Here’s a good thing you can do when you come upon a beautiful sentence—like these ship-launchers, for instance, from the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves:
The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.
What do you even do after sentences like those? Do you feel, as I do, an unsober urge to recite these sentences to the nearest person or at least copy them into an expensive-looking journal? Has your fiancée, like mine, gently made it clear that she doesn’t need to hear every World Class Sentence that you add to your collection? But my reaction to certain passages—aesthetic if also perverse and pathological—is to want to carry them around in cupped palms and show everyone, then maybe put them in my mouth when no one’s looking.
What follows is a socially acceptable, fiancée-approved, and even educational, practice of sentence fetishism, a worshipful apery that authors going back to Robert Louis Stevenson claim was what taught them how to write.
So, Step 1. Give yourself one clocked minute to memorize the Woolf passage. Set your phone. Ready? Go.
Now—no peeking!—reproduce the sentence from memory. Write it down, in an expensive-looking journal if you so wish. Here’s mine:
The sun had not risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except for a slight creasing, as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened, a line appeared crossing the sea, and the grey cloth showed bars, which moved, one after another, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.
The fun part is Step 3, correcting your passage, and correcting is how you should think of it. As a rule, the original sentence is always and in every way better. I like to think of it as having Virginia Woolf as my editor.
The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except for a slight creasing that the sea was slightly creased, as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened, a dark line appeared lay on the horizon crossing the sea dividing the sea from the sky, and the grey cloth showed bars became barred with thick strokes, which moved moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.
What we have now is an annotated demarcation of the space between this work-a-day prose-maker’s instincts and Virginia Woolf’s world-historical genius. Like:
How did I miss yet?! More to the point, notice how melancholy that syllable is, how you hear the ocean when yet laps against risen.
Notice how creasing lacks the solemnity of creased.
Notice the redundancy of the verbs appear and cross with the subject line. What else does a line do? A line is a thing that appears to cross. When the line—the dark line!—lies on the horizon, the line gains a weird mass, and it’s this mass that begins to fold and pull back the flat cloth of sky and sea into the endlessly receding distance until we realize that that distance is actually aimed at us.
And so on. Showed bars? What’s wrong with me.
In Memories and Portraits, Robert Louis Stevenson describes the practice—his learning to write by such “purely ventriloquial efforts”—this way:
Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts.
Stevenson calls it “playing the sedulous ape,” a phrase that was famous for about a century then disappeared. J. M. Barrie says he was “quite the sedulous ape” to Thomas Carlyle. Jorge Luis Borges says he played the sedulous ape to Browning and Kafka, Sternberg and Chesterton. Raymond Chandler uses the phrase to describe his relationship to Hammett. George Bernard Shaw says he sedulously aped himself.
It’s a phrase I like for its ugliness. There we are: we the apes, with our pencils pinched between our knuckles, trying to scratch out our lines. We hunch at our desks, trying to get it right. The endless sky, the endless sea, and we endless apes, writing ugly lines.
Ugly line. Ugly line. Ugly line. One after another. Following each other. Pursuing each other. Perpetually.
Instructor Mark Mayer is the author of the forthcoming Aerialists, which won the Michener-Copernicus Prize, and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. This spring, he's teaching Prose ICU, which starts March 19, and Intermediate Novel Workshop, starting March 22.
