Ten Good Sentences

Ernest Hemingway has advice for writers: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” We know this is harder than it sounds. Secretly, of course, we are looking for more than one. So was he. But one sentence is a good place to start.

A while back I became flummoxed about the next move for the draft memoir I was writing about my father. A teacher encouraged me. “Go somewhere quiet, M and write ten sentences about him. How you really feel.” Actually two teachers advised this, so I thought it must be right.

I did go away. Writing those ‘feeling’ sentences was like extracting teeth. I sweated, I read, I tossed and turned at night, drank chamomile tea. And in the end I forced myself to write something – expressing how I truly felt.

“If I had it all again,’ I wrote, ‘I would hold his hand. I would simply hold his hand.’. Those are two sentences. But you know what I mean. I didn’t have that sentence before I left home. I hadn’t even believed the sentiment to be true. Could I just love him? The agonising process helped get my narrative back on track.

Later, I showed the ten-plus sentences to my teacher. Some were good, some not so good. Some, she said, made her cry. They were not Hemingway sentences. But they were mine. “Was I worming my way back into his heart – or not back, but just working my way into his heart?” Sentences, questions. I was making headway.

Memoirists can follow Hemingway’s exhortations. If we conjure ten good sentences about how we really feel, it might just nudge that memoir along.