style? forget it

A couple of days ago I was talking with my mother about writing. She was saying that one of the things she frets about while writing is how to say something--the issue of style.

I used to concern myself quite a lot with style, but I don't anymore. Or: not much, anyway. Now I believe that if, as a writer, you're focusing on style, you're directing attention at the wrong thing. It's a waste of time for at least two reasons:

1) the most important effects of creative writing are unrelated to style;

2) any style that is self-consciously "used" comes across as affected, which places an obstacle between the reader and the content of the work.

Now I associate "chosen" styles with commercial writing. I think back to writing for hire that I've done, such as a couple of small pieces for Vancouver magazine back in the 1980s. I wrote them in the snappy, breezy style that was the tone of that section of the magazine--and collected my (small) checks. It was perfectly good work, and I myself enjoyed reading that part of the magazine. But if I set out to write a novel in that style, it would be self-conscious and phony exercise (and possibly a work of "chick lit").

I'm no more happy when "serious" writers fool around with their writing style. To me, the work of, say, Ernest Hemingway comes across as affected. Maybe it wasn't; maybe that was his natural and spontaneous way of writing. But I don't think so. It reads, to me, like the work of someone trying to write a "special way" for effect--to impress, in some way.

I'm afraid I can't even exempt my literary idol, James Joyce. Much of Ulysses is a stylistic tour de force. But to the extent that it is such, I'm afraid it is not very powerful--not to me. Such tricks rely on the reader's education in understanding some abstract point or joke being made by the writer. There is then, presumably, a burst of detached, ironic amusement, or some such. Compared to what literature is capable of, this is an empty and arid experience.

I hold much more with E. B. White, who said that style is not something that a writer can really contrive; it is a natural expression of the totality of the writer's being. Your style arises from the sum of your personality, experience, and education. At the moment of writing, you can't change those things; they are what they are, as distinctive as your fingerprint. It's almost impossible to change--and why would you want to?

An excessive concern with style shows that the writer is either ignoring or taking for granted his subject-matter. But this is a bad idea. The first duty of the writer is to have something worthwhile to say. And the more important your subject, the less important the issue of style is. If you've witnessed a genocide and want to write about it, it would be foolish and narcissistic to fuss over your literary style, aiming for precious effects. You've got bigger fish to fry.

Aristotle, in his Poetics, devotes maybe 3 or 4 pages to "diction"--roughly the equivalent of style as I'm using the term here. The rest of the 40-odd pages he devotes to content: your story. That accords with the balance I would propose: spend 90% of your effort on story, or what you're writing, and 10% on style, or how you write it. No: make that 95% and 5%.

The tip I offered Mom was to write the way she might write down a vivid and important dream when pressed for time. If you've only got 10 minutes to write down your dream, how do you attack it? You're not sweating over the fine points of style; you've got something to say, and you've got to get it down--now. That way, you'll rely on your natural style, whatever it is. For better or for worse, it will be you.

I might boil it down thus: don't be clever; be honest and accurate.

top of the reading-stack

Hello friends. What can I tell you in the dark of a Monday morning in October, with rain pouring heavily outside for the nth consecutive day?

Kimmie is still on vacation, and now very much enjoying the new (used, actually) PC set up in her "office" (sewing-room/mad-scientist's laboratory of creative projects). I finally got all those machines set up, networked, and functioning. Now I'm pleased with the result.

On my current reading-pile is Neal Stephenson's 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash. I decided to get it after reading a feature article in the MIT Technology Review about the present and future of Web-based virtual reality, as embodied right now in Second Life and Google Earth. (The article, speculating about what a convergence of these systems might look like, was called "Second Earth".) In Second Life (which I've never explored), you, represented by an animated "avatar", enter a virtual world built mainly by your fellow visitors. There you poke around, do stuff, and interact. In the article, a couple of key programmers associated with this networked virtual-reality world said that they had been inspired by Snow Crash. Since the novel has had such an impact on people so influential on where our society is going, it is, as far as I'm concerned, socially significant, so I thought I'd read it.

I'm on page 198 of 468, reading two short chapters a day. It's holding my attention, which is more than most novels can do.

It takes place in a near future that includes, among many other things, a virtual Metaverse like our own current Second Life, although more potent in that people occupy it via VR goggles that immerse them in the experience, rather than merely watching it on a computer monitor. The main character, Hiro Protagonist, is a hacker and adept of the Metaverse. The book's title refers to a new drug whose effects seems to straddle both worlds: it fries your mind even as it fries your computer. (The term itself is apparently hacker slang for a computer crash so profound that it makes your monitor generate random noise or "snow".)

