Style vs. Content

This being the week to review a work that was published sometime in past years, preferably before 2000, yu are already in a tingle of excitement at the possibility that this has given you yet another book project in the works to the point where you've even worked out a provisional draft of a proposal to help you guide the proper pieces into place.  For the year or so you have been alternating your reviews of newly published works with works published in the past, you hit upon the term Golden Oldies, which is unfortunate because Golden Oldies suggests radio disc jockeys playing hits from the past.  

You want a better title now, something to suggest books that were read and treasured, say, The Wind in the Willows or The Lord of the Flies, or reviled as, say, Atlas Shrugged or Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, a term that will attract rather than put off a potential reader.  Okay, start thinking.

The no-longer-Golden-Oldie you've chosen this week is a work much favored by you and a group of friends dating back to your late teens and early twenties to the point where you usurped the name of a convivial organization featured in the book and adapted it to your late-teen, emerging-twenties Southern California life style, even to the point of having chosen a beach just north of Sunset Blvd. and the Pacific Coast Highway, once known as Castle Rock, as a site for gatherings, picnics, and late-night bonfires.  In your then sensitivities, the beach had morphed from Castle Rock to Kiarian Beach.

Thus do these notes become even more a metaphor for the movement you have made from the Camel-smoking, Courvoissier-sipping emerging writer you sought to discover to the non-smoking Sierra Nevada pale ale-sipping individual you are generally recognized to be.  Reason?  The book in question is Thorne Smith's Rain in the Doorway, which is still quite wonderful to the point of having inspired a particular essay for the new book project.  The trampoline for discovery herein is the style, Smith's use of language.  If memory serves, he was an Ivy Leaguer, likely Dartmouth.  His constructions remind you of pastiches of Elizabethan (Liz I) conversation.  It is at its roots authorial point of view, Smith generously attributing thoughts, ideas, and notions to his characters, each of whom, by the way, is generously provided with an attitude if not an agenda.  In your earlier readings of this work, you thought nothing of the style, were perhaps (you are even now trying to remember) entranced with this style, certainly in admiration of it and as a consequence, probably trying to sound like it in you written and spoken speech.

Some few months ago, another friend from those days called you on the telephone after an absence of enough years that his voice was no longer familiar to you.  After a brief exchange of dialogue, he hung up on you with the announcement that you were still, repeat still an arrogant son of a bitch.  From his point of view and a postmodernist take on the conversation, he had every right to think of you as an arrogant son of a bitch because of your own response to the lines of dialogue he presented you with, the very first one being "This is a voice from the past, bearing tidings and omens."  Even now, at this writing, you can understand why such a greeting would cause your attitude switch to turn on.

We are, you believe, effected by verbal and written speech.  Now that you have spent some considerable time fuming, fussing, agonizing over style, somewhat the way you might at a notable restaurant with an intriguing menu, wondering which particular dish and which combination of offerings would best suit you, you were sent into extended reevaluation about what has become your writing style du jour and the ways by which you arrived at it, and indeed, the very way you define what style is (the way you write without thinking about it).

You had been on your way to where you are now when Virginia came into your life and she began making you aware of her own dramatic studies as a stage actor, even to the point of giving you one of her own texts, An Actor Prepares by Constantin Stanislavsky.

Whether the work is fiction or nonfiction, you "prepare" for it by becoming one or more attitudes, goals, personality types, from which point you remind yourself of books on opening-game chess strategy.  Moves, gambits, ambits, defenses.  Part of your response to the Smith text you are reading is to see yourself as you were when you first read him.  Often Smith "prepared" for writing by an injudicious intake of spiritus fermenti.  Although you have on occasions, written things while drunk, they so often proved illegible or unuseful that you moved further along the bell curve to the point of merely writing about drinking and, like Smith, persons who drank a good deal.  When you reached a point where your own drink-related behavior no longer amused you, it was time to move on to other discoveries.

There may be an entire thesis in the work of Thorne Smith; there may be only enough material for an essay or two.  In either case, if in real life he were a mean drunk or a bitter or cynical one, what emerges from his work is an archetype every bit as remarkable as the likes of Capt. Ahab or Wile E. Coyote, and it is this archetype you will pursue in your review and in the as-yet untitled book project.  Smith was an insightful, gentle man who provided a legion of readers with happiness and an imaginative inner life at a time when this country was greatly in need of happiness and an imaginative inner life.  It is a pleasure to wade through the intricacies of his style, parting the curtains as it were, to allow the unabashed good humor and inspiration to move forth and greet us with the courtly bow of a chorus acting as preface to an Elizabethan play.

