A Manifesto (or maybe an Anti-Manifesto) on Style

In "A Reader's Advice to Writers," Salon's Laura Miller advises novelists to concentrate more on good old-fashioned story-telling and less on style: "Remember that nobody agrees on what a beautiful prose style is and most readers either can't recognize `good writing' or don't value it that much....I've seen as many books ruined by too much emphasis on style as by too little....whether you write lush or (please!) transparent prose, keep in mind that in most cases, style is largely a technical matter appreciated by specialists. You probably don't go to movies to see the lighting and photography, and most readers don't come to books in search of breathtaking sentences."

While I agree with most of Miller's pragmatic advice, I find her comments on style to be simplistic and cavalier. Are there really only two kinds of style, lush (= bad) and transparent (= good)? How about a style that achieves elegance and clarity without sounding like every other book out there? A style with a little poetry, some music, a few original figures of speech, words and sentences put together in a way you've never heard before? A style that carries and supports the story but that is itself worthy of note and recognizable as belonging to one particular writer--that's what I want to read and write.

Game, Set, Match

You don't have to be a tennis fan to appreciate David Foster Wallace's description of a memorable moment in the sport. Pay attention to your own reactions as you read the passage.

"It’s the finals of the 2005 U.S. Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner...until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does

The Power of a Period

Here's a teenage girl musing on her resemblance to her mother, with whom she has an ambivalent relationship:

"[She] would turn out to be a woman of unobjectionable looks (trim enough, tall enough, with brown hair like her mother’s and brown eyes like her mother’s and pale, freckled skin. Like her mother’s)."

from Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Note the three repetitions of "like her mother's" and their punctuation. The first two are integral parts of the sentence; there's nothing about them to draw much attention. It's the third one, set off as a separate sentence, that illuminates the narrator's feelings toward her mother. Can't you just hear the teenage gnashing of teeth as she's forced to admit that in still another way, she's like her mother? Had the third phrase not broken the pattern, we would not sense the narrator's dismay. One little stylistic choice has conveyed the deeper truth.

The Music of Words

"The corpse without hands lay in the bottom of a small sailing dinghy drifting just within sight of the Suffolk coast. It was the body of a middle-aged man, a dapper little cadaver, its shroud a dark pin-striped suit which fitted the narrow body as elegantly in death as it had in life. The hand-made shoes still gleamed except for some scruffing of the toe caps, the silk tie was knotted under the prominent Adam’s apple. He had dressed with careful orthodoxy for the town, this hapless voyager; not for this lonely sea; nor for this death.

(Unnatural Causes - P.D.James)

Another great opening scene, this one by the British writer who uses murder mysteries to explore the depth and range of human emotion. The description is simple, precise, and elegant.

Look! Up in the sky!

"Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Others figured it might be the perfect city joke -- stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring upward at nothing at all, like waiting for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched, the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the gray of the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper."

(Opening of Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, with thanks to Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute for drawing this passage to my attention.)

The first sentence draws us in, quiets us with the word "hushed," makes us pause over the unanswered questions, the mysterious "him." Then the focus sharpens. Those street names, each a separate sentence, tell us exactly where we are. Like the sentences, we move jerkily forward toward the still-unclear focus of attention. Naming things--not just any street but West Street--is one of the best ways to bring a scene to life.

"A silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful" grabs us with personification and oxymoron; we're not sure yet what to feel. In the next few sentences, words pile up like gawkers joining the throng, until we all freeze with the possibilities, thrown at us in three deliberately separate fragments. And after "Or a jumper," that terrible, inviting white space.

I don't need to read further--though I surely will--to know that we're in the hands of a master of words, of punctuation, even of space, itself a tool of writing.

In case you haven't figured it out, the figure at the top of the World Trade Center is Philippe Petit, who in 1974 walked a tightrope strung between the towers.

Great Heart

Eyes closed, I sat in my reading chair lost in the world of J.R.R.Tolkien's The Return of the King, audio version. Frodo and Sam trudged desperately up the Mountain of Doom, the weight of the ring growing ever heavier. All seemed lost. Then, amid images of pain and terror, came one simple sentence: "Great heart will not be denied." I took a deep breath with Frodo, and we climbed on.

Why is this small sentence the only one I can recite from the thousands in the trilogy? Why did it move me to tears and hope, not just for Frodo and Sam but for us all? Its power lies in its starkness, its brevity, the directness with which it lifts us up out of the muck and makes us go on. The short, ordinary words aim at us like battle spears. The consonance of the final t's in great, heart, and not and the double-d of denied cement the promise of the sentence. In six short words, the fate of the world has turned.

If you doubt the power of short, ordinary words, consider one way an amateur writer might have captured the moment: "Having courage and working passionately toward your goals will be rewarded." It's just not the same.