What is style? And how do you get it?
Ask anyone about style, and they’ll nominate their own icons of pizzazz. Oldtimers talk about Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, John Kennedy, Louis Armstrong, and Grace Kelly. Contemporaries name Meryl Streep, Michael Jordan, Scarlett Johansson, and Denzel Washington. Writers talk about the styles of Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Isak Dennison, John Updike, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Laura Hillenbrand.
And so on. Style here concerns rhythm and tempo, glitter and surprise, shine and ease.
Style taps our desire for mastery, creativity, and originality. We want to stand apart from the ordinary, to be better than the rest. Even when we best the rest, we want some distinctive marker that we can call our own. Lacking that, we want to identify with someone or something else with great style.
But what is style? How do you define it? The dictionary offers a useful start: “a manner of doing something … a distinctive appearance, typically determined by the principles according to which something is designed.” Fine, but we follow all kinds of “manners of doing things”; we do not call all of them “stylish.” So consider this definition:
Style is a distinctive way of doing things, seemingly without effort. Style begins with a mastery of basic principles and then advances to some original and delightful form of expression.
As a writer, what does that mean? Let’s explore two varieties of style.
Classic Stylists
Classic style treats writing as a conversation. The writer wants to show the reader things, as if leading a tour of a subject. Rather than entertaining the reader with verbal pyrotechnics, the classical stylist wants to make the subject of writing the focus of attention. The classic stylist seeks to make writing simple, clear, logical, and delightful—and wants to make it look easy. Anything else is a distraction.
The classic stylist treats the reader as an equal. The reader knows the subject better, but the reader is equally intelligent. The two converse, on the page, as friends. Neither is superior. The writer just happens to be leading the conversation.
The classic stylists of our time run from Ernest Hemingway to John McPhee to Laura Hillenbrand. Kay Redfield Jamison, the author of a memoir of suicide called Night Falls Fast, is another. See how she engages readers in this simple passage about the complexities of the brain:
Everywhere in the snarl of tissue that is the brain, chemicals whip down fibers, tear across cell divides, and continue pell-mell on their Gordian rounds. One hundred billion individual nerve cells—each reaching out in turn to as many as 200,000 others—diverse, reverberate and converge into a webwork of staggering complexity. This three-pound thicket of gray, with its thousands of distinct cell types and estimated 100 trillion synapses, somehow pulls out order from chaos, lays down the shivery tracks of memory, gives rise to desire or terror, arranges for sleep, propels movement, imagines a symphony, or shapes a plan to annihilate itself.
Jamison takes the brain’s unfathomable billions of operations and makes them simple to comprehend. Rather than lording her superior knowledge over us, she explains how we, too, can learn what she has learned.
The Stylistics
If classical style means simplicity, clarity, and equality, its opposite means complexity, opacity, and superiority. For want of a better umbrella term for this approach, let’s call its adherents the stylistics.
Stylistics, reveling in wordplay and razzle-dazzle and discovery, go beyond mere description. They flaunt their knowledge and command of language; they challenge and unsettle and wow the reader. Stylistics make words get up and strut, dance, tease, trick, and otherwise play with the reader. Stylistics use language to express—to embody, imitate, and dramatize—the infinite oddities of life. As for the writer and reader having some sort of equality? Nonsense! Writers spend ungodly blocks of time mastering their subjects and their medium. Why should ignorant readers get treated as equals? Their job is to revel in the stylistics’ verbal pyrotechnics.
The ranks of stylistics include James Joyce, Henry Roth, Robert Penn Warren, Hunter S. Thompson, and David Foster Wallace. Take a look at this passage from David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest:
We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.
Like many stylistics, Wallace often meanders, juxtaposes seemingly unrelated ideas, pokes us from our expectations in order to reveal something fresh.
The Vast Middle Ground
Most writers work in the vast region between the classical and stylistic approaches. We try to lay down tracks that keep our ideas clear and true. Still, sometimes, we jazz it up—creating unexpected detours, pointing out odd details, even imitating the sounds and sights along the way … and not always caring so much about the destination.
Always, though, we need to know how to lay down those tracks. We need to master the core skills of writing before we can dazzle. That way, when we take a detour or ogle the sights, we do not crash or leave the readers behind.
