Obscure Sentences

I've been thinking a lot recently (partly as required by my pedagogy class) about how I learned to write - a process that is far from finished of course. But I think that whatever ability I have acquired has come from imitation, both consciously and unconsciously. We all imitate other writers on some level. When you read a lot of a single author, his/her voice gets stuck in your head, and the next thing you write sounds a little bit like you and a little bit like them. In thinking back to high school, though, I realize that I have done this intentionally. Whenever I wrote something that was particularly successful, it was because I was consciously borrowing a style from someone else - usually from one of my favorite authors, or from whomever it was that we were reading in class.

I came across a book while I was searching for possible textbooks for my Composition class next semester called Copy and Compose. It was written in the late 60's and is now out of print, so I can't use it as my textbook if it turns out to be the kind of thing I'm looking for. But it approaches the instruction of writing with exactly this idea of good writing through imitation. How can we be good writers if we don't emulate good writers? It is not an attempt to make us all sound the same or to ignore the potential for one's own creative voice, but it acknowledges that, for most of us, that voice will only come with time and practice and from assimilating the voices of many others.

I like this idea and I've been going through its exercises, realizing that I wish I had been specifically taught to write this way. It is primarily useful for style, rather than for argument, but it is incredibly effective in making one really consider the effect of language, and in giving one a sense of control.

Here are some examples I've been working on:

1) The Loose Sentence

I smoked my pipe yesterday, sitting in the cooling late afternoon air of an early Virginia spring, reading from Montaigne, dead now for nearly 500 years, and I thought about mortality and the futility of caring about one's death, while rings of smoke drifted up into the darkening sky.

2) The Inverted Sentence

Foolhardy Bush was, and his ignorance managed to derail American relations with the world.

3) Loose/Inverted

Long I walked, my belly full of beer and bourbon, dragging my feet against the dog's insistent pulling so that when she darted toward a terrified squirrel, I was facing the other way, thinking about you, and Las Vegas, and when you might come home again.

Sentences have an almost poetic obscurity when composed like this - without a larger purpose or argument. I rather like them. And I like forcing myself to think about my prose consciously. I think only good things can come of it.