I am always attracted to writers whose style, whose attention to sentences, inspires me to do better work or to return, revived, to an old draft of a story.
Such is the case with The Enigma Variations by Andre Aciman. I wasn't sure if I wanted to read a novel about a bisexual man or perhaps more accurately a man who at various stages of his life goes from a schoolboy crush to lust and jealousy with people of each sex--along with regret, fear, sadness, and worry and all the emotions that make sexuality so complicated.
But I am glad I stayed with it. I must confess to having been intrigued by the title, an allusion to Elgar's piece of music, and even more to the multiculturally rich background of the author: He was born in Alexandria,Egypt of Turkish-Jewish parents who spoke French at home and introduced their son to Greek, English and Italian, which he then perfected when the family moved to Rome. Then as an adult, Aciman came to America, to Harvard to study comparative literature, which he now teaches in New York City.
It is no surprise to learn from this latest of his books that he is an expert on Proust: the intense, closely observed and analyzed states of feeling that become almost claustrophobic as we follow a man named Paul at various stages of his life.
The recurring theme of the five interlocking stories that comprise this novel is one of memory and desire, as our narrator takes us deeply into his mind and soul as he moves from a gay to a straight experience and back again, suggesting that these terms and categories are useless in describing, like Shakespeare's sonnets, all the emotions associated with lust and longing, with men and women,with time and regret, with joy and sadness.
Aciman, a master of subtly described arousal, shows us that all of us are various people at various points in our life.
In an elegant style that is almost hypnotic, Aciman has crafted a very original type of novel analyzing in agonizing detail what being in love is like, from various perspectives. It is also, my students will be happy to learn, full of those long sentences that I admire and urge upon them.
So, even if you at first find that the desire analyzed here turns you off, you will find the tone poetic--wistful and melancholy--and the style and the central character memorable.
Showing posts with label prose style. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prose style. Show all posts
Monday, July 10, 2017
Saturday, June 10, 2017
Hemingway and Writing
Three new biographical studies of Ernest Hemingway are out, even though they may not be needed. The life of this overly celebrated writer has been thoroughly researched by many others. I am more interested in the writer than the man who became a brand name.
Hemingway remains, says Fintan O'Toole in the current New York Review of Books, a fascinating object of study: behind his "outlandish public image," O'Toole says, is a trauma caused by World War I and a complex sexuality that resulted in a hypermasculine swagger that I have commented on before. He became, in the words of his third wife, a "loathsome human being."
But was he also a genius? How influential is he today as a writer? Well, he has been a major influence on the modern short story, especially its style; he was a master of the story form and produced at least three significant novels (The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and Old Man and the Sea) that reflect his cold-blooded view of human life in memorable tough-guy prose. Although he re-defined American prose fiction in the mid-20th century, he also wrote much that was disappointingly mediocre, the result probably of his drinking and multiple injuries.
Still, in his prime, Hemingway was a serious reader and fine craftsman who gave some valuable advice to writers. Having revised the ending of A Farewell to Arms 39 times, as he said in an interview, he reminds us of the importance of crafting each sentence carefully and revising the resulting paragraph.
Revise endlessly, he said: "The main thing is to know what to leave out."
He mastered the iceberg theory of literature whereby three-fourths of what happens in a story is unstated, implied, as in his famous six-word story: "For sale: Baby shoes, never worn."
"The way you can tell if you are good," he said, "is by what you can throw away." He claimed to throw away nine out of ten stories he wrote.
Since all style is personal, he said, "don't ever imitate anybody." Writers, of course, steal ideas freely from one another but not style, which has to suit the subject, as it does in Hemingway; it also reflects the author behind the words.
I think the wannabe author can learn many techniques from reading Hemingway, such as the use of dialogue to carry the action and the value of concise, understated sentences. His work is a reminder of the axiom that suggestion is more powerful than statement.
Hemingway remains, says Fintan O'Toole in the current New York Review of Books, a fascinating object of study: behind his "outlandish public image," O'Toole says, is a trauma caused by World War I and a complex sexuality that resulted in a hypermasculine swagger that I have commented on before. He became, in the words of his third wife, a "loathsome human being."
