The Artistic Sentence

Lately, I’ve noticed a curious division in how we discuss writing. On one side, there are the pragmatists who reduce it to formulas and beat sheets, treating narrative as mere engineering. On the other, there are those who romanticize the act itself, as if inspiration alone were sufficient. Both camps miss something essential: good writing operates in the space between structure and transcendence, between the mechanical and the sublime. It is, in its highest form, a work of art.

Consider Frank Herbert’s Dune, which opens not with action but with atmosphere:

“A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.”

Herbert understood that science fiction wasn’t merely about sandworms and spice - it was about constructing entire philosophical ecosystems through prose. His sentences carry weight, each word calibrated like the water discipline of the Fremen themselves. The artistry lies not in florid description but in the precision of his world-building language, the way political intrigue and ecological philosophy merge seamlessly into narrative momentum. Reading Herbert, you get the sense he could make a grocery list sound like a meditation on power and destiny.

The original 1965 cover for Frank Herbert's Dune

Or take Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, where the prose - even in translation - achieves a kind of austere beauty. Liu presents cosmic horror through the lens of historical trauma, his sentences spare and mathematical, yet somehow conveying the vertigo of encountering an indifferent universe. When he describes the sophons as multidimensional protons unfolded into two dimensions, the technical explanation itself becomes poetry. The artistry emerges from the marriage of hard science and existential dread, rendered in prose that never draws attention to itself yet lingers in the mind long after reading. Liu makes you feel small and insignificant in the best possible way.

Then there’s Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose Barsoom novels demonstrate an entirely different variety of artistic achievement. His writing contains none of Herbert’s philosophical density or Liu’s mathematical elegance, yet his breathless, propulsive sentences created entire worlds through sheer imaginative audacity.

“I am a very old man; how old I do not know,”

begins A Princess of Mars, immediately establishing a voice that would carry readers across red Martian deserts for decades. Burroughs understood that art could reside in momentum itself, in the relentless forward drive of adventure married to vivid, sometimes purple, always enthusiastic prose. He wrote like someone was chasing him with a deadline - which, admittedly, they

probably were.

Michael Whelan's ( my favorite Barsoom artist) cover for A Princess of Mars. Fair use

These three writers demonstrate that artistry in writing manifests in wildly different ways. There is no single template, no formula that transforms craft into art. Yet all three share something crucial: intentionality. Every sentence serves not just the plot but the totality of the work’s aesthetic and emotional impact.

This is where I struggle with my own writing, often spectacularly. In my science fiction novel Evidence of Things Unseen, I’m attempting to build a world of cosmic conflict, where the remnants of a defeated evil - the Marauder horde - lurk in the shadows of a planet called Life World. I want to capture the weight of cosmic history like Herbert, maintain narrative momentum like Burroughs, and perhaps achieve one-tenth of Liu’s elegant precision. Instead, I often produce sentences like:

“In the deep, dark, and hidden places of the world, leaderless and unwelcome amongst the civilized peoples of Life World, they needed only a leader to give them purpose and to loose them upon an unsuspecting world once more.”

Tentative cover to Evidence Of Things Unseen, created using Dream AI, with my original painting as reference

The intent is there - I want readers to feel the lurking menace, the gathering storm. What I’ve actually created is a sentence that sounds like it’s auditioning for a heavy metal album cover. “Deep, dark, and hidden places” - because apparently one adjective of ominousness wasn’t enough. I needed the full trilogy. Liu would have conveyed the same menace with something like “They waited in the depths,” and moved on. Burroughs would have already had them charging out of their caves by word twelve. Meanwhile, I’m still setting the atmospheric mood lighting.

And then there's my villain, originally named Bad-Doramu—a name I thought was derived from the Japanese word for bedlam, which turned out to wildly inaccurate. Effective world-building in fiction requires creating strong character names, and I faced challenges in this area. My protagonist, Benjamin Bishop, exists in a world where many characters have names with Japanese or Chinese origins. As an English-speaking writer who has never traveled abroad, I relied on research and assistance from Claude AI and ChatGPT. This journey led me from Bad-Doramu to the more accurate but less intimidating Konton Ran, and finally to the suitably menacing Magatsu Tennō.

 Magatsu-Tennō, The Villain Formerly Known As Bad-Doramu.

Poetry presents similar challenges, though the canvas is more compressed and therefore offers fewer places to hide one’s inadequacies. In my poem about inner fire and yearning, I’m reaching for something primal - the hunger for transformation, for transcendence. “Inside of me, / A fire burns. / A river runs deep, / My soul yearns.”

The imagery here is timeless: fire and water, those fundamental elements that represent passion and depth. You've probably seen this metaphor pop up in tons of poems throughout history. It keeps coming back because it really gets the point across.

A Fire Burns, a visual representation of the the poem of the same name; oil on canvas, 24x30, 2022

The best poetry makes the ancient feel newly minted. When I write “Consuming my mind, / As the flames dance higher,” I’m trying to capture the all-encompassing nature of creative hunger.

Perhaps this is the nature of writing as art - it exists in constant tension with its own aspirations, and occasionally face-plants into its own pretensions. A painting can be judged complete when the artist steps back from the canvas. A sculpture is finished when the final chisel stroke falls. But writing remains endlessly revisable, each word a choice that could have been made differently, each sentence a path not taken haunting the one that remains. It’s like having infinite do-overs in a video game, except the final boss is your own ambition and it never gets easier.

The artistry of writing reveals itself not in achieving perfection - which is fortunate for those of us naming villains after Japanese words we found on Google Translate - but in the ongoing struggle toward it. Herbert’s careful balances, Liu’s precise cosmic dread, Burroughs’ exuberant momentum, and yes, even my own fumbling attempts to build worlds from words alone while occasionally stumbling over my own adjectives. Good writing becomes art when it transcends mere communication and becomes an experience unto itself, when the reader forgets they’re processing symbols on a page and instead feels transported, transformed, haunted by something that lingers beyond the final sentence.

The question isn’t whether writing can be art - clearly it can and is. The question is whether any individual writer, on any given day, with any particular sentence, can close that gap between intention and execution, between the music they hear and the words they place on the page. Some days, the alchemy works, and you feel like Herbert channeling the voice of the universe. Most days, you’re just a person staring at a screen, wondering if “deep, dark, and hidden” really needed to be three separate adjectives, and whether Bad-Doramu sounds sufficiently menacing or just vaguely ridiculous.

But the pursuit itself - that relentless refinement of language toward some half-glimpsed ideal, even when you’re fairly certain you’ve just written the prose equivalent of a faceplant - may be the most artistic act of all. Keep writing, my friends.