The only link between you and the reader is the sentence you’re making. The usual way is making sentences that don’t say what you think they do.
There are innumerable ways to write badly.
Of these, the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says. I don’t mean ‘write the way I do’ or ‘write the way they do.’ I mean ‘write the way you do.’ Perhaps they’ll help you find enough clarity in your own mind and your own writing to discover what it means to write. So is a lifetime of reading and a love of language. Unlearning what I learned in college - teaching myself to write well - is the basis of what I know. It confirms our generally false ideas about creativity and genius. What we think we know bout writing sounds plausible.
For some reason, we seem to believe most strongly in the stuff that gets into our heads without our knowing or remembering how it got there. Like most received wisdom, what people think they know about writing works in subtle, subterranean ways. In Several Short Sentences About Writing ( public library), author and New York Times editorial board member Verlyn Klinkenborg does away with much of the traditional wisdom on writing and dissects the sentence - its structure, its intention, its semantic craftsmanship - to deliver a new, useful, and direct guide to the art of storytelling. “If there is a magic in story writing,” admonished Henry Miller, “and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.” And yet, famous advice on writing abounds.
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