But was he also a genius? How influential is he today as a writer? Well, he has been a major influence on the modern short story, especially its style; he was a master of the story form and produced at least three significant novels (The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and Old Man and the Sea) that reflect his cold-blooded view of human life in memorable tough-guy prose. Although he re-defined American prose fiction in the mid-20th century, he also wrote much that was disappointingly mediocre, the result probably of his drinking and multiple injuries.
Still, in his prime, Hemingway was a serious reader and fine craftsman who gave some valuable advice to writers. Having revised the ending of A Farewell to Arms 39 times, as he said in an interview, he reminds us of the importance of crafting each sentence carefully and revising the resulting paragraph.
Revise endlessly, he said: "The main thing is to know what to leave out."
He mastered the iceberg theory of literature whereby three-fourths of what happens in a story is unstated, implied, as in his famous six-word story: "For sale: Baby shoes, never worn."
"The way you can tell if you are good," he said, "is by what you can throw away." He claimed to throw away nine out of ten stories he wrote.
Since all style is personal, he said, "don't ever imitate anybody." Writers, of course, steal ideas freely from one another but not style, which has to suit the subject, as it does in Hemingway; it also reflects the author behind the words.
I think the wannabe author can learn many techniques from reading Hemingway, such as the use of dialogue to carry the action and the value of concise, understated sentences. His work is a reminder of the axiom that suggestion is more powerful than statement.
Friday, March 20, 2015
Overlooked prose stylists
As I read Laura Snyder's recent book, Eye of the Beholder, today, I saw what I am always on the lookout for: a lucid prose style that doesn't call attention to itself but indicates not only careful thought and word choice but the kind of revision I admire. The language is precisely chosen and the sentence patterns varied.
Her non-fiction book, a study of Vermeer, the painter, and van Leewenhoek, his scientific friend in Delft who invented the microscope, explains, from the very first page, details of 17th century life in Holland clearly, with a mastery of information that is presented without pretension.
Even if the subject had not interested me, I would have read on and perhaps purchased the book--except that our house has too many books. Snyder is one of those historians who can explain complex issues in an interesting way, dropping little tidbits of information along with way, such as the origin of the word lens (it comes, she says, from the shape of the lentil!).
On the way home from the bookstore, I thought of several non-fiction writers who have the gift she shares with David McCullough and others: I think of the lesser known Peter Brown, historian of late antiquity, and R. W. Southern, who wrote about the Middle Ages with elegance.
My wife, Lynn, mentioned several writers of the recent past she loves who are overlooked today but are masters of style. One is James Herriott, the Yorkshire veterinarian who wrote several books on animals; another of her favorites is the detective writer Dorothy L. Sayers, who created Lord Peter Wimsey. The list could go on. Neither writer is fashionable these days.
In fiction, I admire (among the Brits) David Lodge's often comic style, Pat Barker and the late Anthony Burgess, not because of A Clockwork Orange, which is inventive, but his lesser known fictions. Among U.S. writers, there is Tobias Wolff, who, along with Mary Gordon, Julia Cameron, and Tim Parks, is always worth reading.
Why? Is preferring a certain prose style a matter of taste? Perhaps. Any writer who follows the advice of Harold Ross, founding editor of the New Yorker, can't go wrong: "If you can't be amusing, be interesting." For me, this means being aware of the reader at all times and making what is complex or arcane clear--as good teachers do. And it helps to entertain a bit, too, to write with a light, or at least human, touch.
Her non-fiction book, a study of Vermeer, the painter, and van Leewenhoek, his scientific friend in Delft who invented the microscope, explains, from the very first page, details of 17th century life in Holland clearly, with a mastery of information that is presented without pretension.
Even if the subject had not interested me, I would have read on and perhaps purchased the book--except that our house has too many books. Snyder is one of those historians who can explain complex issues in an interesting way, dropping little tidbits of information along with way, such as the origin of the word lens (it comes, she says, from the shape of the lentil!).
On the way home from the bookstore, I thought of several non-fiction writers who have the gift she shares with David McCullough and others: I think of the lesser known Peter Brown, historian of late antiquity, and R. W. Southern, who wrote about the Middle Ages with elegance.
