Communication and Exposition

As I read Gary Lutz’s lecture, The Sentence Is a Lonely Place, I connected his ideas about sentences and their composition to what I have been reading and experiencing with writing lately. The first example of this intricate relationship between words in sentences is metafiction. In metafiction every single word counts and must count, for it to be good metafiction. Lutz states that good sentence writers are those who “seem to know 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.” Slutz’s writing reminded me of Dawkins’ style in The Selfish Gene, were he clearly identifies the units for evolution to be genes. In this lecture, Slutz defines the unit that expresses the essence of writing as words forming sentences, something completely different from words forming paragraphs, essays, or novels. The unit of writing according to Lutz is the sentence which has to be created by the words that “belong together” for that specific sentence. It seems to be the obligation of the writer to expose seemingly obligatory relationships between words to communicate ideas rather than having messages to be expressed by words that fit the message. This may well be the line that cuts off mathematical writing, the place where there is an obligation to write a word that fits the message from expository, beautiful, majestic writing, the place where words are needed to fit a feeling, where words become an obligation of the writer.

As Slutz describes some examples of the relationships between words, specifically the locations and changes between the places where individual letters are located we see the mathematical part of expository writing. There are a wide range of possibilities; however, you can decide to use alliteration, divide a sentence to create portions of repeated letters, play around with two repeated letters, give more or less emphasis to a part of the sentence, etc. Slutz describes writing “rich to the extent that the drama of the subject matter is supplemented or deepened by the drama of the letters within the words as they inch their way closer to each other or push significantly off.” The subject becomes a spectator for the sentence variety, word use and writing styles. The subject of a sentence isn’t more important that what a survival machine is for a gene, it is simply a way to continue being immortal. If the subject can’t be exploited by the relationship of the words that conform it, the subject isn’t appropriate, it isn’t a good survival machine. This perception of the art of writing is different from what I have studied, but only by a short glimpse into Slut’s perception I see a complete different art from what writing for me once was. Now I understand and feel more comfortable with appreciating writing as an exposition of a writer’s creativity and genius rather than just a simple channel of communication.