The Meaningful Sentence

When a writer has, as I have, an irrational fear of writing without saying something worth saying or what I call prattlephobia, it is the focus of the writing exercise to create meaningful sentences. If that focus puzzles the reader, I strongly recommend Ludwig Wittgenstein's work on the logic of language and meaning in his 'Philosophical Investigations'. Otherwise, please read on.
What is a meaningful sentence? It is an approximate solution to a problem in combining idea, lexicon, and syntax. If there is insufficient idea, it is a failed solution. It does not say anything. If the dictates of the market requires a lexicon insufficient to express the nuance of what the writer is saying, it is a failed solution. It does not say enough. If the writer lacks the talent and skill to manage the manipulation of syntax, it is a failed solution. It does not communicate anything.
However one may excuse solution failures in lexicon and syntax, there is no excuse for a sentence not saying anything. If the writer has nothing to say, don't write. Read and maybe an idea will germinate. The craft of writing consists, as far as I am concerned, in creating meaningful sentences that build meaningful stories.

The Art of Saying Something Worth Saying

I'm going to begin this blog by saying that fiction is not well suited to serious thought as such. I can think of very few exceptions to this observation, Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame in which he inserts a brilliant essay on architecture, culture, and technology in media res being one of them. He manages to do this with style and success, but as far as I am concerned the exceptions prove the rule. I tried to include thoughtful digressions in my novella, 'Chances', with notably poor results.
While it is possible to have reservations about nonfiction, historians spinning facts, theory laden volumes of science, fiction is just fiction. It is a vignette frozen in time of a specific state of imagination and not a vehicle for polemics. My working definition is that legitimate fiction is a valuable vision of the possible which entertains. It is an examination and hypothesis of human conditions of existence but it should not be approached with grandiose personal narratives of the genius of the author as thinker. Genius in fiction lies in elegant, evocative sentences that say something worth saying about human beings. Fiction is, after all, the most humane of written works.

A Sketch is Not a Blueprint.

When I plan a work I want a free-form vehicle to take the story from conflict to resolution. What I do not want is a rigid structure that micromanages my prose. While the romantic image of a novelist just sitting down at a typewriter and tapping out the Great American Novel is amusing indeed, there does, if the planning is done correctly, come such a moment when one simply 'Writes'. That is the objective of proper planning.
To get to that point of 'Writing', I begin by sketching paragraph topics, scene by scene, with a sense of chapter endings and beginnings. I then develop these topics into full paragraphs and those paragraphs into pages of content draft. By doing it this way, I maximize my creativity in the moment while maintaining my narrative structure, while making sense. This content draft is the underlying structure of the book which I then transform, by 'Writing', into a rough draft of some literary merit, of some style.
A novel is a complex and difficult form but it does reduce at some point of experience to a magic mix of what the author said and how they said it. Sketching a work allows that magic to happen. Blueprinting it denies such possibility.

Method and Meaning

How one writes ultimately depends on one's predispositions and abilities. I prefer a loose structure to my writing. I may be and, in fact, am guilty of overthink but I never overplan. That destroys spontaneity and, to me, being creative in the moment defines the practice of meaningful storytelling. I could comprehensively outline a competent story with a valuable moral but, then, in writing it I would be filling in the blanks. Some writers can pull that off with style. I cannot. I like to turn the English language loose and go where it leads me. That results in elegant sentences that say something and that is my concept of excellence.
Next week I will detail how I plan a work to maximize my creativity.