Deeper Stories: Clarity with Conviction
Chapter One in a book on the art of prose in fiction.
Over 18 months ago, I began writing a series of articles examining the art of fiction prose. In the time since, I’ve made a couple of attempts to bring them together in book format. Many have helped guide me in this process, and at the risk of not mentioning people I should, I want to highlight the work of Corey Evans and M.P. Fitzgerald in the original effort and Caz Hart and Mercedes de Santiago in the second.
The chapters are often a mix of original material and pieces from the original essays. I’m sharing the chapters here to force myself to work on the edits. When finished, I’ll make the book free for my Substack audience.
Clarity with Conviction
William Faulkner said that anyone who spends too much time developing or following a style probably hasn’t got much to say and knows it. To hell with William Faulkner.
“Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.”
William Faulkner in 1956 interview with The Paris Review
To hell with Faulkner.
It may be that his attitude about style is born from one who takes to it as a fish to water. It’s so woven into his environment, he can’t even see it. He has no name for it and no patience for those who worry about such things. It may also be that he was playing us for fools and closing the gate behind him, for this was a writer of style.
Or he might have meant something else. Perhaps he’d grown tired of writers trying to be him rather than learning the fundamentals of the craft and then bending them to their own desire according to the dictates of their personality. It’s the difference between developing a hollow technique to sound different and learning to communicate a personal story clearly.
If that was his meaning, Charlie Kaufman said something similar: “Don’t let anyone tell you what a story is, what it needs to include or what form it must take.”
Faulkner might yet redeem himself.
While there’s no one correct way to write, there are many ways to get it wrong, most of which writers share at some point in their journey, and they have to learn to shed those old habits. In the beginning, they rebel. They fear stripping away amateurish habits will make their writing sound like everyone else’s. Their writing feels unique because they don’t see anything else like it on the store shelves. Unfortunately, those habits make their work read like all the others in the slush pile. Ripping away bad habits is a necessary process of tearing writing down to this shared language they fear, and it’s at that point a writer finds herself in the maturity of her language, through which something personal emerges.
Those early mistakes include elegant variation, where a writer fears repeating himself and so will refer to a character in a myriad of ways: first name, last name, nickname, and physical description, and the story sounds like it’s about a crowd instead of one person. They include filtering experiences by stating “Jane saw” instead of simply showing the reader what was seen. There are filler words which add nothing to the meaning of a sentence. Don’t forget info-dumping, head-hopping, and melodramatic dialogue tags to avoid repeating the word said.
When the rebellion stops and the writer addresses all those early problems, growth becomes a process of them finding themselves by understanding the various tools available. That’s maturation. Faulkner, whom we may have damned too quickly, addressed that desire to develop an idiosyncratic style too soon. He wasn’t belittling writers for learning how to write better, but he was mocking them for trying to figure out their unique signature.
I’ve already quoted Kaufman on the subject, but it was Cormac McCarthy’s history in developing his minimal use of punctuation that drove the point home.
The first time I ever checked out a book by McCarthy, the librarian commented that she’d tried to read his stuff but couldn’t get past his lack of punctuation, and it does take some getting used to. For McCarthy, however, he thought it made the prose clearer. It began when someone charged him with rewriting some text to make it easier to read. McCarthy stripped away much of what he considered to be the unnecessary punctuation, and it worked beautifully. That experience birthed it all.
McCarthy wasn’t trying to distinguish himself from other writers. He was pursuing the path he thought led to greater clarity. Kaufman isn’t trying to be avant-garde. He has a particular type of story to tell, and he’s looking for the best way to tell it. These storytellers have a unique voice, but they were simply being true to themselves and telling a story as clearly as they could.
One might call it clarity with conviction.
Stylistic options allow us to say things we might not be able to say without them. Style is a vehicle of depth. Think of Hemingway’s use of parataxis, the placement of clauses or phrases one after another, without conjunctions to connect them. The causation is implied instead of stated, with each clause being its own little story.
Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited.
“Men Without Women,” Ernest Hemingway
There’s little to connect one idea to the next, other than the word, besides. Hemingway didn’t have to choose this way to write, but it was one of his favorite devices for telling the stories he wanted to tell as clearly as he could. The pattern he establishes has a rhythm. Each period slows us down, but the statements are full of certainty, a certainty about the wait with nothing but brandy and sleep to fill the hours.
Before we lean hard into how fiction conveys meaning, let’s pursue this idea of how punctuation creates certainty or uncertainty, muscularity or musicality, in an exploration of the most microscopic explorations of how prose works. Then in chapters three and four, we’ll pull back to focus directly on building meaning, all of it focused on revealing the tools available to create clarity with conviction.
— Thaddeus Thomas