Chapter Five

Style and Substance

“He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none.”
—George Bernard Shaw

Two elements that characterize the accomplished writer’s work are style and substance. No matter what the genre, style and substance are the hallmarks of the professional writer. Other aspects of quality storytelling being equal, they can make the difference between a good writer and a great writer.

In this chapter we’ll look at the parts that make up the whole of style and substance, from tone to mission. Let’s start with substance—because if the words you write don’t say anything, the words you write don’t matter.

Now That’s Saying Something

“All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character—what we believe—none of it is real; it’s all part of the story we tell. But here’s the thing: It’s our goddamned story!”
—Jess Walter

Write what you know. We’ve all heard this conventional wisdom before, starting with Mark Twain and nearly every writing instructor we’ve encountered since. Writing what you know is solid advice, if somewhat limiting. To paraphrase Howard Nemerov, if you only write what you know, that may leave you with a lot of free time.

Expanding that advice, sound as it may be, gives you more room in which to create. So try this broader version on for size:

Write what you know.

Write what you love.

Write what you’d love to know.

Remember the exercise we did in the previous chapter, in which you created a bubble chart designed to help you find your true voice? You identified many aspects about yourself that you could use to uncover it. Now let’s dive deeper to reveal how you might use what you know, what you love, and what you’d love to know to give your work substance.

Using the bubble chart below, jot down at least two entries for the lists on a separate sheet of paper. Do this quickly; don’t think about it. When you’re finished, consider what you’ve discovered in this process.

The Art of Fielding: A Short Case Study

Chad Harbach’s novel The Art of Fielding is about college baseball shortstop genius Henry Skrimshander, who seems destined for the big leagues until a routine throw goes rogue—and changes the lives of five people forever.

When I first read this wonderful baseball novel—I admit to being a sucker for any baseball novel that’s about more than baseball—I was reminded that the best stories reflect their authors’ knowledge, background, and obsessions. I suspected that Chad Harbach had traded heavily on this useful triumvirate in the writing of his novel.

After reading The Art of Fielding, I would have bet money that Harbach was from the Midwest, played baseball as a kid, went to Harvard, and loved Moby-Dick. And I would have won: Harbach grew up in Wisconsin, went to Harvard, earned an MFA at the University of Virginia, helped found the literary journal n + 1, and still loves the Brewers and Moby-Dick.

This is how you spin the threads of your own knowledge, background, and history into gold, as Harbach has done. Read The Art of Fielding—and ask yourself how you can do the same thing in your work. (And keep in mind that Harbach received an estimated $650,000 advance for his novel.)

“What fascinates me about baseball is that although it’s a team game, and a team becomes a kind of family, the players on the field are each very much alone. Your teammates depend on you and support you, but at the moments that count they can’t bail you out.”
—Chad Harbach

Toning It Up—and Down

Style and tone are two of the storyteller’s more subtle tools; the right tone and style can help bring a story to life. Yet writers often confuse the two; it’s easy to mistake one for the other, or either or both for voice. Let’s define our terms.

With your voice, you express your truth as a storyteller.

With your tone, you communicate the emotion, atmosphere, and mood of your story.

With your style, you articulate your story and give form to that expression.

Think of it this way: Your voice is your personality, the character traits and personal qualities and unalienable truths that make up who you are, day in and day out, through good times and bad. Your tone is your mood, your emotional state, which can change from light to dark, sweet to bitter, happy to sad, depending on what’s happening in your life. Your style is how you move through the world, the way you wear your hat and choose your clothes and strut your stuff.

Let’s take a look at voice, tone, and style as displayed in the opening of Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Fall of the House of Usher."

• Voice: Edgar Allan Poe is known for his horror and mystery stories, like this one. He tells his tales of death and decay, murder and mourning, in a macabre, almost hypnotic voice.
• Tone: The mood Poe creates here is one of suspense and dread. Poe unsettles his readers by means of atmosphere; we know bad things are going to happen. The narrator is riding straight into darkness.
• Style: This long first line exemplifies Poe’s use of tightly constructed, complex sentences, alliteration, and internal rhyme, a style that suits the disturbing stories he is known for—and "The Fall of the House of Usher" is no exception.

