THE MYSTERIES OF STYLE
When I embarked on this self-directed course in fiction writing, I vowed not to duck the subject of style. In my brief time as a university student, I noticed that English professors generally avoided discussions of literary style, which amazed me then. How could you talk about James Joyce’s Ulysses or Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers or Alice Munro’s works without talking about that which sets them apart from one another? But my professors could and did. Their reason may have been that these were not courses in writing, or it might have been that a writer’s style is a hard thing to talk about. Or maybe it’s easy enough to talk about but not so easy to make sense of. Style is fundamental to the craft of fiction so it will be talked of here.
♦♦♦ To Be Influenced by the Style of Others—Good Thing!
Something I have heard aspiring writers say that makes me shake my head in wonder is that they don’t read much because they don’t want to be influenced. They don’t want their pure writing voice to be sullied. We should all hope to be so sullied.
Of all the ways to learn the craft of fiction, the greatest has to be reading. I don’t even mean a concerted, targeted study of the great books. I mean reading in the normal sense, and the silent unconscious absorption of rhythm, tone, the ways of saying things that naturally occurs. I mean encountering words in a variety of contexts and discovering their connotations. This silent learning, filtered through ourselves, forms the base from which we will write—if we’re lucky. None of us is smart enough or long-lived enough to replace the history of the development of literature with a solo intellectual act. To say you can do so is hubris and self-deception of a very high order. We have been surrounded by literature and its sounds since birth, whether anybody read to us or not, whether we read or not. The phrases of literature are everywhere, and we absorb them as surely as we absorb our parents’ ways of speaking and the slang of our generation.
Beyond the unconscious absorption of styles from reading, I believe writers should consciously explore, imitate, and experiment with style. Why not? It’s what painters do when trying to become painters, and they don’t apologize for it. Try styles on like you would clothes, as part of how you acquire a facility in writing. Maybe it sounds bookish and nerdy, but that was one of my forms of play as a teenager. On a trip through the Rockies with my parents, a friend and I ignored the mountains in favour of writing naughty little paragraphs and dialogues, trying to one-up one another in the styles of our favourite authors. It was play, but it was part of how I went beyond silent understanding of how these writers wrote to some demonstration of their techniques on paper.
The natural question is: “What if. instead of writing like me, I wind up writing like the author I admire?” What if I do and cannot stop?”
This happens. I won’t deny it. It happened to me for a good part of my twenties when I was under the spell of J.P. Donleavy. It was a pleasant-enough spell to be under, but it didn’t advance my writing—or did it?” I undoubtedly learned some things I still use today. But as a dominating force in my writing, it was a phase, and it went away.
Eventually after being stuffed with the styles of other writers for a decade, my style began to emerge. But all the experimentation under the thrall of others, and the learning of technique, was what allowed me to find my voice. If you don’t have a facility with language, you cannot express your voice. You lack the tools.
It seems possible as well that if you arrive at your voice and style early, based on too little experience of literature and the world, it might not be as fine a voice or style as you might achieve if you gave yourself more time to absorb and evolve. This is a big generalization. If it seems to criticize those who publish early, then I need to add a sentence or two. Achievement isn’t the point so much as stasis. If early achievement were to make a writer stop evolving, on the assumption that he or she has found a voice and it is the best voice, then that would be too bad. A person keeps changing throughout life, so why shouldn’t literary style and voice change? Early success is wonderful, but it shouldn’t be allowed to prevent development and improvement.
A fact worth remembering is that, even if you are writing under the influence of the styles of others, it doesn’t mean that you won’t publish. It doesn’t mean that editors will sniff out the influence and toss you aside. I published a novel during my J.P. Donleavy period, and the only critic to comment on any stylistic similarity was one I had confessed to in advance. Either I was doing it so badly that it wasn’t noticeable, or the critics of that day weren’t as well read as they should have been.
