Deeper Stories: Clarity with Conviction

Chapter One in a book on the art of prose in fiction.

In December 2024, 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. This is still work in progress. Feedback is welcome, and changes will be made to these pages. Call this the third effort, and for this chapter’s third go around, I want to thank Johnathan Vance for his input.

When finished, I’ll make the book free for my Substack audience.

Clarity with Conviction

The study of prose line techniques reveals how meaning is conveyed in fiction. In discovering how our personalities translate through these tools and techniques, we discover our authorial signature, for the signature of the writer is the self. Style is the expression of that self.

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.

Or not. After all, this study is based on Faulkner as thesis, Hemingway as antithesis, and McCarthy as synthesis. Give Faulkner the benefit of the doubt and see if he has something to teach us.

“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, 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.

Those early mistakes include filtering experiences by stating “Jane saw” instead of simply showing the reader what was seen.

They include filler words which add nothing to the meaning of a sentence.

And they include info-dumping, head-hopping, and melodramatic dialogue tags to avoid repeating the word said.

Every early writer rebels and clings to her mistakes as if only within them could true genius be found.

When the rebellion stops, growth becomes a process of writers 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, like it was some piece of cloth hanging on rack, bought so they could pretend to be the person who wears such a style.

The signature of the writer is the self, not an affectation. It was Cormac McCarthy’s history in developing his minimal use of punctuation that drove that 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 a text to make it easier to read. McCarthy stripped away 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.

And what of style? 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.

We need style to reveal ourselves as writers and, communally, to reveal who we within this time that we’ve been given. We’re at a crisis point. It seems we’ve been here for a while, in the thick of things. Normally, that’s an excuse to talk about what’s changing in our world, but our challenge is to look at what’s lacking in our ability to talk about who we are. Discovering a renewed articulation of our present, that’s a catalyst for great fiction.

What such fiction looks like will be up to us, but our first concern is learning to become authors capable of fiction worthy of the possibilities. We can’t control what kindling will combust into our masterpiece, but we can intentionally focus on the techniques, exercises, and philosophies that will prepare us to write that masterpiece. We also need to recognize that great writing isn’t unified or singular; the modernists couldn’t agree over what made for great writing. It’s the same today. Greatness will be multifaceted.

This book is written peer to peer, by one who wishes to prepare himself through individual, intentional choice to write something great and for those who want the same. The choices we make will be broad in scope, but we’ll focus on style and meaning, both in a way that embraces all fiction writers. For some, style has never been a concern, but it needs to be addressed. Too often, everything is written around style and dares not tamper with it, as if how we write is sacrosanct and must never be challenged or our boundaries broadened. We can choose to do better. We can grow into a style best suited for our needs, rather than blindly blundering into one and settling there for life.

Some writers arrive at a style like an absent-minded driver. One such driver found she had accidentally arrived at her son’s school; she turned around and drove off, only to twice more unintentionally return. That’s many of us. Our minds are elsewhere, and wherever we blindly arrive stylistically, we assume that’s how it’s meant to be.

The signature of the writer is the self, not an accident.

There are benefits, and certainly artistic benefits, from learning to engage with the unconscious, but to surrender our choices, unwittingly, is to play the part of the zombie or the NPC. We only have free will if we choose to use it, and we need to remember that style is a choice. We’ll have our strengths, but only by an act of will can we highlight those strengths and transform our personal style into something special.

In doing so, we transform ourselves as individuals, but some aspects we’ll hold in common, as people formed by the same world at the same time. Those choices will be different than they were in the 1970s. They’ll be different than they were at the turn of the century. The choices we make together now will define us, and I can’t say what those choices will be, but making them will only be possible if we know the options available and embrace or reject them with purpose.

We get to choose what we write. For a century or more, we’ve existed in a publisher-constructed division of genres and literary fiction, and those categories and the subcategories within them have been defined for us, but what separates one book from another has already begun to blur. Upmarket fiction combines a literary style with high-concept ideas. The genres themselves have seen ongoing literary experimentation, something Ursula K. Le Guin championed as early as the 70s. The old rules need not apply.

Now, you can say, All right, so Tolstoy can break the rules, so Dickens can break the rules, but they’re geniuses; rules are made for geniuses to break, but for ordinary, talented, not-yet-professional writers to follow, as guidelines.

And I would accept this, but very very grudgingly, and with so many reservations that it amounts in the end to nonacceptance. Put it this way: if you feel you need rules and want rules, and you find a rule that appeals to you, or that works for you, then follow it. Use it. But if it doesn’t appeal to you or doesn’t work for you, then ignore it; in fact, if you want to and are able to, kick it in the teeth, break it, fold staple mutilate and destroy it.

The Language of the Night, Ursula K. Le Guin

Borrow, steal, and invent until your style is uniquely your own, born from your soul out of this moment in time. A shared time means that unique styles will share common traits, as is true for James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, very different writers with much in common.

Amateurs borrow. Professionals steal.

John Lennon, adapted from T.S. Elliot or Pablo Picasso or Igor Stravinsky

I remember someone once taking issue with that quote, insisting that professionals don’t steal. Oh, but they do. They must. An amateur borrows because they might use a technique, but the technique belongs to whoever they took it from. The amateur applies the technique in the same way, trying to achieve a similar result. The professional steals because he takes the technique and makes it his own. It serves the new author’s purposes and creates previously unseen results.

Virginia Woolf didn’t like Joyce’s Ulysses, but she stole from it. As Joyce did with Leopold Bloom, so Mrs. Dalloway traces a character across one day. To the Lighthouse, according to professor and historian Nick Mount, plays upon the conventions of the Homeric epic, specifically The Iliad, much like Ulysses did with The Odyssey, but Woolf didn’t use those aspects of Joyce’s work with his ownership still marked upon them. She made them her own.

Moreover, the modernists looked at classics like Charles Dickens and knew that the old approach couldn’t capture their place and time. Today, many genre writers look at the modernists, postmodernists, and metamodernists and say that isn’t how to best capture our time, but they’ll take it no further, stylistically, as if to reject modernism is to reject style.

But this isn’t true.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

Ursula K Le Guin

Story-tellers deepen the souls of their readers.

We don’t have to be modernists to care about style. We don’t have to be literary writers, and maybe the day is coming where the distinctions between literary and commercial fiction lose their significance.

Or, you don’t have to do any of this. You can be like The Beatles. Every time music theory is discussed in terms of The Beatles, it’s always followed by “now, I doubt Lennon and McCartney knew any of this.” They just did it, feeling the theory in their hearts instead of their heads.

They don’t say this about Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys. He was a musical genius. Don’t ask me to explain it. When it comes to music, I don’t know much of anything, but I like hearing about their work because it inspires my understanding of literature.

You can be a heart-felt literary genius like the Beatles. You can be head-filled literary genius like Brian Wilson, or you can be whoever it is you are, trying your best to create the best stories you can. People who want to do that musically want their lyrics to have the music they deserve. Maybe you’ve never even given the music of literature a thought.

By my own testimony, I’ll tell you it’s not that I wasn’t interested, but this information can be challenging to find. There are a million sources on the mistakes we make as beginners, but that’s not prose theory.

We each choose which tools we like and which we don’t. Identify the tools you already use and love, perfect them, and challenge yourself to consider why you use those and not others. They may have been the only tools you were ever given.

It’s like being a guitarist who was only taught three chords. Most pop songs can be played that way, but there are other possibilities. The guitar can do more than that. Our stories can do more.

Discover what works for you.

— Thaddeus Thomas