Take a look at two documents handwritten by incarcerated men, nearly eight decades apart:
A Every night when the light goes out I take a long walk and really I do not known how long I walk, because the most of the time I forget myself to go to sleep, and so I continue to walk and I count, one two three four step and turn backward and continue to count, one two three four and so on. But between all this time my mind it is always so full of ideas that one gos and one comes, and the idea of my youth of day I find one of my mostly beautiful remembrance. While I am thinking and walking, frequently I stop to my window sill and through these sad bars and look at the nature into crepuscular of night, and the stars in the beauti blue sky. So last night the stars they was moor bright and the sky it was moor blue that I did have had seen; while I was looking it appear in my mind the idea to think of something of my youth of day and write the idea and send into letter to my good friend Mrs. Jack in first thing in morning. So here where I am right with you, and always I will try to be, yes, because I am study to understand your beautiful language and I know I will love it. And I will hope that one day I could surprise the feel of my gratitude towards all this fierce legion of friends and comrades.
B [I concluded that] the basic physical framework in which physics operated was inadequate and that so called “free energy” devices—devices that would solve our energy problem and end what is now called global warming and allow for the decentralization of most economic activities—could become a reality….
I quickly combined my newly developed corporate contacts, Andrija [Puharich’s] networks and those past “movement” friends able to deal with “magic,” into my Network called by some “the internet before the internet existed.”…
I was soon up to my ears in a multi-pronged intelligence game that is still waiting to be unraveled….
A small subset of the Network soon found itself controlling the “Russian woodpecker”—a signal emanating from Soviet territory that appeared to have mind control properties….
I also began receiving badly translated reports from all over the Soviet Union of psychotronic/mind-control weaponry. Weaponry so chilling that I only shared some of the content, not the actual reports, with two people….
I sat on these reports for more than a year and a half. I spoke…about the issue only after I was warned my life was under threat.
At the time of my arrest, I had received over 200 reports, mailed from all over the world, but obviously originating from behind the Iron Curtain. In the summer of 1977, I planned a fact-finding trip that would take me to many sites behind the Iron Curtain.
I was up to my ears in projects: I was in the middle of doing an interview with “Omni”; I was about to conduct a book length interview with Arthur Koestler that would have covered his entire career; I was in negotiation about acting in a play; the day my first life ended, a friend was coming down from New York to speak to me about helping to write and possibly act in a TV series about the 60’s.
All was not to be. I was busted for a murder I did not commit and all my work on mind control and free energy became history.
“A” is an except from a 1924 letter by Nicola Sacco, an Italian-born anarchist who had been convicted of robbery and murder (wrongly, it is now widely believed) and would be executed in 1927. “B” is from “A Snapshot of My 70s,” a nine-page handwritten essay authored in September 2002 by Ira Einhorn, a Philadelphia counterculture figure who fled the country in 1978 after being arrested for the murder of his girlfriend. Einhorn was eventually apprehended in France, extradited, and convicted of the crime.
Sacco, obviously, had not mastered English spelling, grammar, or vocabulary. Yet his errors not only don’t impede our appreciation of what he has to say, they further it. His phrasing is distinctive and lucid: “I forget myself to go to sleep,” “the idea of my youth of day I find one of my mostly beautiful remembrance,” “the feel of my gratitude towards all this fierce legion of friends and comrades.” His prose is an instance of what writing aspires to but rarely achieves: the expression of a person’s strong feelings in an unexpected, memorable and moving way.
Einhorn is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and, except for one sentence fragment, his passage is “correct.” Yet what a repellent piece of self-important claptrap it is. The clichés (one of them—“up to my ears”—used twice), the raging quotation marks, the jargon and catchphrases, the bathos (“the day my first life ended”), the pathetically self-important puffery (“I was in negotiation about acting in a play”), the empty portentousness, not to mention the science-fiction gibberish: it is amazing how many crimes against writing can be shoved into a couple of hundred words.
Now read a third document, this one a letter to the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, responding to an article in the paper about a controversy over the phrase mentally retarded:
Many people put the mentally retarded and the mentally ill in the same category and this is wrong. Some of the mentally ill can be helped by medication. The mentally retarded person is born with brain damage or had an accident that caused brain damage and, depending on the severity of the damage, he or she may not know right from wrong. However, it does not matter if you are mentally retarded or mentally ill; everyone should be treated with respect.
