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.
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.
Believe in how you tell your story, but also in the qualities that matter most to you and your audience. Great fiction consistently and frequently impacts you. It’s an unrelenting display of quality. The nature of that quality will vary, but one definition of a great work of fiction is a higher concentration of delivered goods.
How are you telling your story with the greatest clarity? Note what rules matter most to you, while giving yourself permission for those rules to change. We want to challenge ourselves, not lock ourselves into early choices. That’s the foolishness Faulkner railed against, partially, although we must add to that the wrong-headed motivations of eager writers.
Tell the story clearly, in the best way you know how. Write your rules in pencil with an eraser readily at hand. We’ve discussed the early error of replacing said with too many variations. At times, I’ve discovered I do this still, unintentionally. If it’s better in the moment, so be it, but as a rule, I’ve started making myself use said even in place of asked, if the context allows it to slip by unnoticed. I want these tags to register only in the unconscious. Similarly, if I can get away with using and instead of but, I will. If it catches the reader’s attention, I’ve failed. If it confuses the meaning, I’ve failed. The point is the familiarity of pattern slipping by, unregistered, letting the reader’s attention remain where it belongs.
Do I recommend you do the same? No. My choices may be foolishness. These are the rules I’m exploring as I seek to tell my stories with conviction. You’ll find your own.
Similarly, challenge yourself to identify the story qualities that truly matter. To have the greatest impact on the reader, the writer and the reader must be in agreement on what qualities are desirable, and in these qualities the writer must deliver with greater frequency and potency than his peers.
Select a substantial section of your work to review, an entire short story or a chapter from a book. Make a list of the qualities most important to you and your readers. Some potential choices are:
A beautiful sentence.
Emotional power.
Deep characterization.
Scientific insight.
Imaginatively fantastic moments.
True scares.
Creative metaphors.
Fun dialogue.
Satisfying twists.
Vivid descriptions.
The list will be driven from your own personality and the expectations of your audience. When you’ve compiled your list, assign a color to each of your top ten choices, and then read through your work, highlighting whenever your story delivers the goods.
Are you trying to accomplish more and need more qualities? That’s fine. Ten is arbitrary. If the attributes are truly important to you and your audience, make the list as long as you need. Assign a color to each, and start marking up your manuscript. If a line satisfies multiple qualities, mark it with a series of thinner lines. Allow yourself to see how often you deliver on the contract you make with your reader.
Choose a work from another author, one among the greatest of all time. Read several pages. Identify how often her work delivers the goods.
Faulkner and Hemingway exemplify writers seeking to outdo other writers, and this exercise is one instance where that impulse is healthy and instructive. Once you’ve seen what a great writer is capable of, beating them is your goal. Before, you were improving as a writer. Now, you’re seeking greatness.
What do the exercises have to do with deeper stories? It’s all about style, and 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.
Hemingway’s influences and personal history contributed to these choices, but he would have been fully aware of what he was doing. Parataxis would have been on his list of rules for telling his stories as clearly as he knew how. For one, it allows for gaps and silences through which the reader can consider the unspoken story beneath the text, what Hemingway called the Iceberg Theory, or the theory of omission. What would have mattered to Hemingway and his imagined, ideal readers, is a story that respects the reader’s intelligence.
In the next chapter, we’ll consider Hemingway’s idea that a classic work doesn’t borrow from other classics but from lesser stories, at least what he considered lesser. Gertrude Stein introduced Hemingway to crime fiction in the 1920’s, and he became an avid reader of the genre for pleasure and relaxation. He loved these tales, but being a bit of a literary snob, he likely didn’t consider them his competition. I believe he freely took from his love of the murder mystery and carried their rules into his attempts to capture the human condition, placing the reader in the role of sleuth.
I’ve given examples of the personal rules of famous writers, but are not the rules of writing meant to be for everyone? Grammar, after all, is universal, like mathematics.
Or perhaps not.
Grammar is like mathematics, in that the forms we learned in elementary school can only hold so much information. The physicist needs something more than algebra, and you need more than elementary grammar. The more information your sentence can elegantly hold, the more you can do with it, and this is where I have my problem with the opening quote by William Faulkner. The more we can do with a sentence, the more we’re able to communicate everything we have to say. The man who once wrote a 1288-word sentence has to understand that.
The point isn’t to tell you how to write but to make it possible for you to write what you want to write, the way you want to write it. It’s not to proclaim Faulkner and Hemingway as the only opposing forces to guide your writing; any polar pairing might do, like Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon. The benefit Faulkner and Hemingway bring is their verbal jousts. They matched the kayfabe of modern wrestlers and were the reality television of 20th century literature. The nature of that interaction gave us quotes we should learn from and perhaps overblown quotes we should ignore.
Style matters, and as much as that style is guided by the society in which it is formed, it must often be forged in opposition to strictures that same society would place upon us. James Joyce wanted to convey the feeling of an artist breaking free of societal confines to create an aesthetic philosophy of his own. He chose to write it this way:
He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
We see the use of polysyndeton in that last sentence, the antithesis of parataxis, in which Joyce uses an over abundance of conjunctions, and maybe he used that tool because it slows the moment down, allowing the reader to experience every detail just as Stephen does, hyper-focused and in slow motion. Maybe he chose it because it conveys the feeling of a world opening up to Stephen when he let go of the constraints which shackled him.
I wonder what William Faulkner thought of the young Stephen Dedalus. Is the search for an aesthetic philosophy a fool’s errand? Should Stephen have stayed shackled?
Should we?
Faulkner is well known for his use of polysyndeton, and we can see it here, in the opening paragraph to The Hamlet, but a careful eye will spot the asyndeton as well, where conjunctions are intentionally omitted.
Frenchman’s Bend was a section of rich river-bottom country lying twenty miles southeast of Jefferson. Hill-cradled and remote, definite yet without boundaries, straddling into two counties and owning allegiance to neither, it had been the original grant and site of a tremendous pre-Civil War plantation, the ruins of which--the gutted shell of an enormous house with its fallen stables and slave quarters and overgrown gardens and brick terraces and promenades--were still known as the Old Frenchman’s place, although the original boundaries now existed only on old faded records in the Chancery Clerk’s office in the county courthouse in Jefferson, and even some of the once-fertile fields had long since reverted to the cane-and-cypress jungle from which their first master had hewed them.
The Hamlet, William Faulkner
There’s a string of conjunction-free descriptions caught between two “and”s: remote, definite yet without boundaries, straddling into two counties…
Of course, the rest of the paragraph is more in line with how we stereotype Faulkner’s own aesthetic philosophy, but the best writers aren’t limited to one tool. As we discuss sentence construction, we’ll see how Hemingway’s other favorite technique is in sharp contrast to the short sentences that result from his parataxis. Similarly, in this paragraph from Faulkner, two contrasting tools are used, allowing the patterns to shift and the writing to maintain our interest.
But to hell with William Faulkner. Right?
List your rules for clarity. Make your contract of quality with your reader. Determine what counts for greatness, and then prepare to be one of the greats.
— Thaddeus Thomas
This is now an expanded version of chapter one.
"Said" as a dialogue tag is better than trying to be fancy. "Said" becomes invisible to the reader, fancy words are distracting. (I recently read a book, finding myself distracted by "queried" instead of "asked".) Simpler is usually better.