Trying to write something and can’t get started? Started, but stuck? Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times editorial board member and author of the beautiful column and book, The Rural Life, has been there. Many times. His Several Short Sentences about Writing (Vintage, $15) is an eminently sensible guide for helping writers—the novice as well as the practiced—steer around the blockages and back to that elusive, flowing prose (but remember, flow “doesn’t describe the act of writing. It describes the effect of writing”).This practical and inspiring distillation of a master wordsmith’s experience with prose is also a fascinating dip-into miscellany for anyone interested in language and thinking. As valuable for what it says as for how it says it, Klinkenborg’s compendium of brief, axiomatic statements is unfailingly lucid, eloquent, wise, and useful, starting with the Prologue’s reminder that in this craft, “there are no rules, only experiments.”