If you abandon a first novel, the chances of your ever writing and completing a second novel are rather slim. If you pause in the course of a first novel for substantial revision, the chances of your finishing the book are lessened. Finishing a novel isn’t a cinch, even if you’ve done it a dozen times already. When you’re making your initial attempt, I would suggest that other considerations be kept in the background. In this case, the first thing is to get it written. Later on you can worry more about getting it right.
Chapter 11
Matters of Style
Grammar, diction, usage. Dialogue. First vs. third person. Single vs. multiple viewpoint. How to handle transitions, descriptive passages
In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardnesses are easy to see, and they called it style.
I’ve often wondered, when contemplating the passage quoted above, whether or not the author wasn’t being a trifle disingenuous. We certainly regard Hemingway as a highly stylized writer. Passages from his works, taken out of context, are unmistakably his, and the Hemingway style is as inviting a target for the parodist as is the Bogart lisp for an impressionist. It’s hard to believe a man could develop a style at once so individualized and so influential without having the slightest suspicion of what he was doing.
Be that as it may, I have no quarrel with the implied message — i.e., that the best way to develop a style is to make every effort to write as naturally and honestly as possible. It is not intentionally mannered writing that adds up to style, or richly poetic paragraphs, or the frenetic pursuit of novel prose rhythms. The writer’s own style emerges when he makes no deliberate attempt to have any style at all. Through his efforts to create characters, describe settings, and tell a story, elements of his literary personality will fashion his style, imposing an individual stamp on his material.
There are a handful of writers we read as much for style as for content. John Updike is one example who comes quickly to mind. The manner in which he expresses himself is often interesting in and of itself. It is occasionally said of a particularly effective actor that one would gladly pay money to hear him read the telephone directory. Similarly, there are readers who would gladly read the phone book — if someone like Updike had written it.
The flip side of this sort of style is that it sometimes gets in the way of content in the sense that it blunts the impact of the narrative. Remember, fiction works upon us largely because we are able to choose to believe in its reality. Hence we care about the characters and how their problems are resolved. Just as a poor style gets in our way, making us constantly aware that we are reading a work of the imagination, so does an overly elaborate and refined style set up roadblocks to the voluntary suspension of our disbelief. From this standpoint, one may argue that the very best style is that which looks for all the world like no style at all.
Style, along with the various technical matters that come under that heading, is difficult for me to write about, very possibly because my own approach has always been instinctive rather than methodical. From my earliest beginnings as a writer, it was always a relatively easy matter for me to write smoothly. My prose rhythms and dialogue were good. Just as there are natural athletes, so was I — from the standpoint of technique, at least — a natural writer.
This gave me a considerable advantage in breaking into print. I can see now that a lot of my early pulp stories had rather little to recommend them in terms of plot and characterization, but the fact that they were relatively well-written in comparison to the efforts of other tyros got me sales I wouldn’t have had otherwise. But a smooth style in and of itself is no guarantee of true success. For years I was accustomed to a particular message in letters of rejection. “The author writes well,” my agent would be advised. “This book didn’t work for us, but we’d be very interested in seeing something else he’s written.” That sort of response is encouraging the first few times you receive it. When it becomes a common refrain, all it sparks is frustration.
I know several writers who were similarly gifted stylistically and who report similar early experiences. Over the years we’ve worked to develop our abilities at plotting and characterization, though for some of us the disparity is still in evidence. In my own case, it hasn’t been all that long since an editor last explained how much he liked my writing — but that he didn’t like my book.
Other writers have the opposite problem. A friend of mine has an extraordinary natural sense of story, coupled with an enthusiasm for his plots and characters which communicates itself in the drive of his narrative. From a technical standpoint, however, he’s almost numbingly maladroit. His first novel was rewritten several times prior to publication, and received extensive textual editing from his publisher; even so, it remained a crude book. He has improved considerably since then, but to this day, ten books later, he is still very much the heavy-handed writer. Nevertheless, his books are almost invariably best sellers because of the particular strengths they do possess.
My point here is that someone like my friend, who has had to teach himself so much about the nuts-and-bolts side of writing, might well be better equipped than I to discuss the subject. It’s harder to discourse effectively upon something when one’s approach to it has always been intuitive.
That said, perhaps we can have a look at a handful of subjects which fit under the general umbrella of style. Perhaps you’ll find something here of some value, whether you yourself are a natural literary athlete or whether you have to work very hard to make it look easy.
Grammar, Diction and Usage
A fiction writer doesn’t have to be the strictest grammarian around. He can get by without a clear understanding of the subjunctive. Indeed, the sort of slavish devotion to the rules of grammar that might gladden the heart of an old-fashioned English teacher can get in the way of the novelist, giving his prose a stilted quality and leading his characters to talk not as people speak but as they ought to.
In my own case, I’m aware that I make certain grammatical errors, some of them deliberate, others through sheer ignorance. I have a copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, a book I unhesitatingly recommend, and yet months pass without my referring to it. When I’m hammering away a the typewriter keys, trying to get a scene written and to get it right, I’m not remotely inclined to interrupt the flow for the sake of what Churchill called “the sort of errant pedantry up with which I will not put.”
In first-person writing, I would maintain that the writer is fully justified in breaking grammatical rules and regulations at will. How the narrator expresses himself, the words he uses and the way he puts them together, is part of the manner in which his character is defined. I will argue further that a first-person narrator may follow a particular precept on one page and violate it on another. If our characters are to be lifelike, we can hardly demand absolute consistency of them.
The same principle applies, and rather more obviously, in dialogue. Most people don’t express themselves the way English teachers wish they would, and it’s part of the novelist’s license to make their speech as grammatical or ungrammatical as suits his purpose.