I’m often asked what my favorite book is, and I don’t know how to answer that question. There are too many books I’ve loved and that have loved me back throughout my life. Instead, I tend to answer this question with something I do know: When I think about perfection, I think about the first page of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. I don’t care if that sounds cliché.
I’ve read that page out loud to many people to demonstrate the physical sensation of good syntax. I’d like you to read the following out loud (or at least silently, but very deliberately):
It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.
Do you feel the sentences flaking and bursting like a charred marshmallow? Do you feel your heart where it sits in your chest?
Bradbury goes and goes and goes, pulling us gently through the lush rhythm of his sentences. And here’s where I say: Don’t neglect syntax.
Sentences are a book’s foundation. Even if the plot is clever and complex and original, the book will crumble when you inspect the foundation and find heedless or purely perfunctory sentences. I want to read books that are intentional at every level, from the overarching structure all the way down to the decision to introduce a comma splice in place of a semicolon because it serves the sentence’s movement better. I want to run my fingers along the topography of a purposeful sentence. I want to eat a sentence and feel it at once break apart softly and crunch with crystals of sugar.
Learn grammar rules so you can break them. Play. Refine. Play some more. Draft with excessive, blooming flourish, then prune the rosebushes. Write sentences with textures that make the back of your brain thrum with an unnamable gratification. Build your poems, stories, scenes, chapters out of diamonds so that the whole book shimmers prismatic in the light.
—Morissa Young, editor, Milkweed Editions