I’m a 42-year-old man who has cerebral palsy. I am treated differently because I walk a little funny and talk with a speech defect although most people understand me. There are many people who treat me like a child or as if I am mentally ill or mentally retarded. I have to explain that I have goals, dreams and desires like most people do. I try to explain to people how I became disabled and my experiences. I know some people have closed minds and will always put me into some category, but we must not ignore such people because they can spread their prejudice to others.
I don’t know what words should be used to describe the mentally retarded or someone like myself, but regardless of labels, we all need to be treated with respect. To show people respect means to treat people the way you want to be treated.
Many of us may have limitations but we do not want pity or sympathy. I work part-time as a file clerk and I realize I am fortunate to have a job. I want to earn my money and hopefully one day make people aware that the disabled have dreams and desires like anyone else.
Let us say, for the sake of argument, that Nicola Sacco and the man who wrote the letter to the Inquirer both have nobility of soul, whereas Ira Einhorn is devoid of it. It is clear, for each of the three, that character permeates writing. Style is the man himself.
That being the case, who could possibly expect to be trained in the elements, the rudiments, or the accomplishments of a style? The classroom and the textbook are fine for learning to play the guitar, master calculus, hit a topspin backhand, or even to banish murkiness and dangling participles from one’s prose. But style in the true sense wouldn’t appear to be subject to such instruction. This certainly was the opinion of Walter Raleigh, who wrote in 1897:
Style cannot be taught…. The greater part of what is called the teaching of style must always be negative, bad habits may be broken down, old malpractices prohibited…. The formal attempt to impart a good style is like the melancholy task of the teacher of gesture and oratory; some palpable faults are soon corrected; and, for the rest, a few conspicuous mannerisms, a few theatrical postures, not truly expressive, and a high tragical strut, are all that can be imparted. The truth of the old Roman teachers of rhetoric is here witnessed afresh, to be a good orator it is first of all necessary to be a good man. Good style is the greatest of revealers,—it lays bare the soul.
But I’m not about to throw up my hands and leave style to the fates. It is not simply a function of the accident of birth and the good luck of inspiration. Certainly, it can’t be achieved by any kind of step-by-step guide, but following certain strategies and principles will clear a path for its arrival.
The first measures to take, a sort of hacking away of the overgrowth obscuring the path, involve not writing but its complementary activity, reading. Task one is to train the ear to pick up the strains of other writers’ styles. You begin to do this by what could be called active reading: reading widely and slowly, and aloud if possible. Choose some writers whose styles appeal to you and chart their careers, noting how their style changed or evolved in response to the needs of different books and the passage of time. Read up on them to find out who they and critics named as influences; read these authors as well, and see if you can identify points of closeness and divergence. Isolate some paragraphs, sentences or words where your writers sounded least like themselves and most like themselves. Figure out why, and evaluate each passage. You could even give them a grade, A to F. That’s important because one element of active reading is recognizing that although it may seem so in retrospect, no element in a written work is inevitable. It always represents a choice. And even “classic” authors make bad ones.
In the teaching of style, classical rhetoricians were big on imitation. Benjamin Franklin taught himself to become “a tolerable English writer” by attempting to reproduce, from memory, articles he had read in the Spectator; sometimes he would render them in verse, and then turn them back to prose. “By comparing my work afterwards with the original,” he wrote in his Autobiography, “I discovered many faults and amended them.” Imitation is still a staple of traditional training in painting, musical composition, and jazz performance. As a student, saxophonist Mark Turner wrote out John Coltrane’s solos, note by note, and practiced until he mastered them; then he moved on to Joe Henderson, Dexter Gordon, and Sonny Rollins. He explained in an interview with the New York Times that he didn’t fear being intoxicated by one of the players’ style: “By doing it, I knew I would eventually not be interested in it anymore. Also, I noticed that if you looked as someone else who was into Trane, and if you could listen through that person’s ears and mind, it would be a slightly different version. That’s who you are—it’s how you hear.”
