The Secret of Literary Style

Tension and Release

Note: In this essay, I make claims about what literary style is and isn’t and give name and definition to writing that isn’t literary. Above all, I have the audacity to name the one concept that can transform your writing from one to the other. These are not text book answers, only the ones I believe are correct. You’ll have to judge for yourself whether you agree.

Stephen King was an English teacher.

He tried to write in a more literary style, and when he failed, he made peace with what he felt were his limitations. Your English teachers can turn you into famous and profitable writers, but if you want to develop a literary style, you’ll have to break free of one particular result of their teachings.

Follow all the rules, and you’ll have grammatically correct sentences, each of which is perfectly balanced. The paragraph is balanced; each of its components is balanced, and the more we practice, the better it all becomes, which has to mean—it must certainly mean—that we’ll get good enough, transcend regular writing, cross the threshold of genius, and enter the realm of the literary.

But that’s just not true, because consistently balanced sentences are the enemy of literary prose.

Don’t hate me for using Brandon Sanderson as an example. This sentence comes from Mistborn: The Final Empire, and I will say again that I’ve watched several years of Sanderson’s writing classes. I respect the man.

Lord Tresting frowned, glancing up at the ruddy, mid-day sky as his servants scuttled forward, opening a parasol over Tresting and his distinguished guest.

This is a perfectly correct sentence. It’s a balanced sentence, and there’s nothing bad about it. The point here is to challenge ourselves to see how it could be adapted to a literary style.

This is Sanderson’s paragraph as a whole:

Lord Tresting frowned, glancing up at the ruddy, mid-day sky as his servants scuttled forward, opening a parasol over Tresting and his distinguished guest. Ashfalls weren’t that uncommon in the Final Empire, but Tresting had hoped to avoid getting soot stains on his fine new suit coat and red vest, which had just arrived via canal boat from Luthadel itself. Fortunately, there wasn’t much wind—the parasol would likely be effective.

We could make an effort to improve the paragraph. It wouldn’t make it literary, but we could address its issues with flow. In the last essay, we discussed phonetic flow, but generally flow refers to how one sentence moves into the next. We make sure the end of one sentence connects logically with the start of the one that follows. If the connection isn’t immediately clear, then the sentences lack flow.

Lord Tresting frowned, glancing up at the ruddy, mid-day sky as his servants scuttled forward, opening a parasol over Tresting and his distinguished guest. Ashfalls weren’t that uncommon in the Final Empire…

Sanderson requires us to mentally retreat back to the ruddy, mid-day sky to understand the context for the ashfall—which we can do. It doesn’t take long to puzzle out the meaning, but it interrupts the flow.

But again, improving the paragraph’s flow will make the writing better—not literary. Stop thinking of literary as a synonym for quality. It’s about form and fun and a love of the sentence, and we’ve embraced this confusion because literary writers generally have to write better to succeed.

The opposite of literary is balanced. Either can be written well, and either can be done poorly. Misunderstanding that point has left authors befuddled, unable to move from one to the other, because with every technique they employ, they never learn to play with the unbalanced phrase. Literary writing is a ballerina on her toes, one leg high in the air, teetering on the high wire. It’s tension produced by the writing itself, which is released, and then heightened again. The methods used to gain this tension and release are many, but usually, that release comes with change or completion.

Tension and release.

This is the idea we’re working toward, but to avoid speaking in generic, theoretical terms, I’m going to open a discussion on cadence, which (along with stressed syllables) operates the way meter does in poetry. Cadence provides structure, and an even structure—as reliable as a three-legged stool—provides balance.

Let’s consider the short poem Sometimes with One I Love by Walt Whitman, but without line breaks or non-standard spellings, presented as if it were not poetry but prose.

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturned love, but now I think there is no unreturned love, the pay is certain one way or another. (I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not returned, yet out of that I have written these songs).

Whitman replaces a focus on meter and rhyme with techniques such as consonance and assonance but primarily with cadence. Cadence is the rise and fall of intonation.

We are most aware of intonation in connection with punctuation. Questions and incomplete thoughts carry a rise in intonation. Uncertainty also carries that rise, which is why they teach you to end your statement with a falling intonation when speaking in public, to avoid conveying a lack of authority.

