Twilight by Classic Authors

The Best of the Worst 2

He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare. His glistening, pale lavender lids were shut, though of course he didn't sleep. A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal.

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer

I have nothing against Twilight or Meyer. Her books are beloved, and I admire her for not throwing a fit over Fifty Shades of Gray. I needed an example of writing that lacked style, and someone suggested this. It works as good as any other.

First, this isn’t awful, beyond the fixation over his glittering skin, incandescent chest, scintillating arms, and glistening eyelids. This isn’t good repetition, but the passage has promise. It's simply overdone, but why can Faulkner over-do and get away with it? Let's find out.

First, I’ll rewrite the passage into what works for me:

"In the grass, he lay still without sleeping, his shirt open and his arms bare, impossibly immobile and brilliant in the sun, carved from an unknown stone, marmoreal and crystalline.”

Marmoreal? I don’t know; the chances of that surviving to a final draft might not be great, but its technical meaning is smooth-as-marble, while the strangeness of the word suggests the alienated nature of Meyer’s vampire.

That line is now pushed about as far I care to take it and still be comfortable with its sound. The next step is to follow Faulkner’s lead and stretch it as far as we dare without it breaking.

First, let’s look at an example of his writing:

My mother is a fish.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Not that. There are other quotes that better exemplify our stereotypical understanding of his style.

I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.

William Faulkner

That’s closer, but it’s an edited version, pared down to be shared on the Internet. This is what he really wrote:

It was Grandfather's watch and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Obviously, the first problem we have is that Faulkner overflows with philosophical meaning. Making a sentence Faulknerian is more than just long, complicated sentences—those sentences carry ideas. They have meaning and depth.

I don’t know Meyer’s ideas, and the example chosen is about the beautiful inhumanity of Edward Cullen. I’ll have to fill in the gaps of my Twilight knowledge with thoughts inspired by her sampled lines.

William Faulkner:

“He lay in the grass with a stillness I’d only seen in funeral homes where loved ones rest in their Sunday finest, not with shirts open to sculpted chests, hairless and incandescent, resembling something more angelic than man; he didn’t sleep, but with eyes closed he resembled, too, those monuments placed eternally above the dead, signaling power and grace and the promise that peace reigns in the realm of the dead, and in that monumental aspect, his angelic hints called to me that I, too, might lie beneath him.”

This exercise worried me; I confess, but this realization emboldened me: Faulkner carries on for so long because he has so much to say. Style isn’t stretching too little butter over too much bread. Style is how we choose to piece together thoughts in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

And what if we turned to Cormac McCarthy? How might he approach this passage?

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

He’s bleak, and his prose is masculine and often simple.

Cormac McCarthy:

“He lay still in the grass. His shirt was unbuttoned and parted over his chest which reflected the sunlight as if rejecting it, having no part of it, and I knew that beneath all that beauty, the light hid a darkness beyond all imagining, as fire hides the coal. He didn’t sleep. He didn’t breathe. All that had every been both of man and all mankind lay stretched out upon the earth in the shell of a teen-aged boy and the fear of man’s desire lie there with him like scattered seed spent and lingering.”

James Joyce:

“Ineffable immobility of the man: in stillness crawling, like those spams of the eye when the vertigo sets in. A boy lies still in the grass, and yet the man moves. One hand over the other, limited only by the dictates of reality and flesh; solar flares and ice floes. Dreams and nightmares. Whisper my name, Edwin Cullen. What meat lies upon the plate, waiting to be cut in the redness of its own juices flowing? Whisper my name, I say, and I shall whisper back.”

Virginia Woolf:

“She could watch him no longer. Time froze in his presence until she noticed the play of wind on the grass. The time that counted, or which refused to count, was the time kept in her head and heart, the measure of years past and days to come, and in him overflowed a measure immeasurable. Days traced back beyond her grandmother’s remembering, he would know them all, storing them within that frozen shell, as if it were time and not light that shimmered across his perfect flesh and blinded her unto squinting, and she could watch him longer. Nor would she look away.”

Ernest Hemingway:

“He was a young man who lay alone in the grass. He had gone two hours without moving and without tanning in the sun. For the first forty minutes she expected him to burn. His skin was pale, and from throat to bared chest he had no tan line, but he turned neither brown nor red. Instead, Edwin Cullen set the air to burning and dancing, like sunlight on the sea, and her heart danced with him.”

Samuel Becket:

“Inhuman nature. Marvelous boy. Shall I join him? I can’t, or I can but won’t. Perhaps if I would then I could not, but I can and thus possess no knowledge of what should be if I had the will to try. The boy is too pure. He sparkles in the sun. And me? I get good grades in chemistry. That’s the truth as I know it.”

Vladimir Nabokov:

“In the grass he lay, shirt open to the sun, exposing an impossible youth and Promethean chest, the brilliance of the gods in the heart of man. She watched him in his stillness and wondered whether this were Forks, Washington or whether this were Hell, with her heart plucked out daily in penance for an unending desire?— Forks. Washingtotally, Forks. He was cute and all, but this was What-the-Forks, I’m-all-outta-Forks, Who-gives-a-Forks: America’s too-unknown-to-be-forgotten, rain in the ass.”

Some of this was a bit of a cheat, with attempts that verge on parody and passages that hardly resemble the original. Besides, with Nabokov and Joyce, how do you claim to write something in an author’s style when they change their style to meet the challenge of the project?

In the end, my task was to rewrite the passage based on what the author could teach us. You can see that my original instinct is to stay close to the material. Each of the inspired samples, however, carry something more, namely, that first lesson: have something to say. It seems obvious, but in rewrites and considerations of style, I don’t think it is. We often boil style down to whether or not we keep the conjunction, which is a grand consideration, but there’s so much more.

Novice fiction can have fantastic moments, but as we master our writing, those moments need to become more frequent. Let’s call it the quality contract. Whatever you and your audience care about, whatever signifies quality, your contract with your reader says you will carry that through in your fiction as often as possible.

Stylistically, I find that I’ll try something in the draft, and if in rewrites I decide it didn’t work and can’t be salvaged, more of than not, it just gets cut. That was meant to be a quality moment, and it needs to replaced with a quality moment—but that’s hard to do in the rewrite. It’s easier to cut and edit for flow and move on.

That’s where I believe an exercise like this can be not only practical but revolutionary. Find the unexplored ideas hinted at in the text and expound on those in a few stylistic drills. See if one will work.

We can do more.

—Thaddeus Thomas

P.S. If you have a favorite among the rewrites, I’d love to hear what it is and why.

See all the essays in the series. Prose Style: Table of Contents.