{"id":2620,"date":"2012-05-23T09:22:35","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T13:22:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/?p=2620"},"modified":"2012-05-31T14:02:11","modified_gmt":"2012-05-31T18:02:11","slug":"stalking-the-wild-sentence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/2012\/05\/stalking-the-wild-sentence\/","title":{"rendered":"Stalking the Wild Sentence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Brandvold<\/a> has written over seventy fast-action western novels under his own name and his penname, Frank Leslie. \u00a0\u00a0Follow of his blog here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Finding that first sentence of the day can be as bracing to the writer as that first up of coffee, but it\u2019s sometimes as hard to find as the strike zone for the aging fast-ball pitcher or as elusive as wild asparagus for the natural foods forager.<\/p>\n

Sitting down to the soft, menacing whine of his machine, the career-scribe stares at the blank screen and sees nothing but his own bewildered eyes staring back at him.\u00a0\u00a0Two lone eyes in a vast sea of white.<\/p>\n

Gradually, the eyes get wider.<\/p>\n

And wider.<\/p>\n

They are suddenly no longer the wordsmith\u2019s own eyes but the eyes of the moron he suddenly fears he\u2019s become.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cEee-gads!<\/em>\u201d he cries, fists clamped to his temples.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cMy career is over and I have only a few chapters left on this oater I\u2019m writing!\u00a0\u00a0No delivery check for me, and they\u2019re probably going to force me to return the advance money I\u2019ve already frittered away, as well!\u201d<\/p>\n

The scribbler\u2019s heart pounds like musket fire in a Civil War reenactment battle as he wonders if they\u2019re hiring down at Target.<\/p>\n

Where are those slippery devils, those glistening little hand-cut and polished jewels, those sentences, hiding?<\/p>\n

Sometimes, at this point, the writer must become the Euell Gibbons of his trade, don his metaphorical hiking boots and walking stick, and light out for parts known.\u00a0\u00a0Yes, into the wild he\u2019s explored before.\u00a0\u00a0Into the woods where he\u2019s found those toothy little word-lions roaming free in the past and managed to throw a loop around them and haul them home to the cheers of his relieved family and the yips of his happy curs.<\/p>\n

My version of this primeval forest is usually as close as my own office bookshelves or sometimes even my bedside night table.<\/p>\n

At either place I can usually find all the books I\u2019m in the half-conscious habit of returning to on those frustrating mornings I find that I need my pump primed.\u00a0\u00a0Sometimes, all I have to do is flip through one or two of these tomes, reading a few of the sentences in each–usually by writers who have struck major chords with something deep inside my writer\u2019s ear before, firing the spark of creativity inside my desperate soul–and suddenly I become a cat pouncing on a mouse.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m Hemingway in Africa.<\/p>\n

Paris Hilton on Rodeo Drive.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s weird, the books I find myself returning to.\u00a0\u00a0These are the books I\u2019ve read and reread so many times I know them almost by heart, but they\u2019re not at all what anyone who knows I\u2019m a fast-action, blood-\u2018n\u2019-guts western writer would expect.\u00a0\u00a0Most days, there\u2019s not a single oater among them.<\/p>\n

Today I found three books at the top of the stash I return to most often and thumb through repeatedly, searching for the sounds that are going to ring my own bell.\u00a0\u00a0And one or all of these almost always rings it.<\/p>\n

Here are the titles:<\/p>\n

Red Smith on Baseball.<\/em><\/p>\n

Lights on a Ground of Darkness<\/em>\u00a0by Ted Kooser.<\/p>\n

One Man\u2019s Garden<\/em>\u00a0by Henry Mitchell.<\/p>\n

Yeah, that last one\u2019s a freakin\u2019 gardening book.\u00a0\u00a0And aside from throwing a few shrubs in the dirt now and then, I don\u2019t even garden!\u00a0\u00a0The thing is, I\u2019m not reading for content but for the sound of the writer\u2019s words arranged with such seeming effortlessness into graceful sentences.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m needing to\u00a0hear<\/em>\u00a0the writer\u2019s voice and\u00a0see<\/em>\u00a0the images that that voice paints in my head.\u00a0\u00a0For some reason and almost all the time, hearing and seeing those sentences written by folks I consider masters of the trade helps me use my own voice and my own images to write this essay, for instance, as well as the scenes in my own western novels.<\/p>\n

Here are two sentences by sportswriter Red Smith from his essay, \u201cA Man Who Knew the Crowds,\u201d that got me going yesterday:<\/p>\n

\n

When the iceman cometh, it doesn\u2019t make a great deal of difference which route he takes, for the ultimate result is the same in any case.\u00a0\u00a0Nevertheless, there was something especially tragic in the way death came to Tony Lazzeri, finding him and leaving him all alone in a dark and silent house–a house which must, in that last moment, have seemed frighteningly silent to a man whose ears remembered the roar of the crowd, as Tony\u2019s did.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Thanks, Red.\u00a0\u00a0And Henry and Ted.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve helped me more times that you could ever know turn that moon-like desert of the white page into a flowing field green with wild asparagus!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Brandvold has written over seventy fast-action western novels under his own name and his penname, Frank Leslie. \u00a0\u00a0Follow of his blog here. Finding that first sentence of the day can be as bracing to the writer as that first up of coffee, but it\u2019s sometimes as hard to find as the strike zone for the aging fast-ball pitcher or as elusive as wild asparagus for the natural foods forager. Sitting down to the soft, menacing whine of his machine, the career-scribe stares at the blank screen and sees nothing but his own bewildered eyes staring back at him.\u00a0\u00a0Two lone eyes in a vast sea of white. Gradually, the eyes get wider. And wider. They are suddenly no longer the wordsmith\u2019s own eyes but the eyes of the moron he suddenly fears he\u2019s become.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cEee-gads!\u201d he cries, fists clamped to his temples.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cMy career is over and I have only a few […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87,92,91],"tags":[8,18,98,13,32,75],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2620"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2620"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2657,"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2620\/revisions\/2657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}