User Profile

The central fact of your education is this: You've been taught to believe that what you discover by thinking, By examining your own thoughts and perceptions, Is unimportant and unauthorized. As a result, you fear thinking, And you don't believe your thoughts are interesting, Because you haven't learned to be interested in them.

There's another possibility: You may be interested in your thoughts, But they don't have much to do with anything you've ever been asked to write.

The same is true of what you notice. You don't even notice what you notice, Because nothing in your education has taught you that what you notice is important.

— Several short sentences about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

[...] what if meaning isn't the sole purpose of the sentence? What if it's only the chief attribute among many, a tool, among others, that helps the writer shape or revise the sentence? What if the virtue, the value, of the sentence is the sentence itself and not its extractable meaning? What if you wrote as though sentences can't be summarized? What if you value every one of a sentence's attributes and not merely its meaning?

— Several short sentences about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

A writer's real work is the endless winnowing of sentences, the relentless exploration of possibilities, the effort, over and over again, to see in what you started out to say, the possibility of saying something you didn't know you could.

— Several short sentences about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Why are we talking about sentences? Why not talk about the work as a whole, about shape, form, genre, the book, the feature story, the profile, even the paragraph?

The answer is simple. Your job as a writer is making sentences. Most of your time will be spent making sentences in your head. In your head. Did no one ever tell you this? That is the writer's life. Never imaging you've left the level of the sentence behind.

— Several short sentences about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

What you don't know about writing is also a form of knowledge, though much harder to grasp. Try to discern the shape of what you don't know and why you don't know it, whenever you get a glimpse of your ignorance. Don't fear it or be embarrassed by it. Acknowledge it. What you don't know and why you don't know it are information too.

— Several short sentences about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

There are innumerable way to write badly. The usual way is making sentences that don't say what you think they do. Which can the reader possibly believe? Your sentences or you?

— Several short sentences about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Here, in short, is what I want to tell you. Know what each sentence says, What it doesn't say, And what it implies. Of these, the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says.

— Several short sentences about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg