A Case of Style

craft essay

For the rest of this year I’ll be making monthly posts related to the theme of whichever masterclass I’ll be teaching next on Zoom - a taster for the curious.

My September class is devoted to Perspective and Style, addressing techniques that can make a piece of writing into its own distinct thing.

In my teaching on Voice, I stress the value of leaning into the natural speaking voice and getting it down on the page. It’s easy, it comes instinctively, it communicates - we can trust it to do a job. You can find links below for ideas about exploring voice on my blog.

But of course the written word differs from the spoken word, and through drafting we edit and tinker and play to make the writing more interesting. And this is where we start to develop a style of our own, and sometimes, if we practise enough, this sort of writing simply becomes the way we write, and perhaps we don’t have to edit much to make the writing distinctive. Our writing evolves a personality.

What we mean by style is hard to pin down. Voice, narrative tone, diction, syntax, punctuation, vernacular forms, observance of convention or deviation through experimentation: these all have a bearing, and subject matter can also play a part.

It also helps to think about specific types of style, and at this point I usually shift to examples of prose stylists who bring these types to life. For me, one of the great prose stylists in English was Kent Haruf, a Colorado novelist who wrote about the everyday yet exceptional dramas of working people in the ranchlands of eastern Colorado. A quality in his writing always wakes something within me.

Case study: Our Souls At Night

Let’s look at some of those ingredients in the opening page of his final novel, Our Souls At Night (2015).

And then there was the day when Addie Moore made a call on Louis Waters. It was an evening in May just before full dark.

We jump into the middle of a conversation: And then there was. This brings an easy colloquial energy to the writing - a gossipy sense of being invited to listen in. Maybe even a taste of Once upon a time? We have an active sense of a story being told.

They lived a block apart on Cedar Street in the oldest part of town with elm trees and hackberry and a single maple grown up along the curb and green lawns running back from the sidewalk to the two-story houses.

Here we find a running-on style, with an unfussy list of simple but evocative everyday items observed directly and relayed to us with syntactical variety. Hackberry: what a great specific word. And: helps make a rhythm. And that maple: ‘a single’ - what does that give us? And what does it mean always to follow the curb, or be set back from the road by green lawns? These apparently simple descriptions are setting a stage.

It had been warm in the day but it had turned off cool now in the evening. She went along the sidewalk under the trees and turned in at Louis's house.

Turned off cool brings a particular idiomatic ring to the narration - vernacular, almost folksy. Otherwise we are getting an uncluttered and matter-of-fact description of a woman with a purpose. Even the weather is making way for her.

When Louis came to the door she said, Could I come in and talk to you about something?

No quotation marks! That’s quite radical for some readers, and as such a bold and emphatic touch that might scare off the faint-hearted, but it’s also another simple and confident choice. The telling of the story feels unseparated from the scene it’s describing: something happens there too. We also enjoy a pleasant ring in the rhythm of the writing. And this character - she’s direct.

They sat down in the living room. Can I get you something to drink? Some tea?

No thank you. I might not be here long enough to drink it. She looked around. Your house looks nice.

Diane always kept a nice house. I've tried a little bit.

Again, the lack of quotation marks runs dialogue and narration together, and the author seems confident the reader can grasp who’s speaking and when. That dialogue itself feels like a simple exchange, but Addie’s suggestion she might not be there long adds a little tension - it’s almost a threat things will be over before they’ve started. But a beverage was offered, and modest compliments are traded, and Diane is referred to in the past tense: again, little parcels of narrative detail that add up in the straightforward telling, and it’s good for any scene to have moments of exchange as well as curiosity.

I can’t quite figure out where the perspective lies here - probably a bit of both characters, and probably some omniscient guiding storyteller in whose confident hands we’re placing our experience of reading.

And that’s just page one, before we even get to the fact of why Addie Moore made that call on Louis Waters. Gossipy tone, simple concrete observations, that particular eschewing of the conventions of dialogue: these are just three obvious elements of style, and there are others here, including a certain confident and expectant tone. We are not only curious to find out what happens next, but we are drawn in by the style of writing.

This brief opening chapter is just four short pages long, and in 700 words it does everything that a first chapter should do - it clearly gives us a setup, and it leaves us wanting more; it has a great closing line. You can read the rest of this chapter here courtesy of a big global bookseller (though you might prefer to purchase here!).

I could listen to this writer talk about anything. He has a way of grabbing our interest. If you’re interested, here’s a wonderful piece on writing by Kent Haruf himself: The Making of a Writer. Writing small - writing large: such humility yet largeness in that essay.

And, if we are thinking about getting our writing published, isn’t this stylistic quality of voice something that agents and editors always tell us they’re looking for? Too many books feel like writing-by-numbers - high concepts and plot twists and character arcs. We need telling as well as story, else we end up with disappointed readers conned by a stale marketing concept. Here speaks the voice of experience of wading through some of this year’s summer reading recommendations - insert horror emoji. I blame those grasping cookie-cutter writing courses, and a growing list of blurbers I can never trust again.

Different styles

Kent Haruf’s style could be called minimalist, in which an apparently plain style uses simple tricks for deliberate effect: rhythms and repetitions, grounding details, subtexts, the unspoken. The clue lies in the title of another of his novels: Plainsong. Other writing I might describe in this way includes work by Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, and Lydia Davis. I also detect elements of this approach in the work of beat writers such as Jack Kerouac, and I feel it - with a twist of something else too - in the writing of Joan Didion.

