My particular interest in writing is to develop a style. Having read works by Nabokov, Ramsey Campbell and Caitlin Kiernan, among others, I have decided that style is important for me. I like writing that has a style which draws you into the fantasy and brings it to life. Metaphor, for example, can be very effective, as well as poetic language. This I find more engaging than standard, plain language, which relies on the clarity of the sentences to tell a story. So, what stylists do you people know, what do you like, why do you like it? Who are the great modern stylists?
I'm not sure writers aim or try for a style. I think it's just something that sort of happens after you've written a ton. I believe I have a style, though, I put no effort into it. I like to focus on clarity and things I can more easily control. But in doing that and just writing, I believe a writer's style just sort of emerges.
When I say I want to develop a style, what I really mean is my favourite writers have distinctive styles, and part of the attraction is the style. So style is what interests me as a writer. I'm drawn towards it, though I don't know what that will be. But there seem to be so few styles that I really like, so I'm looking for more modern stylists. Just writing is not going to develop anything. Reading is essential.
I'm a big reader, and I totally agree with you that reading is essential. For most things, I think reading can often solve things just writing can't. But I think a writer's style is something that develops over time and through actually writing. I remember when I had a mentor and after two years or so of extensive writing he said to me, "You've found your voice. Write everything like this." So, that was probably my style coming through, but still it was hard to pinpoint exactly what that was for me. I write a lot. Sometimes I can sort of see it or feel it. I'm always aiming for clarity in my prose. I think when I achieve that there is room for my style to show. I thought I was a minimalist writer for awhile. Maybe I am somewhat. But when I tried to achieve this style, it didn't quite work the way I wanted it to. I was missing things. The writing was choppy. It's a great style for those who pull it off. I guess what I'm saying is I don't think we can really just choose a style. I can't exactly describe my style. I think this is something those who have read a good deal of my writing could probably do better than me. I know I like dark comedy. I know I like the absurd. I know I like subtext. Those are probably the foundation of my style. Maybe if you focus on your go-to elements for story writing, your style will start to come through more clearly and then you can play with it. Just a thought. Good luck.
For me, other than Shakespeare, I have to admire Ian McEwan's style in Enduring Love. A lot of my friends found it difficult to understand or keep up with and ended up putting the book down before chapter 3. I love the extended metaphors about the universe and how one chapter touches on Einstein's theories, around about page 49 I believe. (I admit I was reading it at 3 am, so I had to reread it the next day!) My particular favourite excerpt is on page 2; "The encounter that would unhinge us was minutes away, its enormity disguised from us not only by the barrier of time but by the colossus in the centre of the field that drew us in with the power of a terrible ratio that set fabulous magnitude against the puny human distress at its base." It is quite a sentence and I can't help but admire it. A lot of the book I've heard described as introspective, like this part on page 14; "Co-operation - the basis of our earliest hunting success, the force behind our evolving capacity for language, the glue of our social cohesion. Our misery in the aftermath was proof that we knew we had failed ourselves. But letting go was in our nature too. Selfishness is also written in our hearts. This is our mammalian conflict - what to give to others, and what to keep for yourself." McEwan asserts quite a feeling in regards to the human condition and I've met a few people who simply did not gel with these assertions, nor his style of writing. It is one of my personal favourites.
I cannot pretend to have read any of these... China Miéville has an ability to verbally paint a canvas in a saturated richness I would compare to the film The Cell in the fantasy segments. He's hedonistic in his embrace of the absurd and rather than eschewing purple prose, he takes it as a lover and their entwining never closes the door or fades to black. That's why I like him. Samuel R. Delany is a man who suffers profound dyslexia in real life and yet manages to take his non-standard engagement of language and the written word and deliver it to me in a way that's like smoking the finest, the dankest weed. It's not the hands-in-the-pants ravishment of Miéville. It's a sit here and let's get high together. He makes use of the most unusual, often non-idiomatic, but never ungrammatical, turns of phrase. Like someone raised in an alt-version of America where the language developed in an ever-so-slightly different manner. Because of that, you either worship him as a genius or wonder what the fuck is going on and stop ten pages in. He's also quite ready to dive naked, cock-first (get ready for sex with utterly non-humanoid aliens), into the absurdity pool. That's why I like him. M. John Harrison is a lot like Miéville in his use of imagery and metaphor, but his is never stable, the worlds he builds are without rules. He wrote an article where he responds to Miéville's ideas on worldbuilding and says his is the opposite approach and that a world-building folder is nothing but a nerd-bible and he's an atheist in this regard. His books are spooky and bizarre, but... much as I liked them, and I really did, they are the kind of bizarre that really only works once. Once you've ridden the ride, you've ridden it, and there's no chasing the dragon again. I like him for that one amazing ride, but, well, like I said...
Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, by Sunil Yapa. If you want to learn to write well, there's hardly a better book for it. Though, I'm not much for the stylist, find the reading exhausting, the stories mundane. But as they use devices and tricks in their prose that are well worth learning; I will put up with overwrought emotions, the endless despair, the recoiling, bristling tempers, and all the swooning bullshit that masquerades as a plot, and I'll steal their literary gems for my own good use!
Coincidentally Ian McEwan is someone who I recently discovered and bought (First Love, Last Rites). I'd read about his rather original style. Perhaps I should revisit him. How did you discover him?
I think Raymond Carver is who people think of most when it comes to a minimalistic style. His prose are tight. His language is familiar. He writes well and tells good stories, but leaves out the bells and whistles. Subtext is what is being said without saying it. It's reading between the lines, but it shouldn't be hard to figure out. It's just not spelled out for the reader. I think a lot of authors use subtext. An easy and clear example of this is Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants."
Luck, actually. I was introduced to Enduring Love in school by my English teacher. I fell in love with it then - we were tasked with studying pretty typical englishy stuff about his opening chapter and she gave us copies of the book in class, where I ended up not paying enough attention to the lesson and more to the book. I bought it recently and have been utterly compelled by it ever since. I shall have to read some of his other works
I do have a curiosity for Mieville and Harrison, since they have connections to horror/weird fiction, which is my true literary love. I'm not familiar with Delaney. So could you recommend any of their works, preferably short horror/weird stories or collections?
Sure. For Miéville, I would recommend either Perdido Street Station or Embassytown. Both exemplify what I was trying to get across in my prior post. For Delany, though Dhalgren is typically thought of as his magnum opus, my all time favorite is Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand. And for Harrison, if you want the full ride that I was mentioning, then Light.
Mmm.... On second thought, given the nature of the original question, maybe Dhalgren is the better choice for Delany. It's a hard book to get into. Many people find it a tough read precisely because of what we're talking about here. Stars in my Pocket... is a more approachable novel, but for purposes of exemplifying style, Dhalgren is the clear choice. Sorry, I let my preference get in the way of answering.
For me, this is Arthur C. Clarke. More than just the "clarity of the sentences" the OP mentions as contrast to the stylists, even in the realms of clear, direct delivery that is de rigueur in Science Fiction, Clarke creates fantastic worlds and intriguing adventure only ever making use of the simplest blocks. That's a talent unto itself in my opinion. I would offer The Color Purple as my example (both novel and film). It is my belief that all the women in the story are actually facets of Miss Celie. The good, the bad, the brave, the weak, the strong, the stubborn, the beautiful, the ugly. All facets of one person made into a story.
The lesser known SF and fantasy author Gene Wolfe has a style I really admire. His style of prose is evocative, dense and romantic. Some of his books read like literary classics, and he uses the stream of consciousness technique heavily. I’ve heard that many find him inaccessible, but I wonder if that’s because he offers an antidote to many of the tropes of his genre, and because his genre is usually unattractive to readers of more literary fiction, so not that many people pick him up. SF and fantasy fans are often very specific in what they look for I think, particularly fans of epic fantasy. I discovered the concept of the unreliable narrator through his work, and I love the way he uses the deceptiveness of impaired memory as a vehicle to explore this. The book Latro in the Mist follows the diary of a Roman soldier in the Ancient Greek world who has sustained a head injury and finds he can communicate with the supernatural beings of Greek mythology. The catch is that his resulting amnesia is such that he forgets everything at the end of each day, so even he finds what he has written to be hard to believe, and therefore can start to doubt his own narrative. Somebody mentioned China Mieville above, another author whose writing I love, mostly for the descriptions of his weird lovecraftian creatures and settings.
