Lecture delivered by the short-story writer Gary Lutz to the students of Columbia University's writing program in New York on September 25, 2008. (From believermag.com)
"... a word is matter, that it exists in tactual materiality, that is has a cubic bulk. Only on the page is it flat and undensified. In the mouth and in the mind it is three-dimensional, and there are parts that shoot out from it or sink into its syntactic surround."
"the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself."
"... that the words inside the sentence must behave as if they were destined to belong together - as if their separation from each other would deprive the parent story or novel, as well as the readerly world, of something life-bearing and essential. ... The words in the sentence must bear some physical and sonic resemblance to each other ... The sentence feels filled in from end to end; there are no vacant segments along its length, no pockets of unperforming or underperforming verbal matter."
"You might come to realize that a single vowel already present in the sentence should be released to run through the consonantal frameworks of certain other prominent words in the sentence, or you might realize that the consonantal infrastructure of one word should be duplicated in another word, but with a different vowel impounded in each structure."
[analysis of "acutely felt, clearly flat" of Christine Schutt.]
[analysis of "Here is the house at night, lit up tall and tallowey" by Christine Schutt.]
[analysis of "An accident isn't necessarily ever over." by Diane Williams]
"Make sure that the stressed syllables in a sentence outnumber the unstressed syllables as in Don DeLillo's "He did not direct a remark that was hard and sharp." or Christine Schutt's "None of what kept time once works."
"we need not shy away from composing an occasional sentence entirely of monosyllabic words, as Barry Hannah's "I roam in the past for my best mind" and "He's been long on my list of shits in the world," and as Ben Marcus does in "They were hot there, and cold there, and some had been born there, and most had died."
"Unless you have good reason not to do so, end your sentence with the wham and bang of a stressed syllable."
"Give force to your sentences by stationing the subject at the very beginning instead of delaying the subject until an introductory phrase of a dependend clause has first had its dribbling say."
"Avail yourself of alliteration - as long as it remains ungimmicky, unobtrusive, even subliminal. Such repetition can be soothing and stabilizing, especially in a sentence whose content and emotional gusts are anything but."
"Take advantage of assonance. Keeping a single vowel in circulation through most of the conspicuous words will give a sentence another kind of sonic consummation ... as Sam Lipsyte does with three short u's in 'You could touch for a couple of bucks'"
"You can even divide a sentence into two or more acoustical zones and let a single vowel prevail in each zone. Here is a three-zone sentence by Don DeLillo: 'There were evening streaks in the white of the eye, a sense of blood sun.'"
"Press one part of speech into service as another, as Don DeLillo does in 'She was always maybeing' (and adverb has been recruited for duty as a verb) and as Barry Hannah does in 'Westy is colding off like the planet' (an adjective has been enlisted for verbified purpose as well). A variation is to take an intransitive verb (the sort of verb that can't abide a direct object) and put it in motion as a transitive verb (whose very nature it is to enclasp a direct object). That is what Fiona Maazel is up to with the verb collide, which abandoned all transitive use ages ago, in her sentence 'Often, at the close of a recovery meeting, as we make a circle and join hands, I'll note the odds of these people finding each other in this gropu; our sundry pasts and principles; the entropy that collides addicts like so many molecules.'"
