Your Foundation for Style

Minimalism, Maximalism, Voice, and Parallelism

With all the writing about writing, we talk little about style. It’s assumed to be immutable, and the resulting advice is tailored to work around your style, not broaden it.

This assumption may not be totally unfounded. The lines drawn on the literary battlefield are between minimalists like Hemingway and maximalists like Faulkner, and with no proof beyond personal experience, I’m tempted to agree that this one foundational aspect of style doesn’t change. It is more than a mere choice but an expression of personality, be we a person of few words or the long-winded type.

Which category seems better to us depends on our sense of security in ourselves at any given moment. We’ll fluctuate between believing what’s wrong with our style is that it’s not like theirs and believing what’s wrong with their style is it’s not like ours. Both ideas are misguided, and the journey to improving our writing begins by discovering and embracing who we truly are.

We can, for short periods, imitate the other side, but across a longer work we’ll slip back to our natural way of expressing ideas. We learn from each other. This cross pollination gives variation to our work, and the best writers exemplify these borrowed moments of style which lend life and color to what would otherwise be monotonous. To deny that bedrock of personal style, however, is to be at war with ourselves.

I will once again venture too close to the sun and offer something dangerously resembling advice: begin your long fiction in your natural style, whether that be minimalist or maximalist. In so doing we are establishing the background upon which all our little flourishes will be laid, and we are promising ourselves and our reader that when we move away from those variations, this is the style we’ll drift back to.

Is this a law? Heaven forbid.

Consider the beginning of Ulysses.

Note: the Latin is a biblical quote, “I shall go up to God’s altar.” And with Kinch, Buck is using the word Child to refer to Stephen Dedalus.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

—Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

—Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awakening mountains. Then, catching sign of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Ulysses — James Joyce

Joyce is a maximalist, albeit one in total control of his art, and his opening lines are brief and sharp. He gives us until Buck catches sight of Stephen Dedalus before a sentence gets truly complicated, and even Hemingway is known to use such structures.

This is no law but an insurance policy. Go wild and explore, but by showing your true face at the beginning, you will not have betrayed yourself when it shows itself again later.

Most sources that define minimalism and maximalism will begin too late, in as much as they define them as differing sets of techniques. Every technique is open to you, and no technique will transform the foundational nature of your writing. Some will allow you to hone your craft, and those techniques in contrast to your nature will allow you flashes of art that surprise and delight your reader. The minimalist and maximalist were not made so by their techniques, instead we chose our techniques—often unconsciously and in ignorance—as the tools that best express our way of thinking.

Minimalism and maximalism reduce to concise vs. lush; beyond that, it’s just a question of what aspect of style we mean, but the writer who wrote, “My mother is a fish.” was not a minimalist.

Dell said, She's in the box; how could she have got out? She got out through the holes I bored, into the water I said, and when we come to the water again I am going to see her. My mother is not in the box. My mother does not smell like that. My mother is a fish.

As I Lay Dying ― William Faulkner

These factors are an aspect of voice but they are not voice in and of themselves. Like them, however, voice is an aspect of personality and individuality. As we learn techniques and deepen our reading in order to broaden the depth of our style, we need not worry about losing our voice, for it comes into being when we choose what technique to use in a given circumstance—what word and what phrase. It is the expression of our individual humanity in applying the limited tools available to us.

Does that mean that we need never worry about sacrificing our voice? No.

One reason for mastering the rules is gaining the wisdom to take or discard the suggestions of human editors and computer grammar checkers. When we are ignorant of the rules, we think ourselves special for the mistakes that we make, but voice is not found in the background noise of amateurish writing. Learn punctuation and sentence structure. Learn to remove filter words. Understand passive and active voice and the difference between showing and telling. Write a short story that takes no risks and gets everything right. Know the rules to rise above them.

Unless you know the rules—and it has never been easier for a writer to indulge herself in an onslaught of advice—you won’t know what literary hills to defend and which to surrender. With the wrong ground lost and lost too often, that’s when we’re in danger of losing our voice to a computer or to another human who believes your work would have sounded better if they had written it.

