A sentence starts out like a dark cloud of wispy smoke: it’s an idea in my head—an unformed, unbirthed idea, expressing only some type of meaning. Words pop in my head, but they’re often fragments of a sentence: phrases like “compared to” and “just like a” and sometimes “nothing like”... sometimes cool adjectives, sometimes odd verbs.
The subjects come in first, as the body of the sentence takes shape. As a virtue of the linear nature of writing, the subject appears, then the object, then the verb—and some other complexities fall in after that.
Certain sentences are fickle: they need to be written down immediately, otherwise I won‘t remember them. They‘re giggling trick-or-treaters, clutching their candy loot and sprinting from house to house in the darkness. If I can‘t pinpoint them, the meaning is lost.
Once I‘ve got the sentence, I‘ll write it once, and then choose to keep writing it or start all over again. Constructing the sentence is assembling a train, with the locomotive (the period) at the end. If I don‘t get a great start, I usually start over again: consulting the smoke in my head for the few minutes it‘s there, trying to grasp it and force it onto paper.
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