Lost and Found

Welcome into Flight School:

What a treat to speak with Nina Schuyler, a woman lit up by a well-made sentence the way some people are lit up by music or by light on water.

In a time when language has been reduced to a means to an end via the caption, the text, the email that sounds like a text, Nina’s teaching over at Stunning Sentences does something quietly radical. It asks writers to slow down and inhabit the sentence. To hear it. To feel it in the body. And, like her, fall in love with what words can do when you stop rushing them toward a destination.

She’s in excellent company, too. Jane Smiley, in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, builds a pyramid of everything a novelist needs to know.

At the base — the foundation — Smiley places punctuation, spelling, grammar which she calls “the most artificial layer, but also the most necessary to master” as an automatic function so internalized it gets out of the writer’s way.

Above language, Smiley builds story and character, then setting and theme, then complexity, and finally, at the apex arrives at diction.

My own pyramid here at the Blackbird Studio for Writers starts at the foundation: idea, concept, theme. Then the seven basic plots, the archetypal characters, structure, antagonistic forces, setting. At the top, I arrive at language, scene, and exposition.

Intersection Points:

Like Nina, I love the sentence. I do now and always have. When working with writers who stay with me for several years, I set the sentence aside at first because I believe a writer needs to know what they’re building before they can choose the right materials to build it with. My teaching then is where I build relationship and trust that will serve over the long haul.

In the end, as you’ll see, Nina and I agree without question that writing is an embodied act, not an intellectual one. We both believe the sentence has to be felt before it can be fixed. And Nina loves to be lost in the writing — lost in the beauty and the aliveness of language itself, whereas I want to be found in the writing, want to know something I didn’t know, have some assumption interrogated and seen as untrue (or true). I want to gasp at the sentences, yes, but the meaning of them—cumulatively—is where I land in awe and humility.

Both are acts of love. But our methods ask different things of the page, and of the person sitting down to fill it.

I hope you enjoy this conversation for the place where two teachers find each other across the distance of their methods, and where we discover, underneath everything, how much we share.

✍️Your Turn:

What's a sentence you've loved so long you've never forgotten it?

I’ll see you in the comments and maybe Nina will grace our comments, too!

Jennifer, 🐦‍⬛