A Sentence is a Way of Being in the World

More on style/voice

Thanks to TIME Magazine for including two of my books on their list of “25 Books That Capture This American Moment,” and especially for letting me praise Dispatches, by my friend and hero (may he rest in peace), the great Michael Herr.

Special thanks to Amanda Gorman for selecting Lincoln in the Bardo and to R.J. Palacio for selecting Vigil.

There’s a nice video here.

Over beyond the (really quite low!) paywall, we’ve been discussing style.

One of the questions that’s come up is about the difference between voice and style. And I have to admit that I use these two absolutely interchangeably: to me, voice is style and vice versa.

This maybe demonstrates one difference between a theorist and a practitioner. I strongly consider myself the latter. I don’t know the difference and it doesn’t bother me not to know; it’s not a productive distinction for me.

Although there might be one way that I understand these terms as having slightly different meanings.

In stories like Elliot Spencer” or Fox 8,” I spent a lot of time working with the way the prose looked on the page. In the former, I used inter-sentence spacing to communicate the narrator’s struggle to speak and think after his brain had been wiped clean, and in the latter….well, the narrator is a fox who can’t spell very well.

Neither of those choices would be noticed if those stories were read aloud.

So, maybe, in my esthetic world, the way the language sounds when read aloud is “voice” and the way it reads on the page is “style?”

But honestly: to me, they’re the same. 😊

When editing, I think a lot about a quality I’d describe as looksound. How does the prose strike me as I silently (but not really silently) read it in my head, in terms of the way its sonic aspects intersect with its visual aspects?

Is it unusual? Is it cool? Does it have some “me” in it? Does it challenge the reader to rise up out of the plane of normal thinking and have a new look at life, on my terms?

My goal is to make the language seem like normal language, mostly, but supercharged. I suppose the underlying idea is that normal, everyday speech isn’t quite sufficient to represent what’s happening down here on Earth, not really, and so I have an urge to stylize it – organize it, speed it up, compress it, make it denser – rarefy it, essentially – not to be fancy or show off, but to make an experience for the reader that mimics or evokes the experience of being alive. (I’ve sometimes described this as “freakifying” the language.)

We have a language in which we do business (“The hospital? It’s at the corner of Main and 3^rd”) but that language only scratches the surface of what it means and feels like to exist in this world.

Maybe a swath of literary prose has the same relation to normal speech as a swath of music has to ambient sound. It’s a rarefication of the natural.

Now, why would a person want to do that? Why can’t we be satisfied describing things in “regular,” everyday, language? (Why can’t we be satisfied to just step outside and listen to street sounds?) Where’s the value in this “super-charging?”

The answer, I think, is: a non-normative style is somehow more ultimately truthful; more faithful to the reality of an actual lived moment.

In its departure from normal speech, it at least acknowledges the limitations of language and the fact that language is always a tool, that produces a mere approximation of truth.

Imagine a man walking into a Home Depot. On the banal, everyday level, we might just write: “Scott walked into the Home Depot, looking for nails.” That’s a perfectly good sentence, and a good example of the way much literary fiction is written these days, on the assumption that the meaning of the story comes from event, recounted simply, in plain, everyday language.

But is that it? Is that a true statement of that moment? Is that what that moment – that moment when one walks into a Home Depot – feels like from inside?

Anyway, I think that’s where style begins: in an attempt to do justice to a moment.

Now, many great stories operate within the “normal voice” convention. I mean, most do. That’s one way mystery is created – by omission. And we all know that dazzling stories (like Chekhov’s, say) can be built out of very simple language.

What I found out, years ago, is that I, personally, can’t make very good stories out of simple, or first-order-realistic, language. What I need to do is get the surface of the story jangly and energetic, and then everything else comes out of that. And to make a jangly, energetic surface, I have…well, I have to make myself believe in the character’s reality – I have to believe he or she is as real as me.

Just as we are always trying to do in real life.

And, just as in life, this begins in specificity.

If our story continues, “Having recently been laid off from his job at the steel mill, Scott wondered if Home Depot was hiring,” I recognize this as a thought someone (me, even) might have, while, at the same time, feeling somehow let down by the banality of that expression of the though – the way it only distantly approximates the way having a thought feels as one has it (which would be full of character, really: in the form of specifics, things specific to Scott’s way of thinking and speaking and so on, things that would render Scott more particular and vulnerable).

Whereas, if we consent to heighten the language, making it more specific and dense and atypical, we might get something like…

“Moving through the just-sprung-up Halloween section (the upblowing plastic ghosts, the baying werewolves in price-tagged tophats), Scott didn’t feel the old autumn-is-here joy, as he could still hear the attempted kindness in Miss Smelting’s voice as she said they were “letting him go to pursue bigger things,” and here, now, as he moved down the unending aisle of cleaning products (madly expensive-seeming now that he had no (zero) income), he imagined himself working here, orange-vested, competence-exuding, although, in truth, he knew nothing at all about tools and once, in fact, had nailgunned his left hand to a piece of drywall.”

Well, that’s not quite it. Although there’s something intriguing and promising (for me) about the sudden reveal of his incompetence there at the end.

But, if nothing else, we’ve got more of Scott now and I am starting to feel a little sympathy toward him.

Anyway, that’s an approximation of how I work – although the next step would be to do, like, a hundred rewrites of the above until it started to be good – that is, until it started to really sound like “me.”

And the trick is to keep my standards up (truly up) until that happens.

There are, of course, other ways of freakifying prose. Cutting is good: omitting everything we can that might be even slightly implied and thereby redundant. A story compressed in this way starts to feel strange and surprising, like life – it has that slightly malformed quality that tells us something is working besides the author’s intention.

One of the deepest truths I’ve come to realize over my nine million years of living is this: other people are just as real as I am. They really are, even though it doesn’t always feel that way.

Literature helps me feel this truth more viscerally, somehow. Seeking a less normative style is a form of enforced moving beyond my received understanding of the world, into something fresher.

Language always fails us. But literature can be a chance for it to fail with more embedded sympathy.

Thoughts, Story Club?