Living life fully leads to better writing

A newspaper feature I always look forward to — For Love of Sentences — appears in an occasional column by the former New York Times writer Frank Bruni. He invites readers to submit favorite lines, and he shares them with us.

That's an exercise you and I have partnered on before.

A recent Bruni column led me to discover this gem from the poem "Winter Syntax" by Billy Collins, poet laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003:

"A sentence starts out like a lone traveler

heading into a blizzard at midnight ..."

Those words give me the feeling of recognition I have had when reading several writers' descriptions of their experience in composing: They say they sometimes start a sentence thinking they know which words will come next, but when the sentence ends they are often surprised and delighted by what came out.

They discover words and phrases that took shape without the writer's decision to write them — words and phrases that somehow found their way onto the page and that lifted the writing from the mundane to the sublime.

I believe it can happen as a result of a writer's reading, listening to music, contemplating a sunset, watching kids play, sitting in silence ... and a thousand other things.

In other words, experiencing life fully, in the flesh and on the page. If we stay open, a lot of life can find its way into words and phrases and unforgettable sentences.

And so, for a writer, a sentence can spring from either deliberate choice or unconscious happenstance.

Readers of this column often write to me; I always reply, and we have rich exchanges. I believe we enjoy and also learn from each other. All of us love great sentences.

So, I again invite you to send me a favorite sentence, from any source, and I'll share a few in this space.

"Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'"