Raymond Chandler said that “The most durable thing in writing is style.” He used the word durable because he was concerned with what makes writing last. But when you look at writing that has lasted, there’s no consistency of style, not even among contemporary authors. Not between Fielding, Johnson and Swift; not between Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu; not between Hugo, Flaubert and Zola; not between Joyce, Hemmingway and Dos Passos; not between Beckett, Céline and Camus. Among writers belonging to the same period and place you see only salient differences in style. And that is because style is an expression of attitude, temperament, sensibility and technical ability—a unique reaction to existence in written form.
Critics, academics and authors will sometimes distill from style specific techniques and turn them into rules. When followed, these rules usually fail to produce writing as good as, or better than, the original from which they derived. Why? Because these techniques are inseparable from everything that combined to create the writer’s style and cannot be applied elsewhere to the same effect.
Sometimes these techniques are common to the literature of a writer’s time and only appear signature in retrospect. For instance, Hemmingway’s technique of not stating the implicit was common in the woodpulps—writers such as Erle Stanley Gardner and Dashiell Hammett—and newspapers of the early 20th C. At that time, the popular writing for men was fast-paced, accessible and laconic. Writers generally avoided digression and superfluous explanation. Hemmingway integrated that simplicity and brevity with a unique sensibility and emotional complexity to create high-brow fiction. His technique involved subsuming meaning to the effect of creating a latent charge. But it was his character that distinguished his style.
Some writers instinctively employ certain techniques to express an emotional state. Some employ these techniques to express an attitude towards social and political conventions. Some simply employ them to sound good or generate a mood. Some issue from personal experience or the cadences of the language spoken on the streets. All of a writer’s techniques are integral to what we call the writer’s style and are inimical to replication.
Technical prescriptions for writers often ignore the spirit of style, which is the means of expression that is true to the writer’s experience. For example, Jonathan Franzen in his “10 Rules for Novelists” gives the following prescription: “Write in third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.” A first-person voice may have offered itself to him irresistibly, but other authors found it by trial and error. Twain used the first-person in Huckleberry Finn after he’d written an initial draft in the third person. He found that the third-person voice he’d used in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer didn’t have the expressive force of Huck’s vernacular. Also, Huck’s faux naiveté served as a good comedic cover for his critique of the Antebellum South. The use of the first person in Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Camu’s The Stranger also followed earlier attempts in the third person that were not as pertinent to the authors’ designs. Jonathan Swift used the first person in Gulliver’s Travels to satirize Robinson Crusoe. To demonstrate that no matter where Lemuel Gulliver goes or in what situation he finds himself, he remains a quintessential Brit: resourceful but imaginatively, intellectually and emotionally inert. The only common law of the first person among these writers is that they used it to execute their intentions and liberate, as opposed to inhibit, their style.
Techniques distilled from great works tend to dampen the expression of experiential truth. Excessive figures of speech and abstraction (obscurantism); the removal of fat, muscle and connective tissue (omission); ditching the reader (subjectivism); and using big words to appear intelligent (pretentiousness) hinder the ability of language to deliver sentiments and ideas. If the purpose of language is to communicate, these techniques fail to serve that purpose.
Among writers who currently rail against tradpub and MFA literature, we see a variety of stylistic responses, ranging from baroque to clipped, sentimental to analytical, melodious to dissonant, sarcastic to dead serious. These diverse reactions to what seems like a desert of drab, hackneyed literature is a good thing. It demonstrates an increasing dissatisfaction with industry pap and shows a growing intolerance of writing that is devoid of experiential truth (inauthentic), noncommittal and trite (evasive), supplants meaningful content with stale polemics (politically compromised) and stylistically homogenous.
While these new writers are unanimous in their diagnosis of tradpub, their correctives vary greatly. But that’s how it’s always been in times of deficiency. A lot of experimentation. A plethora of styles, techniques, sensibilities, attitudes, temperaments, dictums, creeds, screeds, manifestos and whatever the else is needed to dislodge the status quo. It’s the detritus on the forest floor from which the new growth emerges.
In a publishing industry divided between a consolidated big and a chaotic small, the writing that is impactful will usually be estranged from the big side. It will tend to emerge from the undergrowth and may never receive the publicity and attention that the pap spewing out of the big side receives. Like the underground music that divided the music industry but is never played on the radio, the new writing may not receive much notice except by other writers. It may bring back lost attitudes and approaches (the renaissance effect), as well as generate new ones (the avant-garde effect). But in a divided industry, the new writing will probably not emerge in the industry’s canopy. It will abide in the less popular but more impactful biome of the forest floor, where the independent publishers and creative media platforms give it life.