Understanding really great sentences

Each week in Advanced Creative Writing class, a few students are required to give a short presentation on a chapter from Francine Prose’s book, Reading Like A Writer.

Last week it was my turn, and my presentation was about sentences.

I admitted to my classmates, and I’ll admit here, that I found the chapter to be quite long and boring. There were so many examples of ‘great sentences’ that I found myself lost among the ‘great sentences.’ Sure, there were a few authors that stuck out – such as Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway – but overall, the chapter didn’t impress me.

What I did find interesting, however, was how the chapter started. Prose recounted a conversation between a young author and his publisher. The author was gushing about how his goal was to create really great sentences, and the publisher was rolling his eyes.

Francine Prose, the author of my textbook.

It’s easy to say, “I want to create great sentences.” It’s very difficult to actually do it.

I started thinking about sentences a moment ago when I opened a copy of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. The book was a Christmas present, and I am finally getting around to reading it. When I flipped to the first chapter, this is what I read:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness… we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…

So that’s where that quote is from! It’s so famous, and I’ve heard it so many times, but I didn’t know what it was from or who wrote it.

One of the original covers of the novel.

As I kept reading the passage I was taken aback by how beautiful the sentence was. It flowed together in such a perfect way that I – the reader – went through a number of different emotions as I worked my way through the passage. In short, the opening paragraph in A Tale of Two Cities is quite possibly one of the most beautiful sentences I’ve ever read.

I wish I had read the passage before I did my presentation in class, and I feel like I have learned a lot about sentences just by reading a few short lines The entire book isn’t written in the same, beautiful format, but there are many parts that have made me stop and go ‘oooh.’

I’m sure that all authors want their work to stop readers in their tracks and make them contemplate some aspect of their own lives. I know I do. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s incredible.

Words are beautiful. So are sentences.

*Images taken from Google.