My wife, Lynn, mentioned several writers of the recent past she loves who are overlooked today but are masters of style. One is James Herriott, the Yorkshire veterinarian who wrote several books on animals; another of her favorites is the detective writer Dorothy L. Sayers, who created Lord Peter Wimsey. The list could go on. Neither writer is fashionable these days.
In fiction, I admire (among the Brits) David Lodge's often comic style, Pat Barker and the late Anthony Burgess, not because of A Clockwork Orange, which is inventive, but his lesser known fictions. Among U.S. writers, there is Tobias Wolff, who, along with Mary Gordon, Julia Cameron, and Tim Parks, is always worth reading.
Why? Is preferring a certain prose style a matter of taste? Perhaps. Any writer who follows the advice of Harold Ross, founding editor of the New Yorker, can't go wrong: "If you can't be amusing, be interesting." For me, this means being aware of the reader at all times and making what is complex or arcane clear--as good teachers do. And it helps to entertain a bit, too, to write with a light, or at least human, touch.
Thursday, June 12, 2014
'Open Wider'
As I prepare to teach a six-week writing workshop, I decided to repeat a few comments from an earlier post, "In praise of long sentences."
Pico Iyer, among many other prose stylists today, has written in favor of long sentences that are expansive: they open the reader, he says, to various levels of meaning, enabling him or her to go down into herself and into complex ideas that can't be squeezed into an "either/or."
I was glad to see Iyer sing the praises of the long sentence, something I regularly do with my students, even if they are puzzled or turned off by sentences (like this one) that seem to ramble, like speech, or even if they fear that a long sentence like this might be ungrammatical (it ain't) or worry, in the way every writer worries, that such writing is confusing, artificial or pretentious, which it may be if it isn't done carefully, with balanced clauses and phrases and perhaps a dash of humor. And if it isn't balanced by shorter sentences.
Am I showing off? Yes, for good reason.
It's not that I want students of writing to imitate the sometimes unreadable sentences of Henry James; it's just that I want them to have options.
So much depends on a writer's purpose. A descriptive sentence, if it opens a travel article, might be suitable for a long, cumulative sentence (which begins with the main idea, then accumulates modifiers). It would catch the reader's attention. Or it might suggest simultaneous action in a story in a way that a group of shorter sentences could not.
No one would recommend using a lot of really long sentences, just as no one would use James Joyce's Ulysses as a model of prose style.
There are times that a writer might prefer a trailing, expansive sentence that tells the reader, "open wider, please," like a dentist, "so I can more fully explore this thought with you." But we have to be careful not to overdo such long, trailing sentences and to balance them with simpler ones to allow readers to catch their breath.
Writers at all levels learn a vast amount from reading carefully and paying attention to how skillful writers shape their sentences.
P.S. Here I want to put in a word for my wife, Lynn Schiffhorst, who has her own blog: startingfromthesky.blogspot.com. You might like to check out her style and see how it differs from mine. She has written a number of books for children, available on Amazon Kindle.
Pico Iyer, among many other prose stylists today, has written in favor of long sentences that are expansive: they open the reader, he says, to various levels of meaning, enabling him or her to go down into herself and into complex ideas that can't be squeezed into an "either/or."
I was glad to see Iyer sing the praises of the long sentence, something I regularly do with my students, even if they are puzzled or turned off by sentences (like this one) that seem to ramble, like speech, or even if they fear that a long sentence like this might be ungrammatical (it ain't) or worry, in the way every writer worries, that such writing is confusing, artificial or pretentious, which it may be if it isn't done carefully, with balanced clauses and phrases and perhaps a dash of humor. And if it isn't balanced by shorter sentences.
Am I showing off? Yes, for good reason.
It's not that I want students of writing to imitate the sometimes unreadable sentences of Henry James; it's just that I want them to have options.
So much depends on a writer's purpose. A descriptive sentence, if it opens a travel article, might be suitable for a long, cumulative sentence (which begins with the main idea, then accumulates modifiers). It would catch the reader's attention. Or it might suggest simultaneous action in a story in a way that a group of shorter sentences could not.
No one would recommend using a lot of really long sentences, just as no one would use James Joyce's Ulysses as a model of prose style.