As is probably obvious by now, I consider development of voice and style to be a lifelong business. I love to read early books by authors I admire. Their styles are usually there in some emerging way, as if visible at a depth through water. Through a series of books or stories, those styles attach more and more to themselves. They rise, clarify, and surface. Then they change to a different pool altogether, rise and surface again.
♦♦♦ What Is Style?
One way of answering this question is to say that style is what differentiates one writer from another. Someone in the business of analyzing literature might also declare it to be that which is similar among writers. Personally, I believe that the style of a work should be as much a function of the story or book, and especially of the characters, as it is a function of the author. Style arises out of the self, as illuminated by the world and other writing styles. It is profoundly cultural as well as personal. But the character in the story also has a culture, experience, and influences, which are likely not identical to those of the writer. Characters should have their say in the style by which they are represented.
A style is made up of a long list of things, and this chapter will deal with an important few. At its most basic, style is made of diction (the choice of words) and syntax (the way sentences are constructed). Style will also be looked at as a composite built of rhythm, tone, and mood. Sliced through from another direction, style is about simplicity, complexity, and density.
♦♦♦ Diction and Syntax
The choice of words and their organization into sentences lie at the heart of style. Beginning writers are often told they must learn to write simply and that a small word is always better than a bigger one. This advice can be good if it keeps a writer away from thinking that a pompous-sounding word is more arty and intelligent than a simple and direct one. But it is far from a pure truth. If a complex style expresses you or your story, or your point-of-view character, then to write simply would be terrible advice.
There is also a dangerous assumption that we should reserve a simple, minimal style for stories about people who are poor, uneducated, or rural. A good look at David Adams Richards’s style in any of his novels about the Mirimachi River in New Brunswick will dispel that notion. His Giller Prize–winning Mercy Among the Children is about a poor and persecuted family, who happen to be well read. The novel shows that you can take on any subject, however cerebral, however literary, without violating the diction and syntax that is true to the characters.
The style of David Adams Richards’s novels is incredibly complex. The sentences and paragraphs are built in dense, complex ways that represent the complicated business of perception and what’s out there to be perceived, plus the dense complexity of the emotional and psychological life of the novel’s people. Their lives are probably more complex than many middle-class lives, because they have so many trials and worries and conflicts and contradictions in their heads, brought on by difficult circumstance. It takes a layered and intricate style to represent them.
Simplicity in diction and syntax can mean something other than lack of complexity. Simplicity can be a good goal. We should always be looking for words that communicate our meaning most directly. “Canine” does not improve on “dog.” “Collie” might improve on “dog” if that’s what you want us to see; if it’s important for us to know. In Greg Hollingshead’s “The Dog in the Van” it was important that the dog be just a dog, nothing fancy, and so it was never called anything but a dog.
Following is a little example of writing that sins against simplicity in other ways:
She could not remember how she came to feel the way she did about the vase. There was certainly nothing unusual about it. A normal vase in all respects. But the vase did bother her and so she took it off the place where it had been and stored it away with several other things, in an area of the house she used for storing what had become unpleasant for her to see.
The purpose of this paragraph is to show how devious we can be and willing to not say what is there in a scene. In terms of sins against simplicity, it is long for its meaning. A sparse style might render it: The vase annoyed her. She moved it.
“A normal vase in all respects” says nothing about the vase. It lacks any hint of visual image. Even to say it is a black vase is an improvement. Why say “the place where it had been” if that place is a mantle? Why call it “an area of the house she used for storing” if that place is a closet under the stair closed off by a door? What are the “other things”? If they’re not important, don’t bring them up.
Simplicity, in this sense, can be all about directness and the visibility of the details presented. Often, when a writer does what I’ve done in the example, the choices may not be style choices at all, but a failure on the part of the writer to see the place and the vase and the other things in his or her own mind. The writer can be expressing his or her own vagueness, which produces a corresponding vagueness in readers.
