The problem with great sentences

"You know you have a beautiful sentence, cut it," (Georges) Simenon said. "Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut."

Paul Theroux, Figures in a Landscape

Georges Simenon

This sounds like the worst possible advice for writers. Cut out your most beautiful sentences? When I reviewed The Last Night at the Ritz by Elizabeth Savage at few days ago, I commented on the many beautiful sentences. If she had cut them all out, her short novel would have been a short story.

Yet Dani Shapiro says something similar in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life. She recalls being a student in a writing class taught by Grace Paley. "'If I love a sentence I've just written enough to get up and go into the other room to read it aloud to my husband, I know I should cut it,' she once said."

Georges Simenon and Grace Paley were hardly mediocre writers, so maybe their advice is worth listening to. But what did they mean?

I can recall a number of occasions when I was editing newspaper copy, trying to get a story to fit into a hole on a page. With a deadline approaching, I searched desperately for something to cut out without harming the story. Often what had to come out was the best sentence in the entire story, something I especially hated when it was my own story. Yet great sentences are often nonessential sentences. They may just illustrate a point already made. Or they may just be showing off.

Unless one is another Thomas Wolfe, length is usually not a problem for a novelist. Simenon, in fact, wrote relatively short novels. Paley wrote short stories. One more beautiful sentence should not have been a problem. Still, essential must have been an important objective for both of them. Is this fancy sentence really necessary? A good writer writes short by eliminating the nonessential.

Shapiro interprets Paley's advice in this way: "Don't admire your own work, not while you're writing it." That makes sense. A hitter thinking about his last home run is likely to miss the next pitch. A singer remembering the quality of her last high note may stumble on the next one. First finish the job, then admire your work.

As for Simenon, Theroux comments that "he sometimes lets slip a pretty sentence, but generally his writing is so textureless as to be transparent and never calls attention to itself ..." Whether we are talking about writers, magicians, jugglers, teachers or plumbers, the best ones are those who make something difficult look easy. We appreciate the end result without even noticing how it happened. Beautiful sentences get noticed. That can be a problem. When a reader stops to admire a pretty sentence, as I often do, it can interrupt the flow of the story being told.

All this may be true. Yet still I like beautiful sentences. What would Bartlett's Familiar Quotations be without them?