Hearing Voices, or VoNP (Voice over Novel Protocol)

We gravitate to the work of certain composers of music and writers of stories because, regardless of their genre, regardless even of their style, they speak to us in a particularly resonant voice. You believe there is more of a sense of appreciation among composers of music than you find among writers, nevertheless it is clear to you that the protagonist of your current work in progress reads the work of John Shannon because your protagonist admires John Shannon's protagonist, Jack Liffey. The two men have little in common and it was your intent to keep it that way. Having decided who your protagonist's client was to be, your next clear goal was to have your protagonist's client hire him to do anything but track down and retrieve runaway children because that is what Jack Liffey does. Given the circumstances in which your protagonist lives, you thought it would be fun--and it is--to have your protagonist be hired by a housemaid, a decision that got the story in gear--until you had to decide what the maid wanted to hire your protagonist to do. You fussed and fumed for an agonizing day or two before you remembered a conversation with Karen Dellabarca, whom you met by accident while at Peet's. Knowing why the maid wanted to hire your protagonist is something like the earlier ads for the Porsche and other so-called sports cars, zero-to-sixty in a matter of seconds. The novel is at sixty and, although watchful for speed bumps, is purring along.

The thrust of this investigation resides in the first sentence (supra), relating to the why of gravitation. Your own guess is voice. It is not so much that you have been in an argument with Monte Schulz about voice; actually you've engaged him in his discussion--well, no, one does not really discuss with Monte, one waits for him to take a breath--of style, which is a different thing than voice.

Style is equivalent to dressing for an occasion, it is the clothing the story wears. Like voice, it leans some times on word choice, placement, a sense of rhythm and/or design; sometimes it may even impart the quality you find in voice that makes style so agreeable when it works. The quality of which you speak is heart, or perhaps connection, or resonance, or reverberation. Perhaps it is attitude, state of mind, the unspoken presence in subtext. Perhaps it is even all these things simultaneously;it is what represents the transcendental quality of spirit as opposed to mere text. This is the voice that calls, say Mozart or Cannonball Adderly, and particularly Maurice Ravel from the crowd, the force that makes Twain resonate while you could say of John Irving that he has always been two characters shy of a novel.

Is it the real turtle soup or only the mock?

imitation--a process followed by beginning and intermediate writers in which they sedulously copy the style, concept, and attitude of established writers whom they admire or whose success they envy.

Imitation is useful up to an educational point, but once that education is achieved, the writer needs to move on to the risky business of discovering the self that awaits. As the sale price of an individual hardcover title increases, it becomes particularly apparent that the reader is going to want to get originality, not imitation for the $26 price tag. Why would a reader want to spend $26 for an imitation of Annie Proulx when, for the same $26, the real thing could be had. The writer's best opportunity for finding an audience comes as a result of the risk taking that provides original voice and ideas of dramatic deployment. It is not only possible but admirable to learn from other writers, living or dead. The time comes, however, when this learning must be recast into the writer's own words and feelings.

Intermediate- and experienced-level writers, having discovered their voices, themes, and lines of dramatic attack run the risk of self-parody when they begin imitating themselves, the ideal being that each new project is a launching of the ship of discovery on the vast ocean of enthusiasm.

Words fail me.Really. Some thoughts on Problem Words

problem words--words that seem to enhance attributions but which actually muddy a given issue; descriptors intended to delineate but which instead blur; words meant to indicate an emphasis on degree of intensity; words which don't enhance the meaning for which they were used.

Problem words are the literary equivalent of hiring distant relatives; they mean well but ultimately do not understand what is expected of them. To say that John was quite annoying doesn't tell the reader much except that John exhibited qualities that were annoying to some undisclosed person or persons, and that whatever these qualities were, it is impossible to tell to whom or how his behavior caused annoyance; nothing is expressed or implied relative to the accuracy of the statement or its reflection on the reliability of the narrator. It is all right for John to in fact be annoying but the reader should have some relative sense of how this quality sets forth on its mission to annoy the beholder. Does John chew gum loudly? Does John tell racist or sexist jokes? Then there is the matter of the "quite." Does the "quite" mean "somewhat," "very," "considerably," or perhaps "intensely"?

