Five Great Sentences

One of novelist Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing is this: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” That’s good advice. Clear prose is not supposed to allow anything to distract the reader from the story, conflict or character. If the reader pauses and notices the author even for a moment, it can break the tension. And when that happens, she might put the book down for good. Many a good tome has suffered this fate.

But on occasion, there are those great sentences that make you dog-ear a page, perhaps for the insight the author offers; perhaps so you can share it with a book-loving friend; or, perhaps so you can tape it to your refrigerator and study it. Leonard might disagree with me, but I think there are writers who can both sustain a novel’s forward motion AND write sentences that insist on being noticed.

Following are five sentences that forced me to dog-ear book pages and pause to consider the author – not for pulling me out of the story, but for giving me writer envy. Yes, when I read the following, I couldn’t help but say, “I wish I’d written that!”

“An incidental discovery was that even legendary success brought little happiness, only redoubled restlessness, gnawing ambition.”
Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

“…..Claire says, turning to the counter to order what sounds like six drinks but turns out to just be a coffee.”
Jonathan Tropper, How To Talk To A Widower

“Until now, Tom and Paula had all their wounds in common. Every hurt was diluted immediately, reduced by half for being shared, reduced again, almost redeemed by the attention that it earned.”
Lynn Hoffman, bang, Bang

“But I was also free, invisible, as if the only evidence of my existence were in the tasks I performed, the services I rendered to others. When I stopped work, I disappeared.”
Rosemary Poole-Carter, The Women of Magdalene

“Now, fifteen years and one mildly gifted son later, they had little to talk about. They were prone to epic silences and kept up their little hostilities like rubbed bronze.”
Dominic Smith, The Beautiful Miscellaneous

What great sentences have you read recently?

Karen Harrington is the author of JANEOLOGY: the story of one man’s attempt to understand his wife and her sudden descent into madness. Follow this new author’s writing journey here at HerCircle Ezine throughout 2008.
www.karenharringtonbooks.com

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