How Do You Make Your Sentences Sing?

I swear this is the last draft for a while.

Hi friends.

I’m back in New Orleans after a few weeks away, and the weather is all-consuming. I’ve been making lots of plans for strolls with friends (and my dog) through the neighborhood. Everything starts after 6 pm. Although yesterday I talked to an old-timer in the neighborhood who was sitting on his porch and he said he didn’t even bother to go out until after 7:30. “Used to be seven,” he said wistfully. My dog can’t wait till 7:30, I thought. So six it is.

I read about how European summers have been altered now, too, by the heat, and it made me think about how the ideas of the high season and the low season will soon enough be flipped on their heads. One day we will wake up and January will be July.

I’m still dreaming of the pleasant weather of Los Angeles, though, and my time there with my friends. When you visit your faraway accountability partner in person and get to talk real-time, some new ideas can spark. As I was plotting my next steps with my work with Priyanka, I mentioned that I planned on going through each sentence of my draft to make sure they worked.

This did not sound like a good time to Priyanka—she writes first person memoir, instinctively, and appreciates a good line edit down the road. (Also her first drafts come out stunningly clean.) But this sounded absolutely like fun to me, the fiction writer, who likes a little side of agony with her process.

Later on I was thinking about why, for me, it was important and helpful (and enjoyable!) to go through each sentence after the fact.