A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. ~Henry David Thoreau
I didn’t post yesterday as I was frantically trying to pull together my submission for Listowel and another one for Artella. Both are done, last minute as everything I do is…somehow I thought as I grew older I would lose that bad habit. Not so. But now both are done and I can do my boring paperwork/tax work the rest of the week.
One of the reasons I liked the ASU Conference so much is that I was introduced to so many different forms of writing. Creative nonfiction and prose poetry, are still new to me so it was exciting to hear from writers who use words so eloquently in other forms of writing than commercial fiction. Dinty W. Moore read from his new work and here speaks about the form and his literary journal.
So what is Thoreau saying is a perfectly healthy sentence? I think when you hear a perfectly healthy sentence you know it is something special…it is that sentence that reads like poetry where no word is wasted and each word is the only word that could have worked.
Today, read more about creative non-fiction and then look at the list of writers who write in this style. Many are popular fiction writers. There is a freedom in just writing what appeals to you and not trying to pigeonhole your work.Now get back to work!
Lovingly,
The Writing Nag