If you look at Edna Alford’s “Half-Past Eight,” in terms of diction and syntax, you’ll notice that most sentences move from subject through verb to object. They don’t look back on themselves but are always propelling forward. Forward is where readers want to go. In terms of diction, Alford stays close to Tessie’s diction, because the sound of Tessie’s voice is always with us. We are inside or close to her thoughts, and so it would make no sense to go outside her words and fish in someone else’s diction pond.
At the same time, Alford is precise in the details presented: the bronze shimmer of the mirror, the dowager dresser with the ornate brass hooks, the “Scarlet Fire” lipstick. The style is crisp and visual. The sentences are not short and sharp and blunt, but fluidly long without seeming complex. That is, they are easy to read. They have a graceful ease. Look at the use of dashes by which she inserts an extra thought, or a related image, or example of what Tessie is talking about:
And Mrs. Morrison wasn’t much better—“Yes, Helen this” and “Yes, Helen that”—a spineless old hat if there ever was one.
If asked to sum up her style in this story, I would probably say that Edna Alford has perfect pitch for the inner voice of Tessie, and that her choice of diction and her syntax constructions never violate that fidelity to character. I would say that her consistent use of precise details, precisely modified, is cleverly achieved through Tessie, so that readers are given a sharp scene to experience and engage with, even when Tessie is alone.
At this same level of diction and syntax, look again at “The Dog in the Van.” The style is simple, clear, and clean. What makes it so at the beginning is a series of declarations about the van and the dog: what the van looks like, what the dog looks like, what the Crossleys are doing that brings the dog into their path. You might call the style “rational,” and that is the perfect style considering the point of view belongs to Dick Crossley, who prefers things clear, simple, and rational—uncomplicated. The dog in the van is the exact kind of complication he seeks to avoid.
Notice the last lines of the story’s second paragraph, when instead of what Dick sees, we are for a few seconds transported into what Dick sees the dog seeing. The style changes, and so do the images when the dog’s POV is presented: “a fly dying in the dust of the dashboard.” The dog sees like an artist compared to Dick.
Character is almost entirely conveyed in this story through dialogue. Short bursts of words. “Dick! He’s been shot.” Through the dialogue, we learn how sympathetic and empathetic Jan naturally is—and how tight, argumentative, and unemotional Dick tries to be.
If asked to sum up the style of this story, on the basis of diction and syntax, I would stress how the simple descriptions in the crisp, rational sentences are the stylistic outgrowth of Dick’s personality and a good example of how character and style are matched in a good story.
“The Dog in the Van” and “Half-Past Eight,” both favour a fairly long sentence. In the Hollingshead story, sentences may begin with “when” or “if” subordinate clauses. In addition to the main clauses of sentences in “Half-Past Eight” phrases are often inserted inside commas or dashes. In the work of both authors, phrases are often added at the end, sometimes in lists like the list of things the dog sees inside its van.
The diction and syntax in “Stranger Than Fiction” are different from those in “The Dog in the Van” and Half-Past Eight.” I submit off the top that it is because the point-of-view character is so different. Whereas Dick Crossley is tight and rational, and Tessie is direct and thoughtful, the author/narrator in Diane Schoemperlen’s story is wild, loquacious, and humorous. If she were in the room with you, she would probably talk a mile a minute, frequently interrupt herself and you, and go off on tangents as new things popped into her head. She would make you laugh. Diane Schoemperlen uses a creative vocabulary in the story but not arcane or formal words. The author/narrator is made believable in part by her sounding like a fun neighbour dropping in to gossip and vent emotions. It is a deception as well, because whose neighbour would think to get off such memorable juggernauts of words as the story of the juggler at the East Azilda Fall Fair with which the story begins? But the cleverness is in the ideas. They are also cleverly worded, using a fund of vocabulary within all our experiences and not that different from our own.
The sentences in this story are often long, and that is part of how the narrator’s breathlessness, her hurry, is achieved. She piles on new things, and the syntax rolls from one idea to another across the conjunction “and.” This happened and then that happened, and then something else happened.
