Are you a reader who values a writer's style as much as the meaning it conveys?

Are you a writer who seeks to refine your own style?

Would you like to improve your understanding of the techniques writers use to create beautiful sentences?

Welcome to the search for the perfect sentence!


Most readers and writers focus on the content of a piece--the ideas it conveys, the story it carries, the events it chronicles. "So many books, so little time" we readers chorus, rushing through our stories, newspapers, websites. "Is it finished?" we writers ask. "Have I written enough words? Have I gotten the content across?"

Here we'll focus on the style of writing more than its content. We'll slow down. We'll read very short passages, sometimes single sentences, and we'll savor their wordcraft. We'll examine why each word was chosen, how they were arranged into sentences, and how those sentences evoke our responses. In the process, I hope we'll become more careful, perceptive readers and more effective writers.

Beautiful writing is everywhere--on the sports page of the morning paper, in the novel that relaxes you at night, in your grandmother's love letters found in the attic. If you would like to contribute a passage for close reading, with or without your own interpretation of its techniques, please email me at jtarasovic@gmail.com.


Monday, February 7, 2011

A beautiful style laughing at itself

If you read enough writing magazines and books, you'll quickly become sick of the terms "literary novel" and  "literary style." What exactly makes a writer's style literary? And if it's not literary, what is it?

I have my own tentative answer: we might call a style literary when it is as important to the writer (and maybe to the reader) as the content is; when it not only conveys the writer's meaning but is artful in itself; at its best, when it is so original that it constitutes the writer's signature.

Literary technique can, of course, be abused. The annual Bad Writing Contest (http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2010.htm) showcases writers who are skilled enough to turn "literary" writing on its ear (speaking of bad metaphors). My latest favorite writer, Joseph Caldwell, should be given the Grand Prize for his hilarious parody of "beautiful" writing in The Pig Did It, in which a pompous but lovelorn writing teacher (of course) has come to Ireland to grieve:

“His stretch of beach would be deserted. His solitude would be inviolate, his loneliness unobserved and unremarked except by the sea itself. There would, of course, be gulls, there would be curlews. He would hear their shrieks and watch the curve of their spread wings riding a current of air so rarefied that only a feather could find it. Perhaps there would be cormorants and, if he was lucky, a lone ship set against the horizon. There would be squalls and storms, crashing water, and thundering clouds. Lightning would crack the sky. Winds would lash the cliffs and—again, if he was lucky—rocks would be riven and great stones thrown into the sea. Then he, Aaron McCloud, would walk the shore unperturbed, his solitude, his loneliness, a proud and grieving dismissal of all that might intrude on his newly won sorrows.”

I won't enumerate the techniques used here except the one that creates the humor: the stretching of each image or sound effect just far enough that it screams--and we are screaming with laughter. That Caldwell is a master of literary writing is apparent even while we're laughing at his joke. I'll read one of his serious novels next.

For more on The Pig Did It, including another great passage, go to: http://bookwomanjanreviews.blogspot.com/2011/01/pig-did-it-by-joseph-caldwell.html
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