How about concentrated imitation as an exercise for a writer starting out now? In the words of the old joke, “It couldn’t hoit.” There’s always a value in experimenting with different ways of doing things: after all, you can never really figure out what your own clothing style is till you’ve tried dozens of outfits on. But I don’t believe imitation is an especially efficient use of a fledgling writer’s time, the way it was for Mark Turner. Where music and painting can be seen as pure or almost pure style, writing always carries with it a big bundle of meaning; separating matter from manner is messy and difficult. For that reason and others, imitation is extremely hard to do well. Moreover, if we accept style as a reflection of character, sensibility, and personality, then mimicking someone else’s will have limited value. As George Lewes wrote in his 1865 book The Principles of Success in Literature, “In our day there are many who imitate Macaulay’s short sentences, iterations, antitheses, geographical and historical illustrations, and eighteenth-century diction, but who accepts them as Macaulays? They cannot seize the secret of his charm, because that charm lies in the felicity of his talent, not in the structure of his sentences; in the fullness of his knowledge, not in the character of his illustrations.” Imagine that you work really, really hard on impersonating Marlon Brando. If you manage eventually to succeed (beyond just screaming out “Hey, Stella!”), what have you got? An ability to sound like Brando, which is great for parties and amateur nights, but not much else.
However, simply as a way of appreciating other writers’ styles, I would suggest some practices traditionally associated with imitation. In the course of writing this book, I have found that because it forces you to slow down, simply copying a passage is a great way—much better than mere reading—of internalizing an author’s sensibility and cadences. (Somerset Maugham says that as part of his self-education as a writer he did this with the prose of Jonathan Swift.) Memorization takes that idea one step farther. Up until the late nineteenth century, when cheap textbooks became widely available, schoolchildren were routinely required to memorize passages of poetry and prose, and in so doing they tasted, chewed, swallowed, and digested style. Give this a try with authors to whom you’re drawn. It will attune you to the literary-speech ratio in their style; it will help you feel their rhythms; it might clue you in to their characteristic clinkers. At the very least, it will help pass the time when you’re waiting for a plane to lift off.
Another helpful exercise is reverse imitation. Go to the first page of this book, take the passages from Hemingway, Dickens, Didion, and Barry, and “translate” them, keeping the meaning but expressing them in a way that sounds nothing like the original. Do the same with other strong stylists. Then go back and note the differences between your version and the original. Sometimes the new version will be flat or matter of fact. In some cases, elements of the writer’s voice will remain—meaning either that you didn’t fully succeed or the bond between what the writer had to say and how he or she expressed it was so strong that it couldn’t completely be broken. (Sometimes your version will strike a note that’s out of the ordinary but not identifiably from the original author. That could possibly be the beginnings of your own sound; in any case, it’s worth investigating.)
All these exercises lead up to the single most important activity for anyone who cares about forging a style: becoming a strong reader of your own work. Only as such can you start to identify, isolate, and extricate the elements of your writing that are not your own, that are in fact counter to the whole enterprise of style. This is what Raleigh meant by the negative teaching of style—a brief phrase but a huge endeavor. It involves picking out and picking off the places where you have used an unintended word or incorrect syntax; where you have been unclear or communicated something other than what you wish; where you have unconsciously aped other writers or merely some attitude or tone that’s floating in the verbal atmosphere; and, most crucially, where you’ve perpetrated clichés.
I define cliché broadly: the use, either unconscious or in an attempt to write colorfully or alluringly, of hackneyed or worn-out words, phrases, or figures of speech. You can certainly get your point across through clichés; indeed, part of their appeal is the way they allow a nearly effortless, paint-by-numbers communication. (Cliché is to meaning as junk food is to nutrition.) But if style, in all its meanings except a superficial ornamentalism, has any importance at all, then clichés are deadly. Their first victim is thought. As Orwell wrote in “Politics and the English Language,” “modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy…. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.”
Other casualties of cliché are precision, sincerity, and elegance. In his “Letter to a Young Clergyman,” Swift warned against “the folly of using old, threadbare phrases, which will often make you go out of your way to find and apply them, are nauseous to rational hearers, and will seldom express your meaning as well as your own natural words.” Schopenhauer characterized this sort of writing as “a vague, enigmatical intermixture of words, current phrases, hackneyed terms, and fashionable expressions,” and said that it reads “like a page printed with very old type.” And (to explain why I spend so much time on them here), clichés are abhorrent to a distinctive style. How can you sound like yourself if you use the expressions of everybody else?