There are times that a writer might prefer a trailing, expansive sentence that tells the reader, "open wider, please," like a dentist, "so I can more fully explore this thought with you." But we have to be careful not to overdo such long, trailing sentences and to balance them with simpler ones to allow readers to catch their breath.
Writers at all levels learn a vast amount from reading carefully and paying attention to how skillful writers shape their sentences.
P.S. Here I want to put in a word for my wife, Lynn Schiffhorst, who has her own blog: startingfromthesky.blogspot.com. You might like to check out her style and see how it differs from mine. She has written a number of books for children, available on Amazon Kindle.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
What is Good Fiction?
Although I know the question I posed is impossible to answer in a single word or sentence, since it would take a full-length book to address some of its implications--and even that would likely end up being largely subjective--I am, having just read the latest novel by Julian Barnes, tempted to respond with one word: intelligent.
The Sense of an Ending, which at 163 pages can be completed in one sitting, is an amazing achievement. The few main characters come alive with sprightly dialogue, an equally lively narrator-protagonist, and deft description. For example, Barnes describes the first sight of the "Fruitcake" who haunts his protagonist's life as follows: "About five foot two with rounded, muscular calves, mid-brown hair to her shoulders, blue-grey eyes behind blue-framed spectacles, and a quick yet withholding smile." That tells us a lot in one sentence.
The narrative, which is filled with reflections of regret, nostalgia, and desire, moves along quickly, with a surprise at the end, and manages to deal with some important ideas, chiefly time and memory but also love, death, suicide, sex, jealousy, and aging, among others. It is a clever book, as the Brits would say, and it is very English in many ways.
When I pick up such a novel, I look, of course, at the opening to see if it is original or engaging enough to interest me. I look at the style, and here I find sentences that unfold with effortless ease, conveying an intelligent male narrator who makes every word, every sentence count. It is all done with what the Italians call "sprezzatura."
The tone with its questions is elegiac, reflecting on the vagaries of memory. On the first page: "What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed." This becomes a running theme, elegantly stated yet conversational, as if we are overhearing a man look back forty years to the friends of his youth and wonder if he ever knew them; and we the readers are flattered to be included in his ruminations, which are by turns witty, bawdy, colorful, and always analytical as we think, too, about the slippery nature of time.
Tony, the novel's narrator, asks, "If we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries and pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?"
It is rare to find a novel of ideas that has real feeling conveyed so concisely, but then this is Barnes' 14th novel and 17th book: he knows what he is doing. His style is enjoyable, varied, a model for writers, yet we hardly notice it as we move swiftly to the conclusion of the book, where we find no easy answers to the many questions the narrator has raised. "Time grounds us, then confounds us," we are told.
I can easily imagine a film (for viewers of a certain age) based on this novel starring Bill Nighy, with his clipped, detached, bemused manner, and directed by Steven Poliakoff, who has done a lot of films involving time and memory. He would enjoy the question posed so well here: How far can we go re-imagining our younger selves?
The Sense of an Ending, which at 163 pages can be completed in one sitting, is an amazing achievement. The few main characters come alive with sprightly dialogue, an equally lively narrator-protagonist, and deft description. For example, Barnes describes the first sight of the "Fruitcake" who haunts his protagonist's life as follows: "About five foot two with rounded, muscular calves, mid-brown hair to her shoulders, blue-grey eyes behind blue-framed spectacles, and a quick yet withholding smile." That tells us a lot in one sentence.
The narrative, which is filled with reflections of regret, nostalgia, and desire, moves along quickly, with a surprise at the end, and manages to deal with some important ideas, chiefly time and memory but also love, death, suicide, sex, jealousy, and aging, among others. It is a clever book, as the Brits would say, and it is very English in many ways.
When I pick up such a novel, I look, of course, at the opening to see if it is original or engaging enough to interest me. I look at the style, and here I find sentences that unfold with effortless ease, conveying an intelligent male narrator who makes every word, every sentence count. It is all done with what the Italians call "sprezzatura."