I remember my first exposure to Neal Stephenson. It was in a small bookstore in Sackville, New Brunswick, in 2002. I was still temporarily ordained as a Buddhist monk at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, and had traveled to Sackville with Ani Tsomo, a young Irish nun, to attend four weeks of Ponlop Rinpoche's Nitartha Institute, an intensive (and excellent) program in Buddhist philosophy held at Mount Allison University. Tsomo and I, in our robes, were browsing some local shops in our free time. We made our way quietly and separately past the shelves, the only shoppers moving over the worn linoleum tiles of the store. On a rotating book-rack I found a massive (1130 pages, plus an appendix!) paperback with the daunting title Cryptonomicon.

What's this? I wondered. Science fiction?

The blurb on the back advertised it as "three novels in one", including World War II adventure, cryptography, and high-tech finance. Intrigued, I opened it up. A few pages of enthusiastic notices, couple of pages of acknowledgments, a couple of epigraphs from Alan Turing and The New York Times, then, on page 1, the opener of a prologue:

Two tires fly. Two wail.
A bamboo grove, all chopped down
From it, warring songs.

...is the best that Corporal Bobby Shaftoe can do on short notice--he's standing on the running board, gripping his Springfield with one hand and the rearview mirror with the other, so counting the syllables on his fingers is out of the question.

Ah! A soldier-haiku-writer riding a vehicle of some kind at high speed! I was impressed with how original and vivid this was--and how it was not talking down to me. But I felt a clench of worry too, for it reminded me strongly of reading Thomas Pynchon, especially his most famous work, also set in World War II, Gravity's Rainbow. As I read on through the paragraph, the feeling grew. Here was a super-talented writer writing more or less in the style (incredibly, impossibly!) of Thomas Pynchon.

As a young writer I was a huge fan of Thomas Pynchon, and also tried to write in his inimitable style. It was a bust. One needs to find one's own style (no easy task). I'm less of a fan now, not so easily impressed by riffing. I thought I recognized in Stephenson a kindred spirit (he was born in 1959, just a few months after me), someone who had been thrilled and electrified, as I had been, by Pynchon, but who had had the energy and stamina to actually produce a long work (much longer than Gravity's Rainbow) in that profligate, inventive, and knowing style. If the rest of the book held up at that pace, it should be at least fun to read.

I returned it to the rack. I was too afraid of being dished up secondhand Pynchon, but more than that I already had more reading than I could handle with the Nitartha Institute. And once I had returned to the Abbey, "samsaric" reading was something that would be limited only to Saturdays, our day off. I gave it a pass.

But later, when I'd returned home to Vancouver, on one of my near-despairing traipses through a bookstore's fiction section, I gave the book another look, and realized that, whatever flaws I might think it had, it nonetheless was head and shoulders--possibly more--above anything else in the store inventiveness, intelligence, and refusal to patronize the reader. If anyone there deserved a chance, this guy did. So I bought the book (you're welcome, Neal--45 cents of your kids' education came from me).

I think that was November 2004 (unlike nonfiction books, novels I don't sign and date--usually I'm too disappointed in them to keep them, and wind up sending them to a used-book store, where they're worth more unblemished). Well, I read the whole thing. That's saying something, since not only is the book long, but I just don't finish books all that much, especially novels, which usually become stale and uninteresting (to me) long before they end. I wasn't thrilled with Cryptonomicon, but he kept me interested enough to keep reading. Stephenson really is able to dish up surprises, and situations that are lifelike in their tragicomic complexity. Quite consistently he is able to evoke a sense of richness in his world--that quality I yearn for and look for in writing. And even if he doesn't always completely succeed in what he sets out to do (which always seems to be more or less hugely ambitious), he does not talk down to his reader. For that he has this reader's gratitude.

So Snow Crash seemed like a low-risk buy to me (and another 45 cents to Neal). And so far I am indeed, mostly, enjoying it. He has a gift for jarring, outrageous, and hilarious similes and metaphors, in that way faring tolerably well against writers like Pynchon or Tom Robbins. It's a whole hell of a lot better than the flat, stale, unimaginative, often semi-literate prose of most published fiction.