Schopenhauer wrote more than a century ago, and Swift more than three centuries, but the problem hasn’t gone away. Today, much—if not most—writing is animated by cliché. On the principle of looking at most egregious cases first, consider the opening two paragraphs of a magazine article published in the autumn of 2002:
A year has gone by since terrorists punched a hole in the American psyche, and now Bruce Springsteen, out on the road with his new album The Rising, is touring the country like a latter-day tent preacher, delivering his song-stories of post-9/11 redemption as a balm for our wounds. It seems his mission, though he shies from such high-flying notions, is nothing less than the healing of a nation.
So, can he do it? Can a working-class rock-and-roller from Jersey, backed by the aging E Street Band, pick up the broken pieces and help us all feel hopeful again? Time will tell; the tour is in mid-swing. But anyone who has ever experienced the boost you get from listening to one of Springsteen’s soaring songs of salvation—that feeling of resilience and uplift—will put it this way: If any artist can articulate a suitable response to 9/11, it has to be Springsteen. In other words, if the Boss can’t save us, who can?
I don’t mean to single out the underpaid author of this article as some kind of villain. Clichés are slick magazines’ lingua franca, and if the editors of this one had received a submission where every word and turn of phrase was either fresh or straightforward, they probably would have rejected it as unprofessional or illiterate. Even so, this is pretty egregious:
The particular sin of this piece is the use of mixed metaphors, which are, as Orwell said, “a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying.” No one who really cared about his or her prose would perpetrate a formulation like punched a hole in the American psyche; a moment’s reflection reveals that this action is not only impossible but inconceivable.
You may have noted, incidentally, that I didn’t call the healing of a nation a cliché, even though it’s a metaphor and it’s anything but fresh. In fact, it is dead, and that’s what makes it okay (barely). As Orwell noted (his example was iron resolution), when an image has absolutely no juice left, it “revert[s] to being an ordinary word” and loses the sour taste of cliché. The active vocabulary of English is built on these expressions, and it would be a quixotic undertaking to try to write without dead metaphors like fresh, dead, juice, sour taste, built on, and quixotic.
The Springsteen passage has quite enough live but struggling metaphors to illustrate the perniciousness of clichés. In addition to being lazy, imprecise, and undistinguished, each one emits an unpleasant bleat in the reader’s ear. The more of them there are, the louder the cumulative noise; at a certain point the din will drown any merit or distinctiveness the writing might otherwise aspire to.
Clichés are prominent features of everyone’s first draft, whether we write it down or keep it to ourselves. How could they not be? We hear and read them all the time and our brains are filled with them. The key to avoiding them in the second and succeeding drafts is recognizing them and casting them out. That’s a harder job today than it was in Orwell’s time. Then, there were just three kinds of figurative formulations: the truly fresh ones devised by the writer; the dead metaphors; and the ones in between, ill but not dead yet—clichés. Current popular writing has a fourth category: newish words and phrases, sometimes invented and sometimes freshly borrowed from the streets, the business world, hip-hop, sports, TV shows like Seinfeld or The Simpsons, or some occupational lexicon. Popular writers have gotten into the habit of snatching these out of context and applying them in another one, thus livening up their copy. This can make for fun or funny writing, but it represents a risk. The mass media drive the language at such a fast clip today that the sell-by date of these expressions comes very quickly after their introduction. That is, they’re usable only briefly before they turn into clichés. After that, an attentive writer imposes and follows a moratorium on their use, broken only when they are pushing daisies.
It was in 1997, I believe, that writer David Simon introduced me to back in the day, which he had heard in African-American neighborhoods of Baltimore while researching his book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. Simon said (and I agreed) that it was a wonderful phrase, far more expressive than phrases from which it was clearly derived, back then and in the old days. In 1997 and even for a year or so after that, a journalist or critic could use the expression with the expectation that it would inject the text with a jolt of street energy and the small thrill of mixing idioms. Ever since, however, back in the day has been a cliché, with the slightly pathetic aura of an aging hipster trying too hard. I do not imagine that it will be usable any time soon.