How To Develop Your Own Style
Years ago, I met one of the seminal figures in modern baseball–Jim Bouton, who rocked the sport in 1970 when he published Ball Four, an expose of the outrageous and puerile exploits of big-leaguers. But as he aged, Bouton embraced the game’s traditions. Over his life, his style shifted from breaking the rules to honoring the game.
I introduced Bouton to my charges. They wanted to know: What’s the best way to develop the best pitching motion?
“Long-tossing,” he said.
Long-tossing is just what it sounds like—throwing the baseball over long distances, as much as 200 or 250 feet. To throw long, you can’t worry about what you look like. You have to lean back and then rock forward, slinging your arm forward like a slow-moving whip. Most people long-toss the same way, with just small variations for their size and strength. But long-tossing offers nothing fancy.
After tossing from the longest distances, you move closer and closer to your partner. When you get to the standard pitching distance—60 feet, 6 inches—you are pitching with your natural style.
And so it goes with writing.
Style in writing comes only after years of long-tossing. Without being too conscious of style, you learn to write great sentences, paragraphs, and longer passages. You don’t worry about whether you want to be like Hemingway or Faulkner, Wolfe of Woolf, Didion or Capote. You just create clear, lean sentences and paragraphs and passages. When you do all the little things right, your style slowly emerges. You develop tendencies—toward shorter or longer sentences, greater or lesser use of commas and semicolons, formal or vernacular speech, more or less use of quotations and statistics and other forms of explaining.
Everyone does it that way. Read early Faulkner. You see hints of his later serpentine sentences, but mostly he offers simple, clear, basic writing. Only when he mastered these basics–only when he completed his training with literary long-tossing–did he develop his own distinctive styling.
As you master the basics, pay attention to the maneuvers of different stylists. When I was first writing for publication—in a small weekly newspaper on Long Island—I idolized Red Smith, a columnist for The New York Times. I also admired Hemingway and Fitzgerald, read biographies, and pushed myself to understand some philosophy. I noted the maneuvers of these writers and occasionally copied them. Which is fine.
Mostly, though, you will discover that your truest style comes from the voice you find mastering the simple tricks and maneuvers of language.
Don’t Go Too Far
In a review of Bruce Boyer’s True Style, a guide to looking spiffy without overdoing it, Henrik Bering notes:
The renaissance author Baldasar Castiglione, who in the “Book of the Courtier” (1528) introduced the concept of sprezzatura, advising his reader “to steer away from affectation at all costs, as if it were a dangerous reef, and to preach in all things a certain nonchalance [sprezzatura] which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless.”
But the word sprezzatura conveys more than mere thoughtless spontaneity, notes Mr. Boyer: it is “a matter of reaching for perfection, while cultivating the impression of never having given it thought.” By holding back, it “implies greatness unseen, . . . a strength held in reserve.” Thus the general mistake of the nouveaux riches is that they tend to put it all on display. The impulse, Mr. Boyer suggests, is akin to the owners of the French formal garden that was designed, in the supposed words of the playwright George S. Kaufman,“to show what God could have done if He’d have had money.”
That idea is close to the classic ideal of writing style. Show some pizzazz–use words cleverly, plant a surprise, add a dash of color–so long as you don’t distract the reader in the process.
The Appearance of Effortlessness
True style looks effortless. In sports, you think of style with players like Joe DiMaggio and Derek Jeter, Magic Johnson and Tom Brady, Arnold Palmer and Tiger Woods. In movies, think of Paul Newman and Meryl Streep, or even Gene Hackman. In music consider Miles Davis and Frank Sinatra.
Trying to look stylish is like putting on too much cologne or makeup, Again, Bering:
The problem with the dandy, a figure whom Max Beerbohm defined as “a painter whose canvas was himself,” is that not everybody possesses Brummell’s restraint: One can easily end up looking like an overdressed Easter egg or a rare and extremely poisonous tropical flower. “Your clothes should not in themselves be more memorable than you are,” notes Mr. Boyer. “Individuality should be in evidence quietly.” This is what marks the difference between the gentleman and the poseur. Mr. Boyer’s own preference is for a slightly faded elegance, “the mildly rumpled” rather than “the new and shiny.”
True writing style can be found in diverse figures–Papa Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver and John Updike, Joan Didion and Laura Hillenbrand. Read ’em, imitate ’em, and develop your own style without pretense.