One True Sentence
A few dozen autumns ago, a high school teacher of mine who closely resembled a sock monkey but was otherwise unmemorable stood before our English class and read us a long, wandering sentence from a tattered book.
I can recall only that the passage was terminally loved, used the word “cacophony,” and focused mainly on describing a street scene in Cairo, Egypt.
On second thought, I might be mingling memories; it’s possible that the passage was penned by Steinbeck and had absolutely nothing to do with Egypt. But whatever.
After our teacher finished his recitation, he made intense, prolonged eye contact with the back wall above our heads, as was his habit, and proclaimed, “If any of you can write a sentence like that, I’ll give you an automatic A in this class.”
I didn’t know it then, but his rhetorical challenge gestured at what Ernest Hemingway referred to as The One True Sentence.
“All you have to do is write one true sentence,” Mr. Hemingway would remind himself when the anxiety of writing sent him spiraling into doubt. “Write the truest sentence you know.”
Hemingway was gazing out over the Parisian skyline and not over the tops of two-dozen fresh, dumb adolescent countenances when he gave himself these pep talks, but it’s a conceit so simple and relatable that the backdrop feels irrelevant.
One True Sentence. It’s as hard and as simple as that.
The challenge our teacher offered us that day was probably tongue-in-cheek, and given his proclivity to stall for months before handing us back the work he non-rhetorically assigned, he probably wouldn’t have expended much energy judging the merits of any attempt to take him up on his offer, but I was intrigued.
I recall sitting on my bedroom floor that night and attempting my very own Perfect Sentence.
About what, I cannot recall. I do remember feeling smitten by the idea of Cairo, and even more smitten by the idea that I could (maybe!) write something that good sometime, if I actually tried.
But I was 14, I’d been precisely nowhere, and trying was not my strong suit. The exercise quickly bored me. This was harder than it looked. I abandoned the challenge in a matter of minutes and probably went off to get stoned or something.
I daydreamed my way through the rest of that English class, never finishing a single book assigned to us and cheating shamelessly on vocabulary quizzes. I squeaked by with a C, as it was my teenage habit to look with the highest measure of disdain upon the things that secretly interested me most.
Like books and writing.
It would be more than a decade before I made it to Cairo, which was as lovely and cacophonous as the passage promised, and it would be just slightly longer than that before I got serious about writing.
But I’ve thought of that English teacher’s offer many times, and the level of mastery it points at.
What would it take to write One True Sentence? To really just write the stuffing out of something, to have it be as unimpeachably good as that lost passage?
A lifetime of toil, I’m discovering. Just for that one.
Because writing The Perfect Sentence has little to do with chosen subject or stylistic concerns or how much of the world you’ve seen.
Writers fixate on these things, but ultimately, nailing all that is rarely enough knock a sentence out of the park. To make it come alive and float off the page and grow hands that reach out and grab the reader by the scruff and shake and shake and shake.
The differentiator, the thing that makes the One True Sentence possible, or at least more probable, is knowing how to Really Fucking Write.
Learn to really, really write, and you can make your sentences as long or short as you please. You can tell it slantways or backward or stop halfway through and you’ll still prevail, because you’ve mastered the form. You can write sentences that are one word or 1,000 words. It’s all good.
But how does one learn to do that?
If I could time-travel, and if for some godforsaken reason I elected to travel back to the baking brick prison that was my high school English class, I would tell my vainglorious 14-year-old self this:
It takes writing somewhere between 10,000 and 1,000,000 not-so-great sentences first, depending on your luck and your learning curve.
There’s no other formula, there’s no other mechanism, there’s no other way.
Get Scribbling, I’d tell her. This is one test nobody can cheat their way through. Not Hemingway. Not Steinbeck. And not even you, kid. Not even you.