A generalization: All good writers are sensitive to clichés and endeavor to avoid them. However, some writers are more sensitive than others, or are sensitive to different clichés or kinds of clichés. Meghan Daum says she will never commit…er…(a fake vocalism to indicate hesitation or waffling) or don’t go there to print. James Wolcott mentions my bad (meaning, “that was my fault”) as a borrowing from street lingo that makes his skin crawl; he says, “I would rather use older slang that’s still in circulation.” The variation is one element of the distinctiveness of style. Whereas a true hack will still be using the Seinfeldian yadda yadda yadda or the Gulf War’s mother of all…years after they’ve gone stale, some of the best slick magazine writers are distinguished by their finely tuned radar for new words and phrases; you get the feeling of them unwrapping each one with delight. (The price they pay is that their stuff has the same life span as a filet of perch.) By contrast, when Wolcott uses a phrase like creeped out in a 2003 piece, it’s a bit like a jazz musician flirting with the beat by playing just a bit behind it. In this environment, anyone who’s meticulous about avoiding all vogue words and catch phrases will, ipso facto, stand out. Greil Marcus says:
I’ve learned that one thing a writer has to do is be alive to clichés, to be as fast as you can. When you hear a neologism, that can poison discourse. It can make you sound cool for a minute but stupid for eternity. When you find yourself saying something like weapons grade or take it to the next level, it seems to be saying something, but it isn’t. It’s a substitute for what you really want to say.
Clichés are relatively less of a danger for some writers. This may be because they have an innate ability to express themselves precisely or originally, or because they are culturally cloistered, so that few fashionable phrases intrude on their internal discourse. (Bill Bryson doesn’t watch television, listen to the radio [except for Red Sox games], surf the Internet, or even converse very much to anyone outside his family.) I can think of only one writer who makes a virtue of clichés. That is Andrei Codrescu, who, in his essays and National Public Radio commentaries, will take a vogue or slightly outmoded expression and roll it around on his tongue (metaphorically while writing, literally while commentating), the better to savor it. His pieces are studded with the likes of guy, awesome, au contraire, the average Joe, and give me a break. Codrescu gets away with this—indeed, it’s one of the charms of his style—possibly because he is a native of Transylvania and we sense that he is not a cliché victim but is a true connoisseur of the oddities and charms of American English.
Revision is all about reading, and you need to be a good reader to hear your own clichés and the other ill-advised compositional decisions you’ve made. An aid to this kind of close attention, as the metaphor in the previous sentence suggests and as I’ve repeatedly stressed, is reading aloud. Another helpful self-monitoring drill is to send yourself a copy of all your e-mails that go out to others: as with listening to your own voice on tape, opening and reading your messages can help you “overhear” yourself, the false notes and the true ones. Some of them will go right by you, and so I would recommend finding a writing partner, someone who is also interested in experimenting with style. Better yet, find two. Each of you can be a responsive reader for the others’ work. Don’t give each other notes about whether your writing “works,” whether your themes are valid, your characters believable, or even whether your voice is mellifluous. Those things are all important, and it’s undoubtedly helpful to get feedback about them—but when style is the issue, they change the subject. Instead, when looking at the other person’s stuff, focus on sentences, or phrases, or words. Where the writing seems tired or clichéd, where the word used means something other than what was intended, where the phrasing is awkward, wordy or grammatically questionable, mark it, and suggest an alternative.
Eventually, you’ll become more attentive to the places where your language is flat or dead—where you sound like Kurt Vonnegut’s Philboyd Studge. I predict they will congregate around the places where you’re not entirely sure what you want to say. Journalists’ worst writing comes at points when they haven’t done enough reporting and have to fudge or generalize; critics’ and essayists’ when they haven’t fully worked out their point or are parroting someone else’s; novelists’ when they haven’t done the imaginative work necessary to make types and stock situations into real people doing real things. Hemingway offered some good advice in Death in the Afternoon: “Write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.”
This work, the clearing of brush to create a walkable path, is never-ending for a writer. But at some point you will become more efficient at the job. The wrong notes will be fewer, and it will be easier to replace them with something better. And you will find that your writing is quiet—without the bleat of clichés, the syrupy strings of bathos, the discordant clamor of infelicity. The quiet is important. Absent all that interference, you can begin to appreciate, for the first time, the multiplicity of styles: how many different ways one can express a fact or idea, and how each one nudges the meaning in a slightly different direction.