The tone with its questions is elegiac, reflecting on the vagaries of memory. On the first page: "What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed." This becomes a running theme, elegantly stated yet conversational, as if we are overhearing a man look back forty years to the friends of his youth and wonder if he ever knew them; and we the readers are flattered to be included in his ruminations, which are by turns witty, bawdy, colorful, and always analytical as we think, too, about the slippery nature of time.
Tony, the novel's narrator, asks, "If we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries and pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?"
It is rare to find a novel of ideas that has real feeling conveyed so concisely, but then this is Barnes' 14th novel and 17th book: he knows what he is doing. His style is enjoyable, varied, a model for writers, yet we hardly notice it as we move swiftly to the conclusion of the book, where we find no easy answers to the many questions the narrator has raised. "Time grounds us, then confounds us," we are told.
I can easily imagine a film (for viewers of a certain age) based on this novel starring Bill Nighy, with his clipped, detached, bemused manner, and directed by Steven Poliakoff, who has done a lot of films involving time and memory. He would enjoy the question posed so well here: How far can we go re-imagining our younger selves?
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Life Sentences
I was happy to see in today's New York Times an article by Jhumpa Lahiri, "My Life's Sentences," on the importance and beauty of sentences.
This is a topic I explore with my writing students each year. Like Lahiri, I save memorable sentences, and I agree with his summation: It is "a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a person, a place, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do."
He and I share the habit of fussing with sentences until the meaning or character emerges; I am not one who writes a draft, then revises each sentence so that it is as polished, mature, and expressive as I can make it. The joy in writing comes with shaping each sentence and discovering new, maybe even transcendent things.
Can this art be taught? That's a question I have long wrestled with. Wide reading and the absorption of the work of many great stylists can certainly affect one's emerging style, but this assumes years of reading that many would-be writers are unable to bring to their work. Imitating the work of others can be futile and counter-productive.
Sometimes too much education inhibits good writing. I am thinking of academic writing and of a piece by Bruce Cole I recently read. He laments the fact that few academic scholars "survive the tyranny of their doctorates" to reach a wider audience. I remember how my own dissertation had to conform to the director's ornate, almost pretentious phrasing and how my articles and reviews on 17th century literature, aimed at other experts, had to sound equally artificial, slightly inflated, and trendy. And I learned in the university that writing intellectually challenging material in clear prose for the general reader, as David McCullough and Garry Wills admirably do--despite Wills having a Ph.D.--is not good for one's career.
Barbara Tuchman once confessed that, if she had gone for a Ph.D., it would have ruined her writing capacity. She went on to produce numerous award-winning historical studies. I wonder how many graduate students who want to be writers see that scholarly writing is not in their best interest. I admire storytellers like Tuchman and McCullough who do solid research but keep an eye out for the wider culture and audience. Alas, there are too few of them.
In the postmodern world of academia, scholarly articles and books are often so deadly in their style--impersonal, passive, wordy, pretentious--that they become almost parodies of themselves. The language of the social sciences has infected literary criticism, which has been dominated by issues of race, gender, and class for the past two decades. At least in this country. English academics (at least when they write journalistic pieces) are more readable and fresh.
The main problem with academic jargon is that students, encouraged to read such articles, pick up this disembodied, overheated language in an effort to sound more impressive. The ordinary, direct beauty of an English sentence disappears. Here is an example of a sentence a former university colleague shared with me recently from one of his honors students:
"It can be theorized that the emergence of the modern femme fatale archetype was valorized as an integral, even essential, part of the bourgeois culture in nineteenth-century Europe." Can you imagine 20 pages of this sort of thing? The student apparently thought this imitation of what he or she had read was good writing.
Yet if I were to tell the student who wrote this to "use your own language" and avoid "imitating the academic style of what you have read," he would probably be puzzled and/or offended, assuming I was implying plagiarism.
Is there a chance of bringing such ambitious students back down to earth, immersing them in The New Yorker and other journals in which writers produce memorable, witty, or descriptive sentences that make a difference both for the writer and the reader? I would like to think so--if the teacher values good prose style, which begins with respect for the magic of the individual sentence, as well as research. That is, if the teacher remains human.
This is a topic I explore with my writing students each year. Like Lahiri, I save memorable sentences, and I agree with his summation: It is "a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a person, a place, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do."