As in “Half-Past Eight,” you’ll notice how the details in “Stranger Than Fiction” are never general The narrator sprays the reader with details. If you go to the early introduction of the first fictional Sheila, we hear about the meaning of her name, then her age, her figure, her eyes and hair—and by comparison, we hear about the author’s hair, which is different. Then she moves on to Sheila’s marital situation, her exercise habits ... It is fact, fact, fact, until she reaches the concluding paragraph of the description, which uses a metaphor, comparing Sheila and Roger’s marriage to a pair of ice dancers.
♦♦♦ Rhythm
In “Stranger Than Fiction,” Diane Schoemperlen builds rhythm by combining sentences across the conjunction “and.” Instead of meeting the full stop of a period, the sentences are allowed to continue and mount up, with the result that there is a surging, galloping rhythm. In her case, the technique develops the author/narrator’s breathless style. Other writers use the same technique to produce a different rhythm for different reasons. Short-story writer and novelist Alistair MacLeod, who is very well known for the rhythm of his work, does the same thing with sentences linked through “and,” by which he produces an incantatory rhythm.
Other writers deliberately avoid anything like a long, lilting rhythm. Ernest Hemingway was perhaps the original revolutionary in this regard, often cutting his sentences to staccato lengths. His short words and sentences produced a curt, blunt style often used to describe blunt, violent events.
Much of what we’re talking about here transgresses what we were taught was good grammar in school. When it comes to literary style, it is almost nonsense to talk about good English or obedience to one style guide or another. I remember being told that good style was mixing complex sentences with short sentences to produce a varied effect. I don’t want to lampoon teachers who were just trying to open up these notions to a mind that did not contain them, but we should when we write as adults get over a lot of this advice. Alternating sentence lengths could be the worst of advice. It could produce a mechanical rhythm out of sync with your story.
If it’s a cool grey day, write it in a cool grey way.
Canada, like many other countries, has enormous regional differences in how people speak, and one result is that the fictional work of Maritime writers, like Alistair MacLeod, David Adams Richards, Donna Morrissey, and Lynn Coady, is laced through with a rhythm you won’t find in Prairie writing or West Coast writing. Nor should you. Dialect differences affecting rhythm are one of the beauties of literature, and I don’t only mean the rhythms of Celtic-influenced writing or Caribbean-influenced writing. Beauty in literature is not as simple a thing as that, and the writing of other cultures not so evidently rhythmical has rhythm that the author can find and use to create .
A trick that can help you get a feel for fictions rhythm is to hum it. Read it as if reading aloud but without articulating the words. Pause in the usual ways, and put the stresses where the writer meant them to be, but hum. You might hear the rhythm as distinct from the other effects and understand it in a stronger way. If that doesn’t sound too loco, try it.
♦♦♦ Tone and Mood
Mood is the emotional quality of a passage of fiction. I imagine it like a colour overlay. You have events going on, thoughts, dialogue, but all with a blue or a red cast that is the emotion. A good example is how Rachel Wyatt manages to maintain the overlay or underlay of grief through the story “Visitation.” (I won’t elaborate on this point, as I want you to do so as an experiment at the end of this chapter.)
Tone is a psychological rather than an emotional quality. Think of sarcasm, for example. Sarcasm is not an emotion. In literature, sarcasm is, therefore, a tone rather than a mood.
To study what goes into the creation of mood, let’s return to a concept mentioned in Chapter 6. You were asked to describe a man baking a cake in one mood and then in a different mood. Try it again with a room in your house or with your backyard. Write the description once as simple documentary. Then turn around and write it again from scratch when you as the writer are sad or angry or delighted, or the winner of a lottery, or tired from a night of torrid love-making. Try a variety of moods.
Afterward, examine what changed when you did this. Usually what changes are the details you seize on. Our whole connotative apparatus is at work, finding details it registers as sad-making, glad-making, mad-making, and so on.
Mood can be literally enhanced through colour. The Swedish director Ingmar Bergman in his movie Nicholas and Alexandra contrasted two families: one quiet and sinisterly depressed, the other wild, expressive, and joyful. The sad family was always awash in greys and pale blues. Everything at the happy family’s house was saturated reds and gold. You probably could not get away with such gaudy artifice in fiction, but it does show how colour or lack of it can be used to convey moods.