Problem words and habit words dilute dramatic prose by injecting notes of vagueness and repetition into a narrative, venturing close to the verge of trespass into the terrains of cuteness, patronization, and affectation. Hint: You are in the literary equivalent of a police line-up, asked to identify miscreant problem words. Before you, in well-lit display, appear "rather," "very," "many," and "somewhat." You blink in recognition of your complicity in using all of them, then point an accusing finger.

Conflict of Interests

conflict--the clash of agendas between two or more forces within a story; thus the internal argument of conscience versus desires raging within one character as well as the differing views of appropriate behavior among opposing sides. Conflict is opposition writ large, the duel between dream and reality, between age and youth, between conservative and liberal. Conflict emerges from two wellsprings, the desire of an individual to survive, and the sense in story that every character believes he is right. Conditions that stand in the way of survival represent conflict. Conditions that emerge when opposing forces insist on the aptness and correctness of their positions are representations of conflict. Since its appearance and subsequent evolution, the human species has struggled against the conflicts of weather, starvation, illness. Since its reemergence in the middle of the twentieth century, Israel has been in one form or another of conflict with its neighbors, each side convinced of the validity of its position.

Story often begins with a character being propelled by a goal. The character collides with one or more obstacles, reversals that cause frustration and possible humiliation. These obstacles are often other characters with contrary agendas, but the obstacles may be emotional or philosophical forces within the principal character. In either case, the principle character must seek a way through or around the labyrinth of obstacle to some degree of settling the claims of the original goal.

Real life characters who identify their goals, then set methodically forth to achieve them are admirable, often becoming role models for emulation. They represent progression, but they do not represent story. A woman setting methodically forth to accomplish something rarely achieved by a woman is story because of the presence of obstacle, which in story becomes personified, even objectified.

Conflict begins in story with an individual who wants something to come to pass or who wants something not to come to pass. The conflict is engaged when the individual acts on his goal. The conflict becomes tangible and irreversible when a person or persons reacts to the individual acting on his goal.

Conflict always has consequences (if it does not, the narrative effect becomes reminiscent of the boy hollering wolf).



tension--a sense of potential menace, vulnerability, humiliation, conflict, or reversal hovering over characters as they pursue their agendas; a radiant quality of apprehension affecting readers who have come to have concerns about characters; a dramatic shading valued by some writers to a greater degree than actual conflict, tension is the flashing warning light, the buzzing smoke detector that warns of the consequences of conflict.

One instructive way to look at tension is as an atmosphere of dramatic tentativeness, of characters attempting to behave as though nothing is wrong, trying not to recognize the elephant in the living room. Thus by the indirection of subtext the reader will become apprehensive for the appropriate characters.

Another way of instruction: Tension is the tightening of hopes, anticipation, of thinking nothing more could go wrong, just before one more thing goes wrong. Tension is being in bed in a cheap hotel, awaiting the comforting presence of sleep, then hearing a shoe drop onto the floor in the room above, then waiting for the other shoe to drop. At length, the shoe does drop. But a moment later, one more shoe drops...


style--the appearance and expression of written personality; often enhanced by an adjective to connote spareness, flourish, orotundity, even baroque complexity. Style is the physical fingerprint of the writer, demonstrated by such traits as length of sentence, cadence, length of paragraph, use of adjectives and adverbs, punctuation; style may emerge as formal or informal, depending on such idiosyncrasies as "one" instead of "you."

Most writers have a pronounced style, making it possible to identify their work without signposts (Hemingway comes to mind as a prime example.) while other writers are said to write in a particular style, say journalistic or scholarly or discursive. Some styles, such as material appearing in The National Geographic, are so focused on clarity and accuracy that authorial presence tends to retreat into the background.

Style is what remains of a manuscript after it has been revised by the writer, winnowed to achieve for the author a sense of comfort, which is to say that all self-consciousness has been edited out. If the writer is not comfortable or happy with his style, happier results may be found by examining writers with agreeable styles, looking for things to include or remove from one's own work.

The difference between style and voice has its origins in the author's intent in writing the work; voice comes from an emotional and/or philosophical atmosphere. Style relates to the way the writer dots i's and crosses t's; voice is a direct reflection of the author's attitude.

Why?

Why should we (as readers/audience) care (about what we read/see)?

Some years back, never mind how many, as Ishmael of call me fame was heard to say, you became the editor of a writer who'd written his way up the ladder from the early half-a-cent-a-word pulp magazines to the point where he was turning out two hardcover mysteries a year in addition to being story editor an chief writer for a then major TV series, a man who still had time to write books for you, memoirs largely, such as The Pulp Jungle, reflections about the storytelling trade as well as collections of his earlier work. Around this time, and because you'd had a visible relationship with this writer, you were assigned the task of luring another writing machine away from his publisher, shifting his enormous productivity to the company that paid your weekly salary and expense account.