He and I share the habit of fussing with sentences until the meaning or character emerges; I am not one who writes a draft, then revises each sentence so that it is as polished, mature, and expressive as I can make it. The joy in writing comes with shaping each sentence and discovering new, maybe even transcendent things.
Can this art be taught? That's a question I have long wrestled with. Wide reading and the absorption of the work of many great stylists can certainly affect one's emerging style, but this assumes years of reading that many would-be writers are unable to bring to their work. Imitating the work of others can be futile and counter-productive.
Sometimes too much education inhibits good writing. I am thinking of academic writing and of a piece by Bruce Cole I recently read. He laments the fact that few academic scholars "survive the tyranny of their doctorates" to reach a wider audience. I remember how my own dissertation had to conform to the director's ornate, almost pretentious phrasing and how my articles and reviews on 17th century literature, aimed at other experts, had to sound equally artificial, slightly inflated, and trendy. And I learned in the university that writing intellectually challenging material in clear prose for the general reader, as David McCullough and Garry Wills admirably do--despite Wills having a Ph.D.--is not good for one's career.
Barbara Tuchman once confessed that, if she had gone for a Ph.D., it would have ruined her writing capacity. She went on to produce numerous award-winning historical studies. I wonder how many graduate students who want to be writers see that scholarly writing is not in their best interest. I admire storytellers like Tuchman and McCullough who do solid research but keep an eye out for the wider culture and audience. Alas, there are too few of them.
In the postmodern world of academia, scholarly articles and books are often so deadly in their style--impersonal, passive, wordy, pretentious--that they become almost parodies of themselves. The language of the social sciences has infected literary criticism, which has been dominated by issues of race, gender, and class for the past two decades. At least in this country. English academics (at least when they write journalistic pieces) are more readable and fresh.
The main problem with academic jargon is that students, encouraged to read such articles, pick up this disembodied, overheated language in an effort to sound more impressive. The ordinary, direct beauty of an English sentence disappears. Here is an example of a sentence a former university colleague shared with me recently from one of his honors students:
"It can be theorized that the emergence of the modern femme fatale archetype was valorized as an integral, even essential, part of the bourgeois culture in nineteenth-century Europe." Can you imagine 20 pages of this sort of thing? The student apparently thought this imitation of what he or she had read was good writing.
Yet if I were to tell the student who wrote this to "use your own language" and avoid "imitating the academic style of what you have read," he would probably be puzzled and/or offended, assuming I was implying plagiarism.
Is there a chance of bringing such ambitious students back down to earth, immersing them in The New Yorker and other journals in which writers produce memorable, witty, or descriptive sentences that make a difference both for the writer and the reader? I would like to think so--if the teacher values good prose style, which begins with respect for the magic of the individual sentence, as well as research. That is, if the teacher remains human.
Monday, January 16, 2012
In Praise of Long Sentences
I was glad to find Pico Iyer, in a recent issue of the LA Times, singing the praises of the long sentence, something I regularly do with my workshop students, even if they are puzzled or turned off by sentences (like this one) that seem to ramble, like speech, even if they fear that a long sentence like this might be ungrammatical, which it ain't, or worry that such writing is artificial, which it might be if it isn't done carefully, with balanced phrases and clauses that pile up to amplify a main point.
I am grateful to Mary Ann DiStefano of Mad About Words for today's weekly newsletter, which provided a link to Iyer's piece.
Iyer likes the long sentence, balanced, of course, with shorter ones, because he sees it as a protest against the speed of information that comes at us from all sources. He wonders if telegraphic writing is "a way of keeping our thinking simplistic." Well, it can be.
The long sentence is expansive in the way it opens the reader to various levels of meaning and ambiguity, enabling him or her to descend deeper into herself and into complex ideas that "won't be squeezed into an either/or."
The longish sentences I share with my students come from fiction (T. C. Boyle, among others) and non-fiction (Gay Talese, among others). As I struggle with my own piece of fiction, I find myself using shorter sentences than usual because I want to capture the speech of my anxious narrator, and I wonder if the longer sentence is not more suited to "long form journalism" or discursive non-fiction. It all depends.