Now that you understand exactly what voice, tone, and style are and how they interrelate, let’s take a harder look at tone and style, as we have already done for voice.

Tone

“I think striking the right tone for your story is, if you like, the alchemical work of writing.”
—Julia Leigh

As we’ve seen, tone speaks to the emotion, atmosphere, and mood of your work. Regardless of genre, writers known for their tone endear themselves to agents, editors, and readers. Finding the right tone for your story is hitting the right note, as these writers do in their opening lines:

Evanovich begins the fifth entry in her popular Stephanie Plum series with the trademark smart-ass Jersey-girl tone, which charms the reader into accompanying the brash and brassy bounty hunter from Trenton on another madcap adventure. The tone is fast and funny and in your face, just like her heroine.

The tone is as spare and bleak as the Scandinavian landscape in the first lines of Swedish writer Henning Mankell’s best-selling Wallander series. It prepares the reader for the chronic pessimism that plagues his hero, Wallander, in particular and his country in general.

David Sedaris has made his mark as a storyteller of wit and woe, whose tales are told in a tone as poignant as it is funny. We know from these opening lines that our hapless hero will put on that suit—and terrible, funny, and terribly funny antics will ensue.

It’s all there in these first few lines: a crazy house willing to kill anything, perhaps even larks and katydids. I don’t mind saying that this novel scared the crap out of me. I was thinking about writing a ghost story at the time—more Blythe Spirit than The Haunting of Hill House. I don’t know why I thought I should read it for research, since I knew from the tone Jackson set in the very beginning that I was in Edgar Allan Poe territory and would undoubtedly suffer many sleepless nights after reading it. Which I did.

Dutch writer Van De Wetering came of age during World War II and was so disturbed by the horrific events of that conflict that he went in search of answers while traveling the world on business for his father’s company. He ended up in a Zen monastery in Kyoto, Japan. He came home a Buddhist, worked for the Dutch police force as a special constabulary, and wrote a series of acclaimed detective novels. Van De Wetering’s tone reflects his Zen studies, recalling the lyrical simplicity of a koan and carrying the pitch-perfect lessons of nonattachment.

In all of these examples, the writer has worked to achieve a tone that distinguishes the story right away and puts the reader in a suitable mood for the journey ahead. Sit down and get comfortable, the tone says to the reader, and settle in for a good, funny, scary, poignant, disturbing, or enlightening—but always unforgettable—ride.

That’s why the right tone is critical to your work. How do you want your readers to feel as they read your story? What are the emotional highs and lows you want them to experience? How can your tone help evoke those feelings?

Other writers whose tone is pitch-perfect include:

• Voltaire
• Anne Rice
• Jonathan Swift
• William Faulkner
• Anaïs Nin
• Helen Fielding
• Emily Brontë
• Henry James
• Edith Wharton
• John Steinbeck
• Jane Austen

Say you’re writing a love story. If you’re writing a sad story, your tone could be sentimental, as in Love Story by Erich Segal, a tearjerker whose beloved heroine Jennifer brought that name back into fashion with a vengeance. If you’re writing a happier story, where the girl gets the guy (eventually), then your tone could be hilarious and self-deprecating, like the tone of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. Or maybe you’re writing a twisted love story, where the couple truly deserves each other and will go to deadly lengths to prove it—as in Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, written in a tone that’s as dark and devious as the story itself.

Study the tone in stories by authors in your genre—and deconstruct how they build that tone to evoke the atmosphere, emotion, and mood. Think about how you can achieve the same effects.

