Writing Styles

I’ve just finished reading “How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One” by Stanley Fish. I found the book to be enlightening and fun to read, despite my misgivings from having read a few of Fish’s NY Times columns.

For the practical writer, who cowers before a pen and paper or a computer screen when compelled to write, Fish argues a rather simple compelling thesis: master the sentence and the rest will follow. For Fish, the sentence, and not the word, is the fundamental unit of any composition.

So while your next great novel won’t necessarily start with that killer first line you just came up with -although it certainly could!- you would have a greater command of composition by playing within the microcosm of the sentence.

My favorite part of the book were the chapters on the two dominant formal sentence styles: subordinating and additive – or if you prefer Greek, hypotaxis and parataxis.

The subordinating sentence style describes sentences that are deliberately constructed and follow an internal logic. An exercise that helps to demonstrate this style is to take a simple three word sentence and then logically expand the details of the sentence’s objects and actions.

“Bob drove his car.”
“As he careened past tractor-trailers and weaved through minivans and sedans, Bob, feeling scared, anxious, and -dare he admit it to himself?- even a bit giddy, recklessly drove his car with his overly-pregnant wife by his side as she entered into her seemingly millionth contraction, punctuated by just as many screams, since they left the funeral.”

Pro-tip: If you want to David Foster Wallace-ize a sentence, insert into your sentence more science tangents, endnotes, and maybe even a fake filmography while you’re at it.

An additive sentence consists of components which are not necessarily bound by logic, but instead have the effect of setting a scene, internal or external, for the reader.

Fish offers this example from Hemingway.

“A large white yacht was coming into the harbor and seven miles out on the horizon you could see a tanker, small and neat in profile against the blue sea, hugging the reef as she made to the westward to keep from wasting fuel against the stream.”

I’m still practicing this style. The above example does the style its due justice far better than I at the moment.

As I was contemplating how these styles complement each other, I was struck by a flurry of analogies. Perhaps the simplest is of the sentence itself. Much like the form, or lack of form, of a sentence gives space and structure to content, so do subordinating sentences in a larger composition. They form the logical outline of a work. Meanwhile, additive style sentences provide the “human” content, whether they are a character’s thoughts, the setting of a scene by an observer, a discussion of abstract ideas, etc.

Or, one could see these two complementing styles as a type of paint-by-numbers. The logical sentences form the outline, the colored paints provide vibrancy, temperature, and detail. Or, we can compare these styles to components of a piece of pop-music, where subordinating sentences are the AABA verse-chorus-bridge structure, and the additive sentences are the lyrics, chords, and melody.

Throughout the book, Fish draws the line between style versus content, structured versus unstructured. He counters critics who say that an adherence to form hinders creativity by countering that hindrance to form is actually fecund ground for creativity. At times, he even goes so far as to say that there would be no creativity without form.

I agree. What use is creativity without a vessel to express it?

But while this is an attractive idea, it’s important not to get too caught up in a hard distinction between the two. Human thought, for example, switches between modes all the time: disjointed thoughts and recollection one second, attempts to logically reason the next second.

Some days it seems like my internal struggle is to order the barrage of information which batter the barricades and flood the hold. Other days the struggle is reversed: trying to see beyond the thicket of logic to the larger human experience which shyly secrets itself away.

What’s the best part of both struggles? Thinking about the struggles themselves. The seamless synthesis between the two generates a more complete picture of human achievement and potential. If we were to briefly adopt and modify the ancient view that a composition reflects the moral sanctity of its composer, than we can hope that a good piece of writing reflects the author’s thoughtful internal struggle between the poles of reason and unreason. Any work that calls attention to such a critical aspect of human thought and creativity is worthy of admiration.

So, beyond the composition advice and basic grammatical notes, I recommend “How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One” for its unique consideration of the never-ending struggle between craft and art.

A New Rough Track

Music! That I’ve written! That’s new.

It’s a bit rough around the edges, but I hope that it’s a good place to start improving. Altogether, I’m actually quite proud of it. I went from a blank start to finish in about 5 hours.

Also, if I were to start naming tracks now, the track names would be incredibly silly. It’s better that I not go there.

Since WordPress is dead set against me embedding an audio player into the post, go to this link at Podomatic where I’ve uploaded the track