Some of the really long sentences I have collected have been pretentious or unreadable (as in Henry James), but most are wonderful ways of listening to writers as they take us, in Iyer's words, "further from the predictable and normal and deeper into dimensions I hadn't dared to contemplate."
Of course, everything depends on the writer's subject, but writers need stylistic options. They can write trailing, expansive sentences that tell the reader, like a dentist, "Open wider," so I can probe more thoroughly; but they have to be careful not to overdo these and to balance them with shorter sentences so that readers can catch their breath. Writing just one such sentence can be fun.
If anyone reading this has a long, expansive, descriptive sentence (written in the last 20 years or so) worth sharing, send it to me at my e-mail: schiffhorst@yahoo.com.
I am grateful to Mary Ann DiStefano of Mad About Words for today's weekly newsletter, which provided a link to Iyer's piece.
Iyer likes the long sentence, balanced, of course, with shorter ones, because he sees it as a protest against the speed of information that comes at us from all sources. He wonders if telegraphic writing is "a way of keeping our thinking simplistic." Well, it can be.
The long sentence is expansive in the way it opens the reader to various levels of meaning and ambiguity, enabling him or her to descend deeper into herself and into complex ideas that "won't be squeezed into an either/or."
The longish sentences I share with my students come from fiction (T. C. Boyle, among others) and non-fiction (Gay Talese, among others). As I struggle with my own piece of fiction, I find myself using shorter sentences than usual because I want to capture the speech of my anxious narrator, and I wonder if the longer sentence is not more suited to "long form journalism" or discursive non-fiction. It all depends.
Some of the really long sentences I have collected have been pretentious or unreadable (as in Henry James), but most are wonderful ways of listening to writers as they take us, in Iyer's words, "further from the predictable and normal and deeper into dimensions I hadn't dared to contemplate."
Of course, everything depends on the writer's subject, but writers need stylistic options. They can write trailing, expansive sentences that tell the reader, like a dentist, "Open wider," so I can probe more thoroughly; but they have to be careful not to overdo these and to balance them with shorter sentences so that readers can catch their breath. Writing just one such sentence can be fun.
If anyone reading this has a long, expansive, descriptive sentence (written in the last 20 years or so) worth sharing, send it to me at my e-mail: schiffhorst@yahoo.com.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
What is Style?
Listening to Tony Bennett, singing with various luminaries on his "Duets" album this week, I am not aware that I am listening to an 80-year-old legend (now 85 or so) who outshines most of his singing partners. I hear only the familiar voice of a master vocalist, and I appreciate him now more than I did 40-plus years ago.
He's a master stylist, especially in the way he, k.d.lang and a great jazz trumpeter turn the old song "Because of You" into something memorable. In part because it is slow and you savor every word, every note. Something ordinary is turned into the extraordinary. Bennett expresses great feeling, an intelligent, mellow feeling and a sound that's ageless.
That's, I suppose, what style is: something indefinable, something to do with feelings truly felt and expressed artfully, perfectly, uniquely. It's not something you can learn.
I heard it again this week in one of Don McLean's old songs, "Crying," a Ray Orbison classic that McLean turns into an unforgettable aria.
As I think about style in general, about writing style, which I aim to teach each year, I realize again how impossible it is to explain; it is there to be experienced. Some analysis of sentence structure and word choice are important in any discussion of prose style, but the overall tone is unique to each individual who writes. Some have a keen ear for language and rhythm, just as some develop an ear for music; with practice, they can display their own style. A few will become masters.
Tony Bennett and Don McLean are masters. I am grateful to have re-discovered their art and their ability to slow down the pace of my life with their songs.
He's a master stylist, especially in the way he, k.d.lang and a great jazz trumpeter turn the old song "Because of You" into something memorable. In part because it is slow and you savor every word, every note. Something ordinary is turned into the extraordinary. Bennett expresses great feeling, an intelligent, mellow feeling and a sound that's ageless.
That's, I suppose, what style is: something indefinable, something to do with feelings truly felt and expressed artfully, perfectly, uniquely. It's not something you can learn.
I heard it again this week in one of Don McLean's old songs, "Crying," a Ray Orbison classic that McLean turns into an unforgettable aria.