The Dutch scholar Erasmus showed his students 150 different ways of phrasing a Latin sentence meaning, “Your letter has delighted me very much.” In their book Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, Edward Corbett and Robert Connors translate some of the better reworkings as follows: “Your epistle has cheered me greatly.” “Your note has been the occasion of unusual pleasure for me.” “When your letter came, I was seized with an extraordinary pleasure.” “What you wrote to me was most delightful.” “On reading your letter, I was filled with joy.” “Your letter provided me with no little pleasure.”
A variation on the exercise would be useful for writers finding their way today, first of all, to remind them of the multitude of choices they have in expressing even a simple thought, and what a different connotation each of the choices provides. As the examples from Erasmus indicate, word choice is always up for grabs (letter, epistle, note, what you wrote me), and the thesaurus exists to show the array you have to choose from. Choosing a word is a bracing task. There are shades of difference between ostensible synonyms; unless you are being ironic, you don’t want to refer to a “note” when what you received was 27 pages long. Terms such as missive and epistle also run additional risks: they can make it seem that you’re putting on airs and/or desperately trying to avoid repeating the word letter (what Fowler called “elegant variation”). Occasionally, when you are trying on words for size, hunting around for the mot juste, you will find one that in addition to meaning precisely what you want to say, also seems, for some odd reason, to fit exceedingly well. Note it somewhere; it is an example of your style.
The Erasmus sentence is a good drill because it expresses an emotion and deals with the relationship between two people: fertile ground for style. When you really mean and deeply feel what you are saying, you will be more likely to express yourself in a distinctive and personal rather than a generic way. In his book English Prose Style, Herbert Read went so far as to say, “The only thing that is indispensable for the possession of a good style is personal sincerity.” The territory of feeling lends itself to figures of speech, normally inappropriate for statements of facts unless the facts are extraordinary. You can experiment with the various effects provided by litotes (“I was not displeased”), hyperbole (“Getting your letter made me the happiest man in the world”), irony (“it was definitely the low point of my week”), metaphor (“it was a tonic”), simile (“it made me as happy as a slug on a sunny rock”), and many more. Simplicity is a style and an attitude too. Depending on who you are, who the letter-writer is, and where your relationship stands, “Your letter made me smile” could be a straightforward statement of fact or an expression of emotion so powerful that it surpasses all embellishment. On the other hand, “I was pleased to get your letter” bespeaks a chilly formality that probably augurs difficult times between the two of you.
As you move on to longer writing projects of all kinds, you’ll find that every sentence offers such a range of decisions about diction and figuration. Once those have been made, another cluster of decisions opens up: paragraph length, sentence length, use of contractions, word order, placement of commas. These would appear to be purely technical, maybe even trivial, but in fact, each choice makes a distinct change in the sound of the prose. If you’ve been successful in your reading work, you’ll start to discern which choices are suitable and pleasing, and which ones are banal and out of place. Some of your decisions will seem to add extra meaning to the surface meaning of the words, or just seem to fit especially well. Pay special attention to these. They are examples of your style. When you were starting out, they would have been drowned out by all the other noises your writing was making. Now, in the relative quiet, they sing.
Often, these will be the very places your writing partners marked with a red pen. That’s why you should always take someone else’s comments as food for thought, not gospel. Jean Cocteau said, “Listen carefully to the first criticisms made of your work. Note what it is about your work that critics don’t like—then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.” As Elizabeth McCracken points out, a prudent writer will prune as well as cultivate, or else her or his work will be overgrown with the same cadences, the same words, the same irony or (in my case) rampaging parentheses.
One last exercise. Take an hour (could be a little more, could be a little less) and write a page or so about your father or your mother. Or you could tackle any other subject, as long as you know a lot about it and it means a lot to you. Don’t worry about making it an essay with a beginning, middle and end; just concentrate on imparting some true things. Once you’ve got your page down, transform it, over the course of a week or so. Specifically, take it to extremes, in multiple versions. Try it with no contractions and with contractions at every possible opportunity; with short sentences and complex ones; with one-sentence paragraphs and all in one paragraph; with short Anglo-Saxon words and with long Latinate ones; with literal, straightforward language and with as many metaphors, similes, and rhetorical questions, as much irony and hyperbole and alliteration, as you can pack in. Then experiment a little with compression and slackness. Do one version that’s as long as you can reasonably make it and another that’s as short as possible, each time trying to impart the same sense.
