I remember when I first began writing, I would spend five or six hours on two paragraphs, and at the end of the day, not only were the paragraphs pretty terrible, but I was exhausted by the effort.
When I am on holiday, I spend hours frolicking in the waves, looking at starfish through a mask and reading the same paragraph of a terrible thriller for hours.
Heading each chapter is a paragraph charting the terrible progress of the disease in a real family, and making the connection between the death of the cell and the death of the self.The appealing idea that your you-ness is bound up with your memory runs up against the difficulty that memory is not reliable.
In her peevishly hilarious third novel, Karen Karbo throws down the gauntlet in her opening paragraph: "I am a terrible mother.
The U.S. News account said in its second paragraph, "There is little doubt that something terrible did happen there, in the confusion of war some refugees were shot by American soldiers".
"That's a terrible one," she said, pointing to one of the paragraphs.
Cliffe's analysis (third paragraph from the end) implies that May has made a terrible mistake.
It's not terrible, it's just kind of whatevs, like writing a five-paragraph essay defending your thesis that "cereal is a food".
Joel Sternfeld's "On This Site" (1996) comprises photographs of innocuous places; the facing paragraphs of text, also by the photographer, set out the terrible things that happened at each of these unmarked sites.
Kaplan can be a terrible storyteller, maddeningly proleptic, interrupting marriages to go back to engagements, topic-sentencing a paragraph with one person's illness and devoting all the rest of it to another's giving birth.
But a few paragraphs of her work will show any reasonable mind she understands the terrible depths of conflict and loss.
