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

Only later do we see that the world is not so easily pinned down, and that everything bleeds into everything else. For this we need verbs.

In his book The Crofter and the Laird, the American author John McPhee journeys to Colonsay, the tiny Hebridean island that was the home of his ancestors. Here, he discovers, ‘almost every rise of ground, every beach, field, cliff, gully, cave, and skerry has a name’. The island has only 138 inhabitants, but 1,600 place names.

Our first instinct with words is to label and sort.

The people you love become ghosts inside of you and like this you keep them alive. The artist Robert Montgomery wrote that sentence after a friend from art college was hit by a car and killed.

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:

the earliest epigrams – the earliest sentences – were epitaphs, marking a death. A good sentence on a bleak theme can be oddly cheering.

Stick to time, manner and place and your sentence will never seem cluttered. For you will be relaying an unbroken action in the world of linear time and three-dimensional space within which all of us are stuck. In the early hours I took off my shoes and crept into the spare room. That night I slept fitfully on an inflatable bed. The next day I rose

Amid these gaps, implications sit.

In writing, meaning derives from just four things: syntax, word choice, punctuation and typography. These four things, in that order of importance, must stand in for the unique print of a human voice.