When you’re done, you’ll have a lot of really bad stuff. But you’ll also have some useful lessons, the first being that no good style, whether relatively anonymous or relatively distinctive, is uniform. It’s always going to be a mix of elements, and the key to the style is in the proportion. You’ll also have a better feel for the proportions that work best and feel best for you: your style. The most important lesson is that no draft is sacrosanct. Each version you attempt will have some words or phrasing that sounds silly but also at least one revelation: an inadvertent combination of words that expresses, satisfyingly, something you didn’t know you knew. Part of the magic of writing is the sense of discovery: that you’re finding out what you want to say in the process of saying it. The writers who offer up the most such moments (which readers can sense, even if they might not be able to articulate it) are the ones with the most distinctive styles. The ones where sentence B can be predicted from sentence A, sentence C from sentence B, and so on, sound prepackaged and bland.
Walter Raleigh thought that because style revealed the soul, it couldn’t be taught. You’d probably reach the same conclusion if you thought stylistic distinctiveness signified originality. Few people view the world in a truly singular way, and consequently, it would seem, the best most people can hope for would be a transparent, generic prose style. But that displays a rather harsh and limiting view of human potential. People can change and grow, certainly; then why can’t style develop along with them? Poet Donald Hall observed, “A writer of bad prose, to become a writer of good prose, must alter his character. He does not have to become good in terms of conventional morality, but he must become honest in the expression of himself, which means that he must know himself…. The style is the man, and the man can change himself by changing his style.”
John Lukacs says:
I’m convinced that style is like taste. That is a very interesting thing, because taste itself, the very existence of taste, denies Descartes’s division of the world into subject and object. If style were purely subjective, then it would be deterministic: I write this way because it’s the way I am—I cannot do otherwise. But that’s not true. Style and taste are also a matter of participation, of deciding what one will like and how one will write. Style begins the way fashion begins: somebody admires how the other man dresses and adapts it for himself.
Self-editing as therapy and personal growth: it is not so kooky an idea. Attention to your prose can help you see the places where language helps you to obfuscate or prevaricate or bluster, to indulge in laziness, to hide behind the conventional wisdom and the conventional stupidity. It can also illuminate the moments when your words let you consort, for a minute, with truth and beauty. Doesn’t it make sense that, over the course of a life or a career, you would seek to do less of the first and more of the second? Try hard enough, and your efforts will bear fruit. Spend enough time on the whole project, and one day you are looking at a different person in the mirror.
A personal example: I have a thing for irony. Early on, I read my Hemingway, my Stephen Crane, my Chandler, my Vonnegut, my Didion. I was intoxicated by the less-is-more of these writers, the tough-guy terseness and faux-naïf coyness, the sense of deliberately simple language as expression of and sometimes balm for a hurt too deep for words. But I also sensed that this attraction was potentially fatal. That is, I knew that I had it in me to abuse the irony: to imply more than I knew, to claim more than I had earned. These concerns, obviously, aren’t only about putting words together. What you think you know, what you really know, what your self-presentation says about what you know: if there are more telling ethical issues in the conduct of a life, I don’t know what they are.
For 30 years there has been a tension in my writing, sometimes close to the surface, sometimes pretty far beneath it, between the ironic urge and what you might call the explanatory imperative: laying all my cards on the table. Go too far in one direction (I always feel) and the writing becomes smoke and mirrors; go too far in the other and it gets overearnest, literal, and boring. The tug-of-war between the two carries over from the writing to life, and then goes back again.
I feel this tension, if not in every sentence, then at least in every paragraph I write. However, even very good readers of my work might never be aware of it at all. And that brings me to the very last point I’ll make about style. Give any literate citizen a blindfold test with a passage from Hemingway and he or she will be able to name the author, guaranteed. Give the same person a passage from Yagoda and a blank will be drawn, guaranteed. The Hemingway style is loud and audible to everyone; the Yagoda style is faint and audible only to Yagoda himself (and maybe a few close friends, relatives, and business associates). But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a style, or that I’m not pretty attached to it.
Anyone who puts pen to paper can have a prose style. In almost every case, that style will be quiet, sometimes so quiet as to be detectable only by you, the writer. In the quiet, you can listen to your sound in various manifestations; then you can start to shape it and develop it. That project can last as long as you keep writing, and it never gets old.