Still thinking about sentences (and Pablo Neruda)

Last night, my enormously gracious hostesses at St. Joseph's University—Ann Green and April Lindner—shared their students with me.  Some had read Dangerous Neighbors.  Some had read You Are My Only.  All of them, many in the graduate program, spend their days thinking about words and writing.

I talked about the future of young adult literature.  I also continued to talk about sentences.  Why they matter.  How they are crafted.  What we put at risk if we, as a nation, a culture, foist only plots upon one another, and not song.

Yesterday on this blog I shared some of my own sentences in the making—a beginning place, a mid place—as well as a reminder of a NaNo contest I am conducting.  Last night, at St. Joe's, I read from that same James Wood essay in The New Yorker that I celebrated here not long ago—that lesson in beautiful writing. 

Today I mean only to share these few words from a Pablo Neruda poem.  These are simple lines, simple words.  No pyrotechnics, no self-conscious gloss, no unnecessary intricacies.  Good sentences, I am saying, don't have to be complex.  But they must always be true.

From Neruda:

Only the shadows
know
the secrets
of closed houses,
only the forbidden wind
and the moon that shines
on the roof

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Editing the sentence: This is what I am talking about

I wrote the other day of a post-NaMoWri contest.  An editing exercise focused quite simply on the sentence.  The details and prize are described here.  I hope you'll enter in.

I am interested in the sentence—its arc, its clarity, its shape, its purpose.  I happen to think that it matters.  And so today I thought I would share a little of my own editing process.  These sentences below are from a novel-in-progress.  The first series is from the raw first draft.  With them, I am very baldly, without artistry, writing down what happens.  Making a record.

She hid the photographs beside the Leica beneath the bed.  She told Vin that she had been out in the garden and had turned to see a family of deer at the forest's edge.  She gave great detail to a lie too easily spun:  She had seen a buck and two does, and she had chased them.

Here, then, are those sentences two drafts later (with many more drafts, no doubt, still to come).  I have concerned myself not only with the what here, but with the rhythm and the movement of the words.  It's still not perfect, but it has been improved:

She hid the photographs beneath the bed, made up some story.  There had been deer, she said, at the forest's edge—a buck and two does by the stream.  They had stood there not moving, or perhaps one cusped ear of the buck had shivered—a sign, Becca told Vin, a beckoning. 

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