Minimalism is perhaps a more mannered and tucked version of classic prose style, the sort of clear and direct English we find in the best journalism. It’s the default in composition classes; you can find further discussion in the excellent writing guide Clear and Simple as the Truth. Sometimes it’s plain or transparent, getting out of the way of whatever topics are being discussed, but sometimes it becomes more robust, using rhetorical devices to ramp up a message.

George Orwell’s fiction and nonfiction are classic classic prose. And I think of a writer such as Natalie Goldberg, whose teaching practice recommends a fast and direct style of writing, which is reflected in her own style: vivid, earthy, warm, clear, honest.

I also think of a piece of writing of my own: the essay Fat Marrows and Runner Beans. I was almost embarrassed by its plainness when I first wrote it back in 2007. I’d been trying to write something clever and fairytale and magical realist for Uncontained, an anthology of garden writing edited by my friend Jennifer Heath. But it just wasn’t happening, so rather than fail to submit I dashed off something straightforward recollecting my grandparents’ garden. It has that quality of the natural speaking voice. When I looked back over my writing to find things to share on Substack last month, I realised there was in fact something quite vivid and earthy and warm and clean and honest about that too: things to acknowledge.

But sometimes we like a fancier style, perhaps something more maximalist. From the first time I read each of them, I loved the writings of Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie for their floridity, their excess, their baroque curlicues. Also Rikki Ducornet, and Jonathan Franzen, and the translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez - and beloved Anne Rice! Their styles reflect the energies and oddities and transgressions of the worlds and characters they’re creating. I sometimes wonder how such writing would fare in a writing workshop or writing group, which can have that effect of flattening style through writing by committee.

The Moth-Eaters was one of my forays into a more maximalist style. I indulged in descriptions and lists and sinewy syntax, all those things workshops tell us to avoid, and the story places emphasis on setting over traditional conventions of character.

I hadn’t planned on writing about my own writing - guess I’ve turned into a Substacker, hahaha! I suppose this goes to show how writing takes form on the page or at the keyboard. It emerges in the practice. But my own experiments show we can modify our voice to create a style for a particular piece. I imagine it’s best to avoid seeming showy or laboured - but there’s no harm in trying.

And there are many other styles too - there’s no definitive list. Another style I particularly enjoy is what I call blockbuster style - the slick and confident voice of classic pulpy bestsellers of the 60s and 70s. ‘The temperature hit ninety degrees the day she arrived’ - Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. ‘The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail’ - Peter Benchley’s Jaws.

Perhaps you can name any of your favourite styles, using examples of writers, in the comments below.

Developing your own style

An obvious way to develop a style, a voice, is to write frequently. Sometimes it helps to do this work away from pet projects, which are encumbered with the burdens of expectation of creating a masterpiece. Instead we can take up a daily writing practice, or just write letters to our friends (emails are fine, but letters are best).

And, of course, read - select a favourite book or a model you’re emulating in your own writing, and open a page and work out how it achieved its magic with the practical techniques of craft and syntax, placing word after word.

You could even copy a page into a notebook, taking into yourself the cadence and rhythm of a beloved writer, and then on the opposite page create your own version - aping the style, but adapting to your own content. I did this once with Angela Carter’s The Werewolf, e.g., using a setting in a warm southern country instead of a cold northern one, and following the paragraph and sentence structure as well as the beats of action but adapting them for my own content.

I’ve also tried similar exercises with writing by Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac. This was not writing for typing up to share with others, but it was a good exercise in exploring styles for myself.

Future classes and other resources

My 16 September masterclass, Perspective and Style, is devoted to techniques that lend individuality to any piece of writing. We’ll start by weighing up some of the basic choices for any piece of writing - including point of view, tense, narrative distance - and then we’ll talk about classic prose style and minimalism and maximalism and blockbuster style, among other examples - you’ll be invited to seek out your own.

Masterclasses meet on Zoom for 90 minutes, and to expand on this experience you’ll also be given further examples and writing experiments to try in advance of the class, if you wish, as well as a workbook of notes and extensive resources to explore later. You’ll also get the chance to raise questions about writing and publishing. Regulars include a number of published authors - discussion is serious about craft but good-humoured and practical about the business. Writers who attend seem pleased to come away with fresh insights and enthusiasm about things to try in their own work.

More info here: Perspective & Style on 16 September. This will be followed by Showing & Telling on 14 October, focusing on scenecraft, dialogue and narration, then Genres & Readers on 11 November and Endings on 9 December. Look out for tasters of those classes on Substack in the coming months.

I hope to repeat this cycle of classes next year, returning in January with Beginnings and then covering Voice, Character, Setting & Situation, Story & Plot, and Form & Structure. For 2025 I’m also thinking about running a revision and self-editing workshop based on the Four Elements, and new classes based on tarot and writing.

If you’re interested, you can sign up for my mailing list - and of course subscribe here on Substack too.

I’d love to see new faces on Zoom, as well as old ones! But if you can’t make it and have enjoyed this post, you might take a look at some of the other resources on my website, including my DIY MA in Creative Writing. I also have, e.g., various resources and writing experiments on voice:

Voice 1: Listening
Voice 2: Tone
Voice 3: Passion and Purpose
Voice 4: Other Voices
Variations on the Form of ‘I Remember’
Dear Diaries