Statements, commands, and anything with a sense of completion has a falling intonation, as do the reporting questions (who, what, when, where, why, and how).

In longer sentences, the word before the comma is given a raised intonation, indicating that more is yet to come. Write those same lines in short sentences. Declarative. Ending in a period. You alter the intonation and with it, the implication. What is lost in musicality becomes authoritative. It’s often described as muscular prose and masculine.

Consider the last paragraph of The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

McCarthy ditches most punctuation, but on his final sentence, my intonation still rose on man, my voice adding the comma his line lacks. His shorter sentences remove that possibility, forcing a particular cadence.

Cadence also encompasses rhythm, and we’ve discussed how meter and plosives impact rhythm, but every phrase and clause does as well:

Once / there were brook trout / in the streams / in the mountains.

Notice, too, how you’re forced to separate the ending and beginning plosives in book trout. In-the-streams and in-the-mountains flow as if they were each one word¹, and that separates the phrases audibly from the distinct words: book trout.

Often, our phrases all sound alike: she sat in her chair in the garden in the sun.

We can resolve this by removing phrases: she sat in the garden in the sun.

Or we can vary the rhythm of the phrases through word choice: she sat in her chair in the garden, under the glare of the noon-day sun.

But that doesn’t mean we always want to resolve repetition by removing it. A repetitive cadence creates more tension the longer it’s held, and that tension is resolved in the change that follows it.

You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand.

McCarthy’s first sentence in this pair is made gentle through variation in its phrases and a scattering of two-syllable words. The next line feels like a completion, short and monosyllabic.

In its brevity, the fragment that follows hits those same beats, albeit through its stranded list of polysyllabic words.

They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional.

The pattern creates tension which is resolved through the change.

Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming.

Let’s return to our more monotonous example and follow it with a change that relieves the tension:

She sat in her chair in the garden in the sun / and bleached away the evil that seeped from her pores like the stench of her mother’s cigarettes.

No matter what your style, whether you’re a minimalist or maximalist, this concept of tension and release works. If your sentences feel dull and lifeless. If you’re struggling to develop style and nothing seems to help, this one technique can change everything.

Students look at these writers and ask why they get to break all the rules. Polished and muscular and torsional. How is that even a complete sentence? It’s not. By breaking the rules we can disrupt balance and create tension.

Now, apply that concept to the Sanderson example:

Lord Tresting glanced up at the threatened ashfall and frowned. He grumbled, sniffled, and frowned, his servants scuttling forward, opening a parasol, and covering Tresting’s visitor and Tresting’s new coat and red vest, which had just arrived via canal boat from Luthadel itself—the suit, not the guest. Damn the Final Empire and its raining ash. Still, there wasn’t much wind. The parasol would do.

First, I held onto that frown and used a repeating structure to heighten tension. He…frowned; he grumbled, sniffled, and frowned. This time, repetition gives a sense of completion to the phrase, and with completion comes a release of tension, somewhat undermining the secondary release through the change of structure: his servants scuttling forward, opening a parasol, and covering Tresting’s visitor and Tresting’s new coat and red vest. Meanwhile, this particular section builds its own tension through how long the rambling action is sustained. This new tension is again released twice, first in Sanderson’s phrase, which had just arrived via canal boat from Luthadel itself, and second, in my abbreviated rewrite of the final line(s), using simplicity and brevity to offset what had come before.

If you have no interest in adopting a literary style, I want to release you from the idea that literary is synonymous with quality. You can be a great writer of balanced prose, but some effects, balanced prose can’t achieve.

Ducks and starlings both migrate. In the same way, literary and balanced prose both get you through a story. The balanced option puts your ducks in a row, and that’s enough to convey the tale. Literary fiction isn’t birds in a row; it’s a murmuration. Patterns stretch near to breaking and fold back in on themselves before exploding into bold, new forms. A migration of ducks is a study in structure and balance. A murmuration of starlings is a shifting display of beauty, created in the interplay of tension and release.

— Thaddeus Thomas

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1. words like in and the have no stressed syllable