Learning from the Best of the Worst

Aping the Styles of Classic Writers: 4

Before we get back into our ongoing study of literary style, a reminder: there are only 2 days left in the $1 Black Friday book sale.

17 books, all on sale for two more days. I’m personally hosting this promotion and would consider your visit a personal favor. Thank you.

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In contemplating style, I’ve come to a startling conclusion. There’s no definition for a sentence, other than a grammatically correct collection of phrases, and there’s no definition for a paragraph, other than a unity of sentences set off by white space. The shared rules for both are few. Vary your sizes. Give them cohesive reasons to exist as a distinct unit. Paragraphs and sentences, both, need a purpose for being, at least one central statement which can come at the beginning, middle, or end, and around which additional information is gathered.

For sentences, there’s also the variation of types, part of which is a variation of the rules used to link the clauses. Beyond that, we’ll find the heart of style in the word and the clause.

The ultimate rule for the word is strength and precision. We want the precise noun. We want the strong verb. This is often the reason for cutting to-be and linking verbs, unless said verbs are the best choice for our purpose.

I need bad writing to talk about. I need clauses to fix, and The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis is considered a favorite of bad writing. We’ll go with that.

The weather beaten trail wound ahead into the dust racked climes of the barren land which dominates large portions of the Norgolian empire.

We have too many phrases and clauses that repeat information with different words and a repetition of the sound quality in adjectives and nouns they modify. We don’t need all this. Pick your favorites and cut out everything else.

The trail wound ahead into the barren lands of the Norgolian empire.

There’s not much style left, but we can intentionally use techniques, like repetition, that were previously the cause of our problems.

The trail coiled around mountains and coiled through valleys, until the trail, the empire’s own shuffled-off skin, lay flat before them, white and plain, the only memory of man’s crossing from here to the lifeless horizon.

Now I’ve increased the number of clauses and phrases, as well as their complexity, hopefully in a way that suggests pictures for the mind. Where repetition is used, it triggers an effect other than boredom, highlighting the length and unchanging nature of the trail.

Let’s pick back up with the rest of Theis’s paragraph:

Age worn hoof prints smothered by the sifting sands of time shone dully against the dust splattered crust of earth. The tireless sun cast its parching rays of incandescence from overhead, half way through its daily revolution. Small rodents scampered about, occupying themselves in the daily accomplishments of their dismal lives. Dust sprayed over three heaving mounts in blinding clouds, while they bore the burdensome cargoes of their struggling overseers.

The passage brings to mind a paragraph from Hemingway that I shared recently:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterwards the road bare and white except for the leaves.

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

Ignoring my previous rewrite attempt, I’ll take Theis’s paragraph and rewrite it following Hemingway:

The trail wound ahead through endless tracks of dust and dirt. Ancient hoof marks, turned to stone, mimicked their horses’ steps. The riders bent their backs to the sun, and rodents vanished in their dust. The dust settled behind them in the trail and in the hollows of the footsteps of those long forgotten riders who once rode as long and as hard and carried the same weight of cargo and of thirst, different souls scratching out the same rat’s run.

My definition of purple prose is empty style, and that’s what we see in Theis’s example. People find some measure of beauty in it. It has a fandom as being their most beloved awful prose, but so much of what the text says carries no new meaning.

Hemingway’s paragraph seeks to convey an image through the final, cumulative sentence, and it would be a bit much of a sentence, except he dedicates the first part of the paragraph to setting the scene in excessively clear and simple prose. The paragraph as a whole carries this cohesive thought, but Theis’s paragraph builds to nothing and uses many words to convey little.

The tireless sun cast its parching rays of incandescence from overhead, half way through its daily revolution.

“rays of incandescence;” “overhead, half way through its daily revolution.”

Theis uses complicated language to convey each of these ideas twice, and Hemingway uses simple language to convey concrete imagery, leading to a complex description of the passing of troops through the woods.

I tried to take what Theis described, convey it simply, and have that lead into a more complex statement that built on the sentences before it. I didn’t mimic the verb phrases of Hemingway’s final sentence structure, but I borrowed the structure of his paragraph to give the description purpose.

What I didn’t worry about was making sure the paragraph carried Theis’s exposition, namely, the Norgolian empire. Exposition should come where it fits well, and we cause ourselves problems when we throw our sentences out of balance because things need explaining.

Concepts particular to prose style are few and hard to come by. For the most part, style is about slipping in the techniques of poetry, most of often in understated ways. Such conceits can go big. Big only turns purple when that big poetic vessel holds too little substance, but big draws attention to itself. If your style draws attention, it better be good enough to stand up under scrutiny.

We’ll get into the poetics of style in another essay, but I want to finish this one with a focus on clauses and phrases. More and more, I suspect that this is the heart of readability, and whether our sentences are as long as Faulkner’s or as short as Hemingway’s, their value will be in the clause and in the phrase.

The weather-beaten trail wound ahead
into the dusk-racked climes
of the barren land
which dominates large portions
of the Norgolian empire.

Compare that to a section of Faulkner’s longest sentence.

…when he saw she was watching him
he looked at her,
at that moment
in which she paused, cried, hopeless yet absolutely unregretful;
and then as if she cried
against that outbuilding
from which presently there would emerge that face
which was like the face
of the new moon not at all,
but only in that it would be transparent,
only a little light,
a weak silver tinge not even,
not merely bloodless but almost fleshless too…

Absalom, Absalom!

Faulkner can be difficult, but his style carries weight. It holds substance.

Let’s do one final rewrite, shall we? Let’s turn Faulkner into Theis.

Her tear-reddened eyes watched him,
and he looked at her puffy lids.
He saw the blood-shot whites
and the pupils, dark and centered,
and she cried, hopeless but without regret.
Tears traced her dark face
like rain on a moonless night,

I had to cut there because I almost liked what followed:

nothing there to reflect hope,
the way the moon reflects the sun,
nothing to regret the daylight’s passing,
almost nothing,
a tinge,
a trace.

These studies aren’t about advice. We explore options, especially those chosen by the masters, and you decide what you want to use. What I’m about to say comes dangerously close to being advice: consider the feel of each phrase and the weight it carries. Be ready to cut.

When we dip into the purple, the need to cut reaches down to a word level—but our most common problems aren’t in the ill-chosen word but in the unnecessary phrase, the one-too-many that carries too little and costs too much.

— Thaddeus Thomas

Remember our $1 Black Friday book sale.

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