“When you read Chekhov, everything has an even gray tone. When you read [my novel] Family Life, everything has an even white tone. It is almost like when you paint on paper and you can see the paper through the paint.”
—Akhil Sharma

Style

“There is such an animal as a nonstylist, only they’re not writers—they’re typists.”
—Truman Capote

As we’ve seen, style speaks to the form of your expression; it’s the actual way in which you put words together, structure your sentences, and use punctuation. It’s the words you choose—and why you choose to use them. The right style enhances your story, just as wearing the right clothes on the outside can reflect who you are on the inside.

Let’s take a look at some of the writers who are known for a style so unique it’s identifiable from word one.

Pulitzer Prize−winning author Cormac McCarthy tells his dark and violent stories—No Country for Old Men, The Road, and the Border trilogy—in what The Boston Globe called “stripped down, doom-soaked prose.” As you can see in the opening lines of No Country for Old Men, his nihilistic, poetic style is rife with alliteration and repetition and a kind of rhythm that scares readers even as it pulls them into the story. McCarthy writes by his own set of punctuation rules, which by his own admission consist mostly of periods, capitals, and the odd comma. He leaves out a lot of conventional punctuation, notably quotation marks and the apostrophes in contractions.

The New York Times called reading Proulx like “bouncing along rutted country roads in a pickup truck with no shock absorbers.” But there’s a muscular lyricism that lulls the reader like a great country-western song. Proulx has a penchant for odd names and weird nouns, which she weaves in and out of her sentences in an alliterative rhythm that, in its own way, is as hypnotic as Poe’s prose.

James Joyce is one of those writers whose style is so singular that it takes the world by storm—in its own time and for generations to come. His experimental, stream-of-consciousness style is as playful and unpredictable as it is poetic and poignant. Joyce’s boldness with language has, as Goethe would say, “genius, magic, and power in it”; his lyrical, fantastical prose washes over you like a dream. This no-holds-barred approach to style is one that all writers could learn from, if only to give ourselves permission to let go and let the words flow—and see what bubbles up.

Every genre contains great writers known for their style:

• Ernest Hemingway
• Virginia Woolf
• William Faulkner
• David Foster Wallace
• Salmon Rushdie
• Isabel Allende
• Mark Leyner
• Charles Bukowski
• Douglas Adams
• Annie Dillard
• Tom Robbins
• Pat Conroy
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Alice Hoffman
• Joyce Carol Oates
• Raymond Chandler
• Gertrude Stein
• David Mamet

We all can’t be Cormac McCarthy or Annie Proulx or James Joyce—and we shouldn’t try. Your writing style should suit your chosen subject matter. This marriage of style and substance leads to the most successful storytelling.

If you’re writing a gothic story set primarily in nineteenth-century New Orleans about love and alienation and vampires, your style could be lyrical and lush and lurid, as Anne Rice’s style in the best-selling Interview with the Vampire has been called.

If you’re writing a novel set in Arkansas in the 1870s about a fourteen-year-old girl out for vengeance, your style could be as resolute and unsentimental as its heroine, recalling the era in which it takes place through long, rolling sentences and narrative formality—just as Charles Portis does in his classic True Grit.

If you’re writing a novel about the excesses of the eighties, your style might be as over the top and bombastic as the decade itself, making full use of colorful and satirical language that pulls out all the stops, dropping brand names and exclamation points freely, as Tom Wolfe does in his bestseller The Bonfire of the Vanities (originally serialized in Rolling Stone magazine in twenty-seven installments).

Or maybe you’re writing a private-eye novel about a wisecracking detective in 1940s Los Angeles, so your style combines the force of a blunt instrument with the wit of clever, biting similes, as Raymond Chandler does in his hard-boiled classic Farewell, My Lovely.

Study the style in stories by authors in your genre—and analyze how they use the language, choose their words, construct their sentences, and set their rhythms. Think about how you can achieve the same effects.

Clarity: The Ultimate in Style

“I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer Prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.”
—Isaac Asimov

For many writers, clarity is the first—and sometimes only—aim. Your tone and style should strike clear notes. The goal: clear and concise prose.

I have a client named