Friday, March 04, 2011

Can creative writing be taught on the sentence level?

After reading about (not actually reading) Stanley Fish's new book on sentences, as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates's lovely discussions of Jane Austen's sentences, I am wondering: Can creative writing be taught on the sentence level? Could there be a class (or, say, a series on an obscure blog) that dissects literature sentence by sentence, in order to improve students' (or fellow writers') own writing?

I've never taken a creative writing class that dove that deep, except on occasion. It seems one ends up talking mostly about "flow," believability, characterization, plot, and structure on a higher level. But can writers be taught, through example, to craft better sentences, word by painstaking word?

I'm rushed today, but intend to think about this more...

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