How about a sampler. Here is chapter 1, paragraph 1 of Snow Crash:

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachno-fiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

If being a fiction-writer means being able to evoke a world forcefully in the mind of a reader, Stephenson is one, certainly for this reader. He's earned his 90 cents.

finding the feeling

Over the last couple of days I have read over some of my blog-posts of the past few months, and thought I detected a rather depressed tone. It seems that a couple of years ago, when I started this blog, I was more lighthearted and capable of humor in my posts. It looks a little like one of the possible effects of aging, in which the joie de vivre of youth is squeezed out by painful experience.

May it never be!

I don't think too much about the "tone" of my writing, since I generally regard this as hard to control, and anyway the effort to control it would be a contrivance, an affectation--something I want to avoid. But every once in a while it is pushed into my attention. I recall, for instance, the very first feedback I got from a literary agent. It was in response to my submission of a youthful adventure novel called The Black Orchid, which the agent (forget who) tore to shreds. One of her withering comments was something like, "...and the dry, stilted tone, which I suppose is an effort to make it sound 19th-century...." Apart from the general unwelcomeness of this "negative praise" (a term I learned from my father), I was struck by the criticism, because I hadn't been aware of trying to affect any particular tone, or to make it seem "period". My prose style, according to this agent, was therefore just boring and stilted, full stop.

Ouch. It's a jungle out there, I thought.

It smarted, but I didn't take it too seriously. I knew my writing stood up favorably in comparison with the great majority of published material. But it did give me some pause. My outlook did and does tend toward the detached and scientific, and my writing style inevitably reflects this. Am I too much of a "scientist" to write fiction and drama? Why do I want to write fiction and drama anyway?

Well, I just do. There is a creative spring within me that keeps burbling forth, and I want to channel that, give expression to it. But there's no denying that that spring percolates through the rational, analytical rock of my mind. A hardheaded Mercury in Capricorn is just not the gushing type, or given to effusiveness.

Of course, it's not a question of a dichotomy between "dry and factual" and "gushing and effusive". And it's not as though I want to read stuff that is merely dry and factual--although I tend to find such stuff much more persuasive than purely emotional outpourings. Rather, I like a balanced, detached, well-researched text powered by an underlying passion. I like adult discourse, not baby-talk. Passion drives the prose forward, motivates it, makes it matter. Clear, authoritative facts, enlisted in the cause of passion, make for powerful reading, I think.

Another way of cutting dryness is humor. This again should not be contrived--for that is painful to read. But if one has a natural humor, then this enlivens one's prose, creates warmth around detachment. Maybe when I'm feeling depressed this becomes muted, and conspicuous by its absence.

And yet another way of boosting the vitality of a naturally even and dry tone is to turn one's detached mind directly onto the emotions themselves--to take an interest in feelings and reporting their effects, rather than simply ignoring them, which is what a true dryasdust does. When a detached mind pays attention to the feeling side of life, the effect is especially powerful, I think. James Joyce was a master of this. A cool, detached, satirical Aquarian, he nonetheless saw into the living heart of people's feelings, and was able to evoke their manifestations in his writing. His dramatization of the painful fight at the Dedalus Christmas dinner in A Portrait of the Artist is one of many examples of his mastery: a cool detached eye seeing how a family suffers, and reporting it vividly, blow by blow.

In the end, you can't really camouflage who you are. As Popeye said, "I yam what I yam." But I do need to watch out. For I think I do unconsciously steer away from "emotional" writing, just because I dislike naked appeals to feeling as a way of making one's case. My desire for objectivity and evenhandedness has me purging my prose of words or expressions that might seem "loaded" or tending to bias the viewpoint. The result can be too much like report-writing (something I'm very good at).

I don't believe in trying to goose scenes in order to wring more "feeling" out of them. In season 2 of The Odyssey, when a new story editor was shoved in by the network to run the writing of the show, he threw around the words emotion and feeling as though merely saying them were the same as evoking them. I had contempt for both the intent and the method. If there's anything I like less than dry, insipid writing it's ungenuine and painted-on emotionality. Real feeling comes out of real situations, and to make them real, you need to be connected with truth--you have to tell it like it is.

When I (mainly accidentally) switch on a contemporary TV drama, the strained efforts at laughs and emotions simply embarrass me, if they don't provoke active feelings of horror, like witnessing someone losing their grip and defecating in public.

No, give me a good, well-written report.