A Writing Exercise for Immediate Satisfaction

I love writing, but sometimes, I tire of working on a huge project, such as a novel. I want to write something that rewards me with instant pleasure.

Last week, I read Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One. In this captivating book-length essay, he includes some exercises to help people write “finely crafted sentences.”

In Chapter 2, he asserts that “a sentence is a structure of logical relationships,” and excellent writers build sentences with a variety of logical relationships.  

To practice, he proposes that a writer begin with a short sentence of three or four words such as my example of “Toby cooked the chicken.” Then, the writer adds a series of logical relationships to this short sentence to make it interesting. Here’s my attempt:

• Toby, who had arrived at the restaurant at 10:06 a.m. instead of his expected time of 9:00 a.m., cooked, or rather deep-fried the chicken, which the owner purchased at the local butchery that morning before he arrived at 9:00 a.m. on time.

I realize that this isn’t the most incredible sentence of all time, but it says much more than its original version. First, we know that Toby was extremely late to work. We also know that he cooked the chicken with grease since he deep-fried it. He works with his boss, who does the purchasing for the business, and his boss knows he was late since he arrived before Toby. As soon as I wrote it, I felt elated at my new-found skill.

Here are a few more examples of my sentence-relationship-building exercises.

Short sentence: The dog scratched his ear.

Adding logical relationships:

• The dog, a runt mixture of auburn English Setter and black Poodle, scratched his ear, which was covered with a bandage due to an infection.

Short sentence: Joan called her father.

Adding logical relationships:

• Joan, who was suffering from the flu and lying in bed with a box of Kleenex, called her father to whom she hadn’t spoken since before she bought her new car.

Short sentence: Dan drove his car.

Adding logical relationships:

• Dan, a medium-sized guy with a mop of brown hair and a sliver of a mustache, drove his car, a bright red Subaru Outback that he had bought five years ago in Bozeman, Montana.

This exercise is so easy that I plan to do it every day. Why shouldn’t life be fun all the time? Thank you, Stanley Fish.

Source: Fish, Stanley. How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One. Harper. 2005.