Style

An Element of Fiction

Style is another Element of Fiction that has been given a lot of thought over the years. Style, like Tone, is somewhat of an elusive element, a little hard to pin down and keep still long enough to examine. But, thankfully, many writers and teachers of the craft have pondered it and shared their thoughts.

Such as this one by Voltaire, “Every style that is not boring is a good one.”

Or this one by Elizabeth Bowen, “Style is a matter of coming to terms with language.”

Then she adds, “For each writer there can only be one style — his own.”

Goethe makes a beautiful, invaluable point, “If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.”

Philip Gerard suggests, “Style lives in the sentence.”

“An individual style,” says John Gardner, “is developed as much by resistance as by emulation.”

Edward Sapir, my favorite language genius has this to say, “The major characteristics of style, in so far as style is a technical matter of the building and placing of words, are given by the language itself, quite as inescapably, indeed, as the general acoustic effect of verse is given by the sounds and natural accents of the language. These necessary fundamentals of style are hardly felt by the artist to constrain his individuality of expression. They rather point the way to those stylistic developments that most suit the natural bent of the language.

“The merit of such a style as W.H. Hudson’s or George Moiré’s is that it does with ease and economy what the language is always trying to do.

“It is strange how long it has taken the European literatures to learn that style is not an absolute, a something that is to be imposed on the language from Greek or Latin models, but merely the language itself, running in its natural grooves, and with enough of an individual accent to allow the artist’s personality to be felt as a presence, not as an acrobat. (My italics).

“There are almost as many natural ideals of literary style as there are languages.

“The structure of the language often forces an assemblage of concepts that impresses us as a stylistic discovery. Single Algonquin words are like tiny imagist poems.” (My italics).

W. Somerset Maugham, the writer with one of the cleanest and clearest styles I have come across, has this to say about style, “One fusses about style. One tries to write better. One takes pains to be simpler, clear, and succinct. One aims at rhythms and balance. One reads a sentence aloud to see that it sounds well. One sweats one’s guts out. The fact remains that the four greatest novelists the world has ever known, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoi and Dostoevsky, wrote their respective languages very indifferently. It proves that if you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and if you have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write. All the same, it’s better to write well than ill.”

Says Lu Chi, “Know what is and what is not merely fashion; learn what old masters praised highly, although the wisdom of a subtle mind is often scoffed at by the public.

“The brilliant semiprecious stones of popular fashion are as common as beans in the field.”

Suggests Elizabeth Bowen, “In our individual work we have the same aims — clearness, truth, evocation, some touch of grace. By keeping those in view, we arrive at style — it may be almost imperceptibly.

“Style is not a mere surface to be adorned from without: the spring of it is deep-down, interior. It stays mobile, and stays alive, through its organic relation to its subject.”

Oliver Goldsmith echoes this sentiment, “True eloquence does not consist, as the rhetoricians assure us, in saying great things in a sublime style, but in a simple style: for there is, properly speaking, no such thing as a sublime style; the sublimity lies only in the things.”

Back to Maugham, with a very pithy observation, “A good style should show no sign of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.”

As for Jacques Barzun, equally pithy, “Prose is good only if it sounds easy.”

E.B. White, another language icon, observes, “As you become proficient in the use of language, your style will emerge, because you yourself will emerge, and when this happens you will find it increasingly easy to break through the barriers that separate you from other minds, other hearts — which is, of course, the purpose of writing, as well as its principal reward.”

White goes on to say, “When we speak of Fitzgerald’s style, we don’t mean his command of the relative pronoun, we mean the sound his words make on paper.

“A careful and honest writer does not need to worry about style.”

And finally, “Young writers often suppose that style is garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style has no such separate entity; it is nondetachable, unfilterable. The beginner should approach style warily, realizing that it is an expression of self, and should turn resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style — all mannerisms, tricks, and adornments. The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.”

Isaac Asimov has also pondered this subject, and makes this brilliant observation, “Style is that use of language that creates a vivid, full-color image, with sound and smell and other sensory effects, in the reader’s mind; and that is all. Remember: what lasts in the reader’s mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy.”

As for William Zinsser, “Style is organic to the person doing the writing, as much a part of him as his hair, or, if he is bold, his lack of it.

“Good writers are visible just behind their words.

“Since style is who you are, you only need to be true to yourself to find it gradually emerging from under the accumulated clutter and debris, growing more distinctive every day.”

And the ever-practical Ayn Rand, “A good style is one that conveys the most with the greatest economy of words.”

Barnaby Conrad on Maugham, “It has been said of Somerset Maugham that he had so little style that that, of itself, was a style.

Joyce Carol Oates warns, “I think that’s one of the problems with really elegant writers; you stop reading and start admiring the words. So you lose the narrative flow. I don’t want that to happen.”

Ted Berkman makes a couple of brilliant observations, “Two pages — the right two pages — can tell more than four hundred bad ones.”

And, “You must be able to kill your darlings and edit out your most treasured inspirations if they violate your larger purpose.”

John Gardner also calls a warning, “About style, the less said the better. Nothing leads to fraudulence more swiftly than the conscious pursuit of stylistic uniqueness…. Subject matter influences style.”

Gardner goes on to elaborate, “The realistic writer’s way of making events convincing is verisimilitude; the tale writer by the quality of his voice, and by means of various devices that distract our critical intelligence to get what Coleridge called — in one of the most clumsy famous sentences in all of literature — ’the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’; the yarn writer tells outrageous lies, and emphasizes both the brilliance and the falsehood of the lie. All three kinds of writing depend heavily on precision of detail…. To say that a style feels appropriate to a subject is to say, then, that we believe it in some way helps us see the subject truly.”

John Fowles concurs, “It’s no good inventing a style that doesn’t come naturally.” John Fowles

William Sloane observes, “The greatest possible merit of style is, of course, to make the words absolutely disappear into the thought.”

As for Gertrude Stein, “Start clean and simple. Don’t try to write pretty or noble or big or anything like that. Try to say just what you mean. This is hard because you have to find out what you mean, and that’s work, real work.”

“When we say we like a writer’s style,” adds William Zinsser, “what we mean is that we like his personality as he expresses it on paper.”

Jacques Barzun on Lincoln’s style, “For his [Lincoln’s] style, the plain, undecorated language in which he addresses posterity, is no mere knack with words. It is the manifestation of a mode of thought, of an outlook that colors every act of the writer and tells us how he rated life. Only let his choice of words, the rhythm, and shape of his utterances, linger in the ear, and you begin to feel as he did — hence to discern unplumbed depths in the quiet intent of a conscious artist.”

Also on Lincoln’s style, from the Nineteenth Century editor of Lincoln’s Work, “Because he was determined to be understood, because he was honest, because he had a warm and true heart, because he had read good books eagerly and not coldly, and because there was in him a native good taste, as well as a strain of imagination, he achieved a singularly clear and forcible style, which took color from his own noble character and became a thing individual and distinguished.” (My italics).

And I’ll let John Steinbeck have the final word, “As soon as the story starts its style will establish itself.”

© Wolfstuff