its work and removed the evidence of itself. A sentence that announced its labour would, by that announcement, undo what the day was for. The point of the work was to arrive at the sentence that does not need the day to be visible inside it. If the day is visible inside it, the sentence is failing in the specific way the writer was trying to make it not fail.

The writer accepts this, mostly. There are days when the acceptance is harder. The hours have passed and the page looks almost the same and somewhere underneath there is a small unanswered complaint about the work not being seen. The complaint is not entirely wrong. It is also not what the writing has been for. The writing has been for the sentence, and the sentence does not need the writer to be visible inside it. It needs to be the sentence the moment required, which is a sentence that reads easily.

What the writer accepts, in accepting the contract, is that the work and the appearance of the work have separated. The writing life does not, after a certain point, look like a writing life. It looks like a person at a desk, mostly still, producing very little visible matter. On a good day the very little visible matter is the right matter. On a bad day it is not. From the outside the two days look the same.