First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.

A classic way to do this is time, manner and place. It is there in Old English, in the stout sentences of the tenth-century monk-scholar Aelfric, which say what someone did, when, how and where:

Ageing is a privilege, not a predicament.

The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal wrote a whole novel (Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age) containing just one sentence.

William of Occam, who held that ‘it is vain to do with more what can be done with less’.

Letter-carvers had once been seen as artists, like painters and sculptors, but now they were looked on as mere artisans, like printers. Writers, meanwhile, had come to be seen as intellectuals or creative people, working with the mind, not as scribes, working with the hands.

Amid these gaps, implications sit.

you can eat well by learning how to shop.)

Having only minor gifts has its compensations. It has forced me to think hard about how words join up and why some sentences work better than others. A nightingale has no idea why such a bewitching noise emerges from its throat; a human nightingale impersonator must parse every note.

Some stains can be removed only by the destruction of the material itself.

Racter’s lesson for the sentence writer is never to say everything. If you make the familiar shape of a sentence, it will remind the reader of meaning. We take our reading cues from syntax, so when the words fill the right slots, we cannot help but shape them into sense and imagine the world they suggest.