The first writer was Frank Gruber, the second Louis L'Amour. Neither was what you would call a prose stylist, which says it all for the placement of prose style in the hierarchy of writing DNA. Although largely unknown today, Gruber's work then found a target audience, attracted readers.

At the time of his death just a tad over twenty years ago, all hundred one of his books were in print. His works have literally sold hundreds of millions of copies, are still popular and finding new readers today.

They both substituted story for style; their work had so many other qualities that it did not require style on that level of aesthetic nicety. From each man I learned a way of looking at the central figure in a story as a platform for qualities and goals that caused readers to stop what they were doing in order to sign on to the text. Each writer spoke of traits and quirks that caused characters to get up a bit earlier to get a jump on the day or to relish an extra guilty hour of sleep when they should be up. Each had an instinctive appreciation for a person who needed to feel right about "things," which is to say the details, rules, and morality of life.

Jack Schaefer's Monte Walsh was such a man, a cowboy who wanted the life of the trail more than anything else, a man whose very epitaph spoke his life's story: A Good Man with a Horse.

The men and women we care about are men and women who care about others, who care about things, who have some built-in hard drive for what is right and what isn't. Stories are subversive by nature; they work away at the things these men and women know to be wrong, pushing them up against the odds of being forced to break from their code one or twice then pay the price of rue or guilt or some need to atone, some way to get back on track with The System, whatever The System may be.

We readers should care because the authors of works, even inelegant works, evoke care and concern within us. We writers should care enough about something to write about it with the passionate force of abandon. If storytelling is an exercise, it is an exercise of the muscles of passions and caring about things and loathing other things and empathizing with the conflicting forces within humans that drive them over boundaries.

A story does not have to be gift wrapped in style to leave a lasting effect on our reading self; it is gift enough that we have been made to care.

Through a Glass, Dorkly

βλεπομεν γαρ αρτι δι εσοπτρου εν αινιγματι is rendered in the King James Version of the Bible as: "For now we see through a glass, darkly."

There is no getting around it: As we age, our individual point of view shifts. We look upon a person, place, or thing differently than we may have earlier. Even our wish list undergoes a sea change. At one time in my life, the top items on my wish list were atlases, comic books, licorice cigarettes, and tops (spinning tops). That was then.

It is a fact that as we age, our eyes have more difficulty adjusting to shifts in light; things take longer than they once did; we may be creatures of the night in an interior sense, but we did not evolve to become night predators (except perhaps in the interior sense).

What we once did as mere performance we now tend to disclose, to elaborate, even to argue. This is a part of what the scholar/critic Edward W. Said referred to as late style. You would see a splendid example of late style in operation were the motion picture version of To Kill a Mocking Bird be remade using the same script, with the character of Boo Radley being portrayed by a 2007 version of Robert Duval rather than the Robert Duval of the original.

Have I a late style? The question is the writer's equivalent of checking one's physical body for lumps--you know; cancer. I may not have a late style, but I have had cancer and that experience alone has had some effect on such style as I may have; it affects the way I see, feel, and write about things.

Many persons of my age are well advanced into a vision of things best described as curmudgeonly. Although no stranger to such visions, I see my curmudgeonly self being deposed by enthusiasm, which carries with it hope, charity, wild-ass optimism, even forgiveness. 

 Accordingly, as it increasingly behooves one of my age to exercise, it also argues forcefully that I keep at my chosen work, not so much for the result of the work as for the ambiance of it. In The Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna: "To the work you are entitled, but not the fruits thereof." I take that to mean, among other delicious things, that if you go into your work with enthusiasm, you will meet the loveliest people, starting with yourself. You find your un-dorky self in that ambient landscape, and although the things you see may, from time to time sadden or sicken you, you will have found a late style that is evocative, elaborative, and in the best sense of the word, argumentative.

The best way to portray a character in a history, a biography, or a narrative entirely fictional in nature is to show that character in action, his or her attitudes toward the action at hand revealing more than any attempt at description.

The best way to have a MRI scan of one's own psyche is to compile a body of work, which may then be traced during off moments for clues relating to the health and life expectancy of that psyche.

"Oh wad some power the giftie gie us," Robert Burns suggested, "To see oursels as others see us/ 'Twould from many a blunder free us/ And foolish notion..."

