Somewhere in the middle of a quiet scene in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, a sentence appears out of nowhere and mentions almost casually that a boy will grow up to shoot himself at twenty-eight. The sentence continues to flow. It doesn’t pause to inquire about your wellbeing. The distance between those two images—childhood and catastrophe, innocence and what time does to people—is so precise and compressed that readers have reported crying without fully understanding why. It depicts a young boy learning to dance in the same breath as the reality of his death. The Pulitzer Prize went to that sentence. More significantly, it’s the kind of sentence that people unintentionally carry around for years.
Although both craft manuals and grammar guides have their place, it is difficult to answer the question of what causes a sentence to lodge itself somewhere deep and stay. Linda Caroll, a writer who has spent years contemplating the connection between language and the human mind, compares preserving lovely sentences to keeping seashells or old copper pennies in a small box at the back of a closet—something to go back to on days when the well runs dry. That picture is almost a beautiful sentence in and of itself. It highlights a fact about why some writing endures: it holds something, transports something, and gives it back to the reader altered.
Most writers are unaware of how bizarre and amazing the neuroscience underlying this is. Because the neocortex is where memory resides, it activates when a person sits down to write, bringing past experiences into the present. Typing and holding a pen require motor skills that are handled by the cerebellum and basal ganglia. The default mode network, which is the same network that is active when daydreaming, illuminates, enabling the mind to constructively explore associations. The cingulate cortex, hippocampus, and amygdala work together to supply and regulate emotional tone and intensity. Anger is expressed in a felt form when it is written down. Writing something sensitive results in something that is almost tender. If you could observe the entire process from outside, it would resemble a breathtaking light show taking place in real time. Additionally, none of that ensures that the writing is good, which is both liberating and humble.
It does, however, ensure that the writing is human. With AI-generated text flooding every platform, inbox, and comment section—much of it coherent and some of it quite pretty—the distinction is more important now than it was even five years ago. However, Caroll makes a noteworthy observation: AI is trained to choose the word combinations with the highest probability—the most expected, the most statistically likely sequence of words—by assigning probability scores to word combinations. Low-probability sentences are nearly always the ones that astound a reader. “Pain gathered up its things and disappeared into the night.” No algorithm that chooses the likely would ever get there. It’s the unlikely statement that sticks.
Lewis Carroll had a similar understanding, but he lacked the vocabulary to express it. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, then nineteen, was allegedly enthralled with Edwin Landseer’s painting of a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Royal Academy in 1851. Fifteen years later, that enchantment reappeared, folded and transformed, in Alice in Wonderland, along with a smiling cat from a carving in a church where he grew up, a mad hatter inspired by a mercury-poisoned furniture dealer who always wore a top hat, and a stuttering dodo bird based on his own childhood name. The brain stores images and impressions and releases them later in modified forms through accumulation and recombination. That process results in sentences that are memorable. They are not the result of attempting to craft memorable sentences.
The reason Philip Pullman’s passage about two people’s atoms searching for each other after death—atoms that will inhabit birds, flowers, and specks of light in sunbeams until they find each other again—works is that it takes an abstract terror (the end of love, the end of a person) and renders it physically, specifically, with a tenderness that feels almost embarrassing in its openness. In Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro does something more subdued but no less devastating: he holds two people at the top of a field in the wind with nowhere specific to go. The only thing keeping them from getting lost is their clinging to one another. Neither passage is particularly impressive. They are both doing just what is required of them.
After reading enough of this type of writing, one gets the impression that the skill of crafting an unforgettable sentence is more about willingness than technique. This includes the willingness to write the sentence that the brain suggests rather than the one that sounds appropriately literary, to trust an image that seems odd or unlikely, and to use the exact word rather than the approximate one. The fundamental idea is put simply by Benjamin Watkins when discussing the distinction between creating as practice and creating as performance: the work is the work. You release it into the world and allow it to be understood. It’s likely that the person who wrote the sentence that has stuck in someone’s mind for twenty years wasn’t trying to write it. All they were attempting to do was tell the truth about what they observed.
