My former creative writing professor Nina Schuyler once told me that a meaningful fictional world begins at the sentence level. Every aspect of the sentence, its grammar, punctuation, syntax, the literary tropes utilized, like allusion, metaphor, metonymy, alliteration, et. al. and how to deploy these tools for maximum impact on the reader so that the sentence(s) in a paragraph simply sings, takes decades to master. Like my literary ambassadors of style, Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, and most recently Alice McDermott and Paul Harding, I love long sentences. But to create a long sentence, to stylize it artfully so as to retain and expand and build on its meaning is not just a trick of clever wording, of laborious effort, but of a mind attuned to the nuances of life and character.

Like painters and photographers, musicians and sculptors, who reveal theme with color, staging, light, perspective, the nuances of sound and rest, the materials of marble, granite, metal or clay, to create visual or auditory art (art whose meaning reaches through the medium and rattles the viewer’s spine), it is too obvious to say that a writer uses words. It is how those words exist on the page and whether or not those words contain rhythm, light, perspective, and whether or not those words sound hard or soft, grating or jarring, feel expansive or minute, abstract or specific, make all the difference between a work that lifts and plummets, or sits inert in the imagination. For that is (or should be) the goal of all art–to move a person, to expand his/her notions of self, to allow him or her to dream, plumb deeper into the mysteries of life, swim in uncertainty, and leave the work of art as a changed person.