Tone is even harder to talk about. Why is something sarcastic? Cutting? Depressing? Comforting? Sarcasm is often about irony, saying one thing when you mean another. Diane Schoemperlen is great for the study of tone because much of what she writes is tongue-in-cheek, with a wink, with irony—but delivered with a straight face. She lays out the examples of how life is stranger than fiction at the beginning of that story as if she were simply retelling a fact. The humour in the tone comes from its being more elaborate than what we have ever experienced, a burlesque satire of the usual little coincidences people insist are important.
If writers write, “Oh joy,” they are seldom conveying joy. That is tone.
♦♦♦ Density
There are many wonderful metaphors to describe the art of fiction. The Edmonton writer Merna Summers has many wonderful metaphors to describe the art of fiction. One is to compare the writing of fiction to the dipping of a candle. Each pass thickens the candle: an image of how the quality of density is achieved in fiction. To some extent, writers do create density by the progressive addition of powerful details. That is, rather than adding new sentences and new paragraphs, they work new material into the existing sentences and paragraphs, adding to their weight and emotional, sensory complexity.
The effect on the reader is to be acted on by an increasing number of sensual and intellectual cues. You see more, hear more, feel more, and are surrounded by more hints and ideas. Hence, the experience becomes more complex. In terms of sound, the music of the prose becomes more intricate and, if well done, beautiful.
In Canadian literature, look at Mark Anthony Jarman’s work for an example of this kind of density (the novel Salvage King, Ya! or the short-story collection Nineteen Knives), or at Zsuzsi Gartner’s short-story collection All the Anxious Girls on Earth. Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano is a unique model of style density.
Other writers will choose deliberately not to produce such a density because it doesn’t suit their story. Dense fictional style slows down time, allows us to get within a moment and experience it on many levels, hyper-realistically. Another writer’s purpose might be to speed time up through a loose, sparse style. Or fidelity to the character might demand a less frenetic, hypersensual treatment; for example, the opening makeup scene in “Half-Past Eight.” Time is slowed, the detail is dense, but it is limited to what Tessie is doing and thinking now.
Another style alternative is minimalism. Probably no writer is more associated with minimalism in fiction than Raymond Carver. By deliberately choosing only a few strong details for a scene, Carver achieved terrific impact. Dialogue in his work is likewise bare and blunt. This is hyper-realism again, but achieved in the opposite way to the progressive addition of detail. In Carver’s short stories, the few perfectly chosen details land like blows. Because of the lack of competition from many other details, each one has maximum impact. In his dialogue, the reader strains to dig out the meaning of the cryptic messages.
Carver’s minimalism was a powerful influence on a generation of writers, though many who followed his artistic lead have since re-inflated their styles. Going back to my original thoughts on experimentation with style, by all means read and be influenced by Raymond Carver. It looks so easy and is so difficult to do.
Another category of style is humour. What makes a story humorous? How does the humorous stylist achieve what he or she does? This is a big topic, popular with writers, and I’ve devoted a good deal of my career to it. It is the subject of the chapter to come.
♦♦♦ Your Process
“Visitation” was not used as a source of examples in this chapter. That is because I wanted you to write a style synopsis of “Visitation,” of the kind done in the previous chapter for other stories.
- How does Rachel Wyatt manage to create and maintain the mood of grief in the story?
- How is the humorous tone brought in?
- Talk about how diction and syntax obey Almeida’s character and also help define that character for readers.
- How does the style suit the story?
- Can you imagine another style in which the story might have been written?
- Redo the exercise of describing a place or person, and then writing it again when you are angry, sad, joyful, and so on. Do it a couple of times and then evaluate how the change in mood and tone was created, from the plain version to the emotionally flavoured one.
- For the next chapter, read “Positive Images” by Fred Stenson.