Last Thursday I stayed late at work, making small progress on various small projects until just before 7:00, when I closed my laptop and took the elevator to the seventh floor, joining a small but enthusiastic audience in one of the classrooms. We were there to listen to Geist editor Stephen Osborne speak on “Learning the Music of the English Sentence”.

I first met Stephen many years ago as a student in a course that he was co-teaching with book designer Barbara Hodgson. I knew of his background as a publisher and editor but I had not thought of him as a writer at that time, and learned, in fact, on Thursday, that he had not begun to write until 1987. Short essays appeared from time to time in Geist, where he also wrote regularly on photography using the pseudonym of Mandelbrot. A selection of these “nonfiction narratives” appeared in Stephen’s 1998 book Ice and Fire, and it was while reading them collectively that I was struck by how well he wrote, and began to pay more close attention to his style. I wanted to see if I could figure out just how he achieved the effect he did.

The university classroom setting, and the verb — “Learning” — which featured in Thursday’s stated topic, each contributed to a general feeling that we were all there as acolytes. Directly in front of me local poet Brad Cran was fiddling with his mini-disk recorder; I had my Waterman ballpoint pen at the ready and a notebook opened to a blank page, and as the talk progressed the page accumulated a few rapidly-scrawled notes. I can testify that all these notes made perfect sense to me at the time, and the evident illegibility of those same notes today I take as proof that Stephen’s thoughts were coming at me so thick and fast that my pen had difficulty keeping pace. The result is a collage of cryptic insights and advice on the writerly arts, and I herewith offer a selection by way of recreating the atmosphere:

• verbs the muscles
• naming not describing; visceral not visual
• Joan Didion in Slouching; “that book more than any other has informed my writing”
• Robert Louis Stevenson: “death to the optic nerve”, in a letter to Henry James

At several points Stephen encouraged writers to imitate the writers they admire, although “imitate” was not the verb he used. His own model writers had been Samuel Johnson and Joan Didion, and to these he had later added Walter Benjamin and José Saramago (both in translation). He spoke of how he had, on first encountering Joan Didion’s work in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, stopped reading in admiration, and then reread the texts more closely in an attempt to figure out just how she wrote the way she did. A handout provided us with an example of Didion’s writing and we followed along as Stephen read one sentence from it aloud:

When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again.

“You see,” he said, “she did something that is quite remarkable in that sentence; listen.”

And he proceded to reread the sentence from the beginning, stopping after the phrase “I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal”.

“I would have put a period there,” Stephen Osborne said, “but Didion didn’t: she remembers the dress she was wearing, and how she felt about it on arrival at the Idlewild temporary terminal. Notice how she even repeats that phrase; as writers we are often told never to repeat ourselves. But it works here. And most people would have put a period there, feeling that the thought was finished, but she puts a comma. And then she waits.”

“And even more of that memory comes back: the warm air, the scent of mildew. And another comma. And in fact the real power of that sentence — the heart of the entire paragraph and maybe of the piece itself — comes at the end: the realization that ‘it would never be quite the same again…’”

“And she might never have come to that insight if she hadn’t put that comma there and waited.”