I like when someone tells big things in small words. I like loud silence. I hate drama queens and expressive emotionalism. I like big emotions told by minimalistic way. Drama works only without dramaticism. Plain language through rich and colourful thinking and experiencing - that's it.
Well, shit, I never thought I'd see anyone put those three in the same sentence (or at least the latter two with the first). Well done.
Jot down another vote for Mr. Wolfe, please. It's been a long while since I read any of his stuff, but his prose is incredible. There are many others whose style I greatly admire—but only Oscar Wilde, Ray Bradbury, William Gibson, and Anthony Burgess leaps to mind at this late hour, along with certain Russian greats I've only read in translation. With these latter you get the impression that it's probably amazing, but I can't swear to it. There is one more name: Mervyn Peake, of Gormenghast fame. I only became familiar with his writing as of this year, so he has the advantage of being fresh, but... This is who I consider the very finest writer, stylistically speaking. This is an artist at work. His prose is vivid, surreal, and utterly unique (in my admittedly limited experience). There's just such a weight, color, and texure to everything. It's been a long time indeed since I was made to imagine so strange a world so very clearly. Absolutely to be recommended for the style connoisseur. Edit: Where are my manners at. I have to give a shoutout to R. Scott Bakker, who has written such things as The Prince of Nothing. Bakker is a bit hit and miss with me, but mostly hit, and when he's at the top of his game, the pages catch fire in your hands. That is all.
Wolfe, Peake, Nabokov, Delaney, Kiernan, Mieville (and also Melville), Harrison--all great stuff. Let me throw in Dorothy Dunnett, and if you haven't read her Lymond Books they're wonderfully written and quite funny historical novels. Also, Lawrence Durrell and (since we're nearing Halloween) Shirley Jackson.
I suppose the king of style in English is James Joyce. Avoid Finnegans Wake, of course (if you don't, it will avoid you), but don't take all those critics who say Ulysses is difficult that seriously. Joyce uses many styles, sometimes as parodies, but when he writes straight, he's just about unbeatable. My favorite sentence of his (from Ulysses) describes a couple of guys recovering the body of a drowned man (I've mentioned this sentence on this forum before): "Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun." Joyce's attention to rhythm, to alliteration, to the sounds of vowels just amazes me. Other people have mentioned his "The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit." You can see the same alliteration, the same attention to vowel sounds. Another of my favorites is Anthony Burgess (not coincidentally, a Joyce disciple). He uses a huge vocabulary deployed so as to show off his endless erudition, but I forgive him because he's witty and fascinating. Rudyard Kipling is, I find, electrifying. His prose surges with energy and color. I find it impossible to read the first page of Kim without being helplessly carried along by the tide of Kipling's imagination and verve. How about Henry Miller? I guess he's out to shock his readers, and he does, with great skill. On the first page of Tropic of Cancer he writes: "I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. "This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse..." And so on. John Steinbeck was a master of imagery. In one of my favorites, from East of Eden, he describes the churches coming to the Salinas Valley in California "prancing and farting like brewery horses in bock beer time." Thomas Wolfe, though frightfully self-indulgent, also knew a thing or two about imagery. He calls children "those absolute little gods of the moment." There are too many more to mention here. These are just ones that popped into my head in the last few minutes. Here's a tip: To find novelists with a fine sense of style, look for those who are also poets. Writers of poetry usually pay close attention to their prose as well.
By coincidence I've just got a library book by China Mieville called Looking for Jake and other stories. I'm not sure if I like it yet, although "Details" is good. He seems to write with much skill, but the stories don't really work out, in my mind.
There is a link between them. Ramsey Campbell has cited Nabokov as one of his biggest stylistic influences, and Kiernan has been somewhat influenced by Campbell. But hey, Nabokov was a very influential guy, one of the greatest modernists.