That same writer, at two o’clock next Thursday afternoon, will despair of his ability to ever write again. Writers are strange and predictable that way.

Know the rules to rise above them. Know the techniques to choose among them.

As we explore specific techniques, our biggest challenge will be familiarity and the temptation to skip over and move on because we know parallelism. Give me something new, we cry, but knowledge of parataxis simply removes our ignorance. We haven’t mastered it until we both understand its application and can use it successfully at will. When we talk of parallelism, we can tell ourselves that we learned it in school or that we sort of do it already, and in so doing, never explore the technique as a mature literary stylist.

I must confess, however, that I chose parallelism as my example because a certain fraction of readers won’t have come across the term before. I could have used a more obvious example, but that bored me. So, in fairness, I’ll explore the technique.

No, the words meant absolutely nothing to her now. She could not even get an echo of her old emotion. But she could remember going cold with excitement, and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy (now the old feeling began to come back to her, as she took out her hairpins, laid them on the dressing-table, began to do her hair), with the rooks flaunting up and down in the pink evening light, and dressing, and going downstairs, and feeling as she crossed the hall "if it were now to die 'twere now to be most happy." That was her feeling—Othello's feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton!

Mrs. Dalloway — Virginia Woolf

Parallelism is about comparison and contrast; it’s about emphasis, balance, and rhythm. This explanation is it’s own example as one phrase parallels the others, giving the sentence a rhythm and flow I couldn’t have achieved with an overly long list. Parallelism is about structural similarities.

We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with thickset gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations—books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.

The Book of the New Sun — Gene Wolfe

Literary parallelism uses similar structures within a sentence, paragraph, and ever larger passages to create patterns that aid in creating meaning and the aesthetics of readability. We have books here bound in hides… We have books bound wholly in metals… We have books cased in perfumed woods…

…books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.

That last one is interesting because not only is the repetition of books part of the structure, but after three repetitions, the full parallel is implied.

Moving from Wolfe to Woolf, the repetition is more subtle, a building of words with similar meanings (emotion-related and action-related (hair dressing)) as well as the word down used in different ways. …down in the pink evening light… and going downstairs…she was coming down to dinner…

Which then makes me ask, why does the thesaurus of emotion and memory words work when the sparkle words from our Stephanie Meyer example did not?

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 — Stephanie Meyer

We’ve run through several rewrites of the passage already, but allow me one more try:

He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, scintillating chest; his scintillating arms bare, and his scintillating, pale lavender lids shut without sleeping, a perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal.

Can Stephanie Meyer and Virginia Woolf come together to teach us a rule about repetition of words? No. Probably not. A suggestion? Yes. Quite possibly.

The easiest repetition of words to pull off is direct repetition with little to no synonyms involved. Such a repetition is loud and likely to overpower other techniques and is often used alone in concise language where is can have the stage to itself. We saw this earlier with Faulkner:

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.

The Sound and The Fury — William Faulkner

Equivalent repetition is softer when successful. One difference between Meyer and Woolf is Meyer’s are all synonyms for one adjective while Woolf presents us with a cascade of ideas around a shared theme, intermixed with and transitioning into direct repetition.

…her old emotion…cold with excitement…a kind of ecstasy…the old feeling…and feeling as…That was her feeling—Othello's feeling, and she felt it…as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it…

Incidentally, I also rewrote Meyer’s passage to flow together as a single unit instead of several small sentences, but that’s doesn’t mean the technique doesn’t work for minimalist approaches. We’ve seen that already in Faulkner’s passage where he uses short, concise sentences.

We see it, too, in the work of Ross MacDonald. Hard-boiled mysteries are a haven for minimalists, and MacDonald was a critical darling, seen as the heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler while elevating the work with social commentary.

But I remembered how it felt to be a thief. It felt like living in a room without any windows. Then it felt like living in a room without any walls.

Find a Victim — Ross MacDonald

— Thaddeus Thomas

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