Two kinds of mindsets prevail among writers.
Style 1, the Clear and Simple School, insists that the purpose of writing is to inform and entertain as simply as possible. Partisans of this style call for short sentences, simple words, and uncomplicated messages. Forget about symbolism or erudite allusions. The Clear and Simple School is the literary version of Joe Friday: Just the facts, ma’am.
Style 2, the Rococo School, insists that clear and simple is really shallow and boring. Why not jazz up the prose? the Two Group asks. Why not create several layers of meaning, even in the simplest phrases? Why not offer the reader new discoveries with every reading of a piece?
In fact, the two schools are not as incompatible as they might seem. You see, even the most ornate prose is usually just a collection of simple phrases and ideas. When you break down a master of literary riffing, like Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, you see a string of simplicity.
Consider this passage from Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, in which Wolfe peals with horrified glee at the foolishness of modern builders. He shows a horde of interior designers and construction crews swarming over a law office, carrying faux-classical materials to dress up the sterile modernist design.
Every great law firm in New York moves without a sputter of protest into a glass-box office building with concrete slab floors and seven-foot-ten-inch-high concrete slab ceilings and plasterboard walls and pygmy corridors-and then hires a decorator and gives him a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars to turn these mean cubes and grids into a horizontal fantasy of a Restoration townhouse. I have seen the carpenters and cabinetmakers and search-and-acquire girls hauling in more cornices, covings, pilasters, carved moldings, and recessed domes, more linenfold paneling, more (fireless) fireplaces with festoons of fruit carved in mahogany on the mantels, more chandeliers, sconces, girandoles, chestnut leather sofas, and chiming clocks than Wren, Inigo Jones, the brothers Adam, Lord Burlington, and the Dilettanti, working in concert, could have dreamed of.
Now look at this passage, idea by simple idea:
Every great law firm in New York moves
without a sputter of protest
into a glass-box office building
with concrete slab floors
and seven-foot-ten-inch-high concrete slab ceilings and plasterboard walls and pygmy corridors
and then hires a decorator
gives him a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars
to turn these mean cubes and grids
into a horizontal fantasy
of a Restoration townhouse.
I have seen the carpenters and cabinetmakers
and search-and-acquire girls
hauling in
more cornices, covings, pilasters, carved moldings, and recessed domes,
more linenfold paneling, more (fireless) fireplaces
with festoons of fruit
carved in mahogany on the mantels,
more chandeliers, sconces, girandoles, chestnut leather sofas, and chiming clocks
than Wren, Inigo Jones, the brothers Adam, Lord Burlington, and the Dilettanti,
working in concert,
could have dreamed of.
Each line is as simple as an Amish barn. This passage gets its energy form two things: the specificity of details and the piling-on of these details in just a couple of sentences.
When you want to pepper your prose with style, don’t think you need to be elaborate. In fact, think the opposite — that you need to be as simple as possible. If you find the specific details that others might not notice — and pile these details on top of each other, to create a collective portrait that overwhelms the reader — then you’ll wow the reader.
One warning, though. Don’t overdo it. Audiences love to be dazzled. They love the energy and the color of passages like this. But they can get overwhelmed too. Alternate this kind of linguistic pyrotechnics with a simpler, shorter style. Then you’ll have the best of Style 1 and Style 2.
