Ben Yagoda (My favorite books on writing)

Ben Yagoda, The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing.

This isn’t a book on writing in the general sense; it is an exploration of a single topic, and it’s like no other book I’ve ever seen on ‘style’ or ‘voice,’ or whatever you choose to call this elusive quality. I first read this book when published back in 2004, and when I finished it, I promptly picked it up and read it again, for sheer enjoyment.

Who needs another book on style? As it turns out, anybody who really cares about the issue. As Yagoda discovered when he read through the existing books on style or voice, there tend to be two classes: The Strunk-and-White school, which emphasizes clarity, transparency, and avoiding anything that calls attention to the writer; and the Follow-Your-Bliss school, which urges self-expression at the expense of the reader. None of the writers we prize are in either category.

I can’t think of a better way to explain Yagoda’s approach to the topic than to quote the opening paragraphs of his Introduction:

This book began with a single and simple observation: it is frequently the case that writers entertain, move and inspire us less by what they say than how they say it. What they say is information and ideas and (in the case of fiction) story and characters. How they say it is style.

For the first of many times, I present an example: Ernest Hemingway. What is Hemingway’s content? He has some fishing and war stories that are pretty good, if a little short in the action department, and some ideas about honorable and dishonorable behavior that would puzzle many contemporary readers. His characters, especially in the novels and most especially in the later novels, tend to be tiresome. But his style!…

Yagoda himself has a marvelous style that slips rather than veers between conversational and erudite. In addition to close readings of passages, he interviewed more than 40 writers for this book, and his definition of ‘writer’ includes some surprising figures (such as Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, or comic essayist Dave Barry).

He makes some points I’d never considered before—for example, the fact that dialogue dilutes style. Dialogue tends to follow the rules and realities of speech, and, moreover, is a representation of how the characters would speak rather than the narrative voice of the book. This may explain why so many stylish literary novels are short on dialogue, and why so many voice-y novels with ample dialogue are also first-person narratives, so that a big piece of the dialogue is in the same voice as the narrative. (As in Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Catcher in the Rye…).

His discussion of cliché phrases is also well worth reading. Yagoda contends that clichés pass through phases, beginning as fresh observations, then becoming trendy, then becoming cliché…and finally retiring to become parts of speech that are almost as neutral as well-worn words. He notes:

Evelyn Waugh…advocated sections of narrative written to conventional standards punctuated by moments when the author steps forward. In the former, he maintained, the most unobtrusive language was best, up to and including (gasp!) clichés…

He then goes on to quote the master, Waugh himself:

I think to be oversensitive about clichés is like being oversensitive about table manners. It comes from keeping second-rate company. Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they develop an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases. There are many occasions in writing when one needs an unobtrusive background to action, when the landscape must become conventionalized if the foreground is to have the right prominence. I do not believe that a serious writer has ever been shy of an expression because it has been used before. It is the writer of advertisements who is always straining to find bizarre epithets for commonplace objects.

(I would have shortened that if I could have, but what would I cut from that marvelous torrent? Go, Evelyn.)

Yagoda would never urge, ala Strunk and White, that there is a right style that ought to be adopted. (In fact, he points out that EB White himself was a stylish writer…and that Orwell, in his famous essay Politics and the English Language, happily ignores some of the rules he is expounding.) But he does try to systematize a bit, at least identifying the traits that make up a writing style. The seven he discusses at some length are:

Competence: The basic skill of the writer in handling language.
Iconoclasm: The unexpectedness of irregularity of the constructions.
Extroversion: The “loudness” or “quietness” of the writing itself.
Feeling: The divide between rational and emotive elements.
Single-mindedness: Focus versus elaboration.
Tension: The degree of complacency or edge/irony in the prose.
Solicitousness: The posture assumed before the reader.

He then suggests that

For each of the seven scales, there’s a certain zone of expectation—a place where “transparent” writers gather and presumably look right through each other. Styles that are close to one or the other pole being to attract readers’ attention. And styles that are all the way to one side seem odd, or maybe even pathological…

Normally, writers with extreme tendencies will mute them in the process of revisions; others, however, will retain or even aggravate them. Writers of this kind face one of two prospects: a life of rejection notes and marginalization, or the hope that somewhere along the line, an editor, critic, or reviewer will decide they are a genius and start the ball rolling.

I’m not sure how helpful this book is to writers; it certainly isn’t a how-to book. But it’s a hell of a lot of fun—and wonderfully well-written.