As I think about style in general, about writing style, which I aim to teach each year, I realize again how impossible it is to explain; it is there to be experienced. Some analysis of sentence structure and word choice are important in any discussion of prose style, but the overall tone is unique to each individual who writes. Some have a keen ear for language and rhythm, just as some develop an ear for music; with practice, they can display their own style. A few will become masters.
Tony Bennett and Don McLean are masters. I am grateful to have re-discovered their art and their ability to slow down the pace of my life with their songs.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Writing Sentences without Stanley Fish
I bought the new book by Stanley Fish, "How to Write a Sentence..." in the hope that I might gain some new insights and examples to use in my upcoming workshop on prose style that starts July 7.
I was a bit disappointed by the opening chapters: they taught me little that was new, and I found the emphasis on mastering certain sentence patterns or forms, and then imitating them, to be restrictive. And I was not won over by Fish the stylist; his writing seemed full of abstractions, academic jargon, and cliches.
Thanks to the helpful webite Arts and Letters daily, I happened to see an article in The New Criterion by a master stylist, Joseph Epstein, who reinforced my unhappiness with Fish's book, calling its author an "undistinguished writer" who produces some ungainly sentences. I felt vindicated.
Not that I find the book worthless. I, too, am a collector of memorable sentences and believe in sharing them with students, though my tastes differ from those of Fish, who likes Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Wolff, and several other great writers whose style do not seem to provide good models for emerging writers.
This raises the question: for whom does Fish write? I assume, as a good teacher, he wants to help the less experienced reader learn how to write more skillfully. But he seems more concerned with displaying his own deconstructive skills, analyzing sentences with a certain jaunty confidence (Epstein's phrase). His advice--to ignore the rules (which ones?) and focus on the limited (?) number of relationships words, phrases, and clauses can enter into--seems odd since the the number is unlimited. Nor can he tell us what a good sentence is.
Fish's chief argument--that "without form, content cannot emerge"--is certainly arguable, as Epstein shows (content usually dictates the form of what we write, not the other way around). And the emphasis on imitation is questioned: if a form or type of sentence is imitable, it is (Epstein says) probably stale and best avoided; for him, good writers create their own forms.
I'm sure I have learned some lessons from this book about the way I will NOT conduct my writing workshop. And as for good examples of great sentences, I don't find many in Fish's short opus. I would say to would-be writers: save your money. Read good prose and write as much as you can. Avoid books of advice on writing and style, especially by writers who are not master stylists.
I was a bit disappointed by the opening chapters: they taught me little that was new, and I found the emphasis on mastering certain sentence patterns or forms, and then imitating them, to be restrictive. And I was not won over by Fish the stylist; his writing seemed full of abstractions, academic jargon, and cliches.
Thanks to the helpful webite Arts and Letters daily, I happened to see an article in The New Criterion by a master stylist, Joseph Epstein, who reinforced my unhappiness with Fish's book, calling its author an "undistinguished writer" who produces some ungainly sentences. I felt vindicated.
Not that I find the book worthless. I, too, am a collector of memorable sentences and believe in sharing them with students, though my tastes differ from those of Fish, who likes Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Wolff, and several other great writers whose style do not seem to provide good models for emerging writers.
This raises the question: for whom does Fish write? I assume, as a good teacher, he wants to help the less experienced reader learn how to write more skillfully. But he seems more concerned with displaying his own deconstructive skills, analyzing sentences with a certain jaunty confidence (Epstein's phrase). His advice--to ignore the rules (which ones?) and focus on the limited (?) number of relationships words, phrases, and clauses can enter into--seems odd since the the number is unlimited. Nor can he tell us what a good sentence is.
Fish's chief argument--that "without form, content cannot emerge"--is certainly arguable, as Epstein shows (content usually dictates the form of what we write, not the other way around). And the emphasis on imitation is questioned: if a form or type of sentence is imitable, it is (Epstein says) probably stale and best avoided; for him, good writers create their own forms.
I'm sure I have learned some lessons from this book about the way I will NOT conduct my writing workshop. And as for good examples of great sentences, I don't find many in Fish's short opus. I would say to would-be writers: save your money. Read good prose and write as much as you can. Avoid books of advice on writing and style, especially by writers who are not master stylists.
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