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"  &amp;quot;Who&amp;#039;s this?&amp;quot; Why he wrote the last line: A phone call interrupts a marital argument so intense that Tom, who answers, doesn&amp;#039;t comprehend the name on the caller I.D. You&amp;#039;ve never heard the phrase &amp;quot;Write each sentence like it&amp;#039;s your last,&amp;quot; but you probably recognize it as a play on &amp;quot;Live each day like it&amp;#039;s your last.&amp;quot; Together, these two pieces of advice say that you should no more spend your limited time on this earth writing badly than living badly. That there&amp;#039;s no margin for error. Because death is often closer than it seems -- poets promise that it will kindly stop for you if you don&amp;#039;t stop for it, etc -- you need to carpe diem your syntax and seconds in order to look back at the end on what you&amp;#039;ve done with satisfaction. Which is impossible. If you knew that yesterday were your last, for example, would you have woken up to an alarm clock, slouched to work, eaten lunch standing up, declined a third happy hour drink, and been asleep by ten? No. You would have crammed as much acrobatic sex, slow food dining, base jumping, acrobatic sex positions, Pamplona bull running, poker playing, club hopping, fine liquor imbibing, and acrobatic sex into those twenty-four hours as possible before going out in a blaze of hyperkinetic glory. Maybe you&amp;#039;d even have fit in more acrobatic sex. The point is, your yesterday was not a lesson in raw vitality, and that&amp;#039;s okay. It doesn&amp;#039;t mean you&amp;#039;ve sold out or turned into the drone you swore as a teenager never to become. It simply means that life is full of quotidian moments that ideally will lead to and then accentuate the transcendent ones. In some ways writing is like life. Just as you&amp;#039;d feel regret at the close of a typical workday to learn that that was the end, I&amp;#039;d be sad to step in front of a moving bus and know that &amp;quot;Who&amp;#039;s this?&amp;quot; was my final sentence. It&amp;#039;s got nothing: no great metaphors or thrilling revelations or keen observations on humanity in all its flash and filigree. It&amp;#039;s bland. It&amp;#039;s functional. It&amp;#039;s eating lunch standing up. Without it, though, I won&amp;#039;t be able to reach the surprising and worthwhile prose -- the cornea-bending sentences that allow readers to see farther than would otherwise be possible -- that I hope will justify and comprise the essence of my third novel.  &amp;quot;Who&amp;#039;s this?&amp;quot; appears in &amp;quot;Ambleside,&amp;quot; the story of a couple who trade their city apartment for a monthlong stay at a cottage in a small lakeside town, where they go to try to save their marriage. Tom and Amber have been together five years, and they&amp;#039;ve built up a host of problems related to money, sex, emotional dependency, drugs, and other modern-love pitfalls, which they hope but don&amp;#039;t expect to address and overcome. Soon after their arrival in Ambleside, however, they discover something sinister about the town that overshadows their personal problems and shifts their focus from themselves to what&amp;#039;s going on outside.  Ambleside&amp;#039;s Hollywood pitch would go something like this: it&amp;#039;s a cross between Ingmar Bergman&amp;#039;s Scenes from a Marriage and Franz Kafka&amp;#039;s In the Penal Colony. I put it in these terms to both show why novels don&amp;#039;t get Hollywood pitches (Ingmar Who? &amp;quot;In the What Colony?&amp;quot;) and to say that this project needs as much help from language as it can get, that a tightly constructed, well-crafted book full of kindness and cruelty and profundity and superficiality and weirdness and normalcy can only happen through layers of apposite sentences working diligently.  In other words, &amp;quot;Who&amp;#039;s this?&amp;quot; is not a result of laziness. Although I said that writing and life are similar, in one important respect they&amp;#039;re not. Whereas no one expects to relive and refine a moment once it&amp;#039;s passed, every writer anticipates going back to tinker with and improve their prose many times before it&amp;#039;s published. While setting down &amp;quot;Who&amp;#039;s this?&amp;quot;, therefore, I took comfort in the idea that it could be replaced later when mood or inspiration struck. Revision is, after all, how mediocre work emerges unrecognizable from its chrysalis. And yet I&amp;#039;ll probably leave &amp;quot;Who&amp;#039;s this?&amp;quot; alone because -- and here is where writing and life come back into sync -- not all sentences can or should shine with equal luster. Some are diamonds and some are quartzite. Even Marcel Proust, one of the most dazzling novelists of the last century, wrote ordinary prose on occasion (this sentence can be found on page 193 of the second volume of his In Search of Lost Time: &amp;quot;He was right.&amp;quot;) This is not to say that literature should reside in a split-level house in a suburb with good schools and a low crime-rate, or that you should put off for one more day doing whatever brings you joy; fiction, like life, should frighten and elate and astound you. But literature, like life, will sometimes include unheroic but necessary moments, sentences that in their plain utility take you forward in the story and provide the contrast by which phrases of greater lyrical power can make their full impact. Consider this effort that comes just before my current last-line: &amp;quot;He had to persuade her that what she believed -- if indeed she believed what she&amp;#039;d just said and wasn&amp;#039;t merely drawn to the novelty of the idea or blindly guessing or trying to hurt him at this crucial juncture in order to make herself feel better or exact revenge for past offenses or discourage him from arguing that they stay for the rest of the month -- was essentially false, that he did love her.&amp;quot; While not tombstone-worthy, it involves more dexterity than &amp;quot;Who&amp;#039;s this?&amp;quot; and hints that future sentences will reward the time and effort of whoever reaches them.  When William Blake wrote that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, he had in mind the few people who won&amp;#039;t be worn out or destroyed by the journey. For everyone else, fiction and life are balancing acts, constant calibrations that will, provided we remain open to them, entertain and edify us before they&amp;#039;re over.  So remember the next time you read a humdrum sentence or go to bed early that what comes next in your book or your life might not be just another inch of dull thread, depressingly familiar before it&amp;#039;s even encountered. It could instead unspool quickly and beautifully and truthfully into the whole breathtaking spectrum. About the author: Josh Emmons is the author of The Loss of Leon Meed and the forthcoming Prescription for a Superior Existence, out in June from Scribner. He lives in Philadelphia. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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