About this episode

This episode discusses the importance of finding the truest sentence in writing and the process of refining a manuscript.

I had sixty-thousand words then I had twenty-thousand, and I still did not have a book. This Thursday’s episode is about how I finally learned the difference, and it’s the most useful thing I know about the work. The manuscript had frameworks. It had seven tidy maps. It had the warm, encouraging, here-are-your-steps voice I’d spent years building. And every time I read it start to finish, something was wrong and I couldn’t name it. That’s not writer’s block. It’s quieter and worse: the slow realization that a pile of genuinely good material is not a book. In Vivian Gornick’s terms, I had a situation . I didn’t have a story . The way out came from Hemingway, broke and young in a cold Paris garret, who when he couldn’t get started would tell himself, “Write the truest sentence that you know.” Just one. But here’s the part everyone skips: he also cut to it. Whenever he caught himself writing elaborately, presenting something, he’d throw that ornament away, what he called the scrollwork, and start from the first true simple sentence. The truest sentence isn’t something you add. It’s what’s left when you cut the performance off. So I went hunting through my thirty-seven thousand words…

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