Seeing our multiple selves--for we are indeed many--as other individuals as well as our multifarious self sees us is best accomplished through the work we do, not the work we do in order not to work. If we are ever to remove the cataracts forming over the lenses of self, we must experience the primal, drunken joy of laughter at our own human condition.

A Frank Discussion of Hot Dogs and Hot Dogging

It would be difficult to think of much less find a poet or writer who did not love language. This would be of a piece with finding a dancer who did not like music, a fine arts painter or photographer who did not care much for images, an actor who hated story.

A discussion about the love of language is most likely to be brought up in an atmosphere of self-justification (I love words and all the language.) and is never so present as when an editor wants us to cut some words from something we have written. Cuts are painful, a writer will tell you.

I was engaged some time back by a man I'd more or less grown up with. He was the great big band and small combo leader, Artie Shaw, who had graduated from an excellence in music to a self-imposed auto-didacticism, to an expertise in, of all things, marksmanship with a rifle. It was in his later quest, with words, that I was engaged, given an enormous box filled with manuscript pages, literally thousands of them, and told, "I need you to help. I've lost my objectivity."

Proceeding on my own personal belief that a novel could use as few as fifty thousand words to a maximum of about two hundred thousand, I began to cut. Shaw was soon outraged. "You can't cut that," he literally expostulated. "I love that."

The engagement was soon aborted and I returned to my memories of Shaw as a man who had achieved numerous goals and stature through his uncompromising vision of how reality should look--and sound, as opposed to his being an unrelenting curmudgeon.

Guillaume Doane, Managing Editor at the Montecito Journal, where I contribute a weekly book review, once emailed me with an observation that a sentence seventy-six words long may have worked for William Faulkner but it did not seem appropriate for a community newspaper, even a community as sophisticated and multifarious as Montecito.

Mark Collins, whom I occasionally see in the warp and woof of my life about the outer reaches of Santa Barbara and Summerland, has embarked on a "project" to have words such as very, and many removed from the language.

I once caused great mischief by the fact of having written to the editor of a literary journal I subscribe to, asking if he would please not bother to send me the forthcoming edition, featuring work of and commentary on a major minor American writer whose work, I allowed, played faster and looser with the language than the Bush administration played with the United States Constitution.

It all devolves to words, the use of them, the effect of them. In the beginning, as I noted recently, was "the word." That particular word was made from the welding together of the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet; variously translated, variously stretched to fit the one-size-fits-all standards of a particular culture at a particular time.

Many of us "love" the written and spoken words of Abraham Lincoln, who learned to read and write under the influence of The King James Bible and Noah Webster's Reader, a combination of influences that produced remarkable, memorable, poignant examples of narrative.

At the time of my employment with the Associated Press (thinking toward a career as a journalist), that organization had spent big bucks on a study related to the use of language in newspapers. One of the findings spoke of the need to limit the number of words in a newspaper story sentence to seventeen.

"What do you read, my lord," Polonius asks Hamlet in the eponymous play. "Words, words, words," comes the rejoinder. A severe editor would have found that reply superfluous, the poet's need for meter notwithstanding.

Words.

True enough, we use them because we love them and their potential, but we also learn, or hope to learn how to treat them more as an embarrassment of riches and more as a successful parent treats a child, which is to say we have to learn to let them go, allow them to have a life of their own.

Welcome to the twenty-first century, where it is no longer the cultural heritage, the duty, or expectation of words to perform tricks of the sort some dog and cat owners teach their pets. Words describe, words evoke. Sometimes they combine forces and do both at the same time, a lovely two-fer.

I am immediately made suspicious when a student or new writer offers me something to look at, hoping to enlist my enthusiasm early on by telling me of their love for the language and for words. When I see that they are not dressing up their words in costumes, rolling over, sitting, or playing dead, I am half way to a sense of relief that allows me to move on into their narrative with the expectation of a reader.

When I set to review my own words, my first search-and-destroy mission is to find the examples of hot-doggery so resident within me, so willing to sit up and bark to prove something I already know.

Going through magazines at doctor's offices, at barber shops, drivers' license renewal facilities, and the like, I am amazed and appalled by the photos of the interior of apartments, lofts, offices, sensing an immediate vibration of comfort or discomfort, reminding me to keep the interior decorator out of my own prose. Clean lines and functionality are worthwhile desiderata, but they are not to die for. Better to trip over the adjective or adverb of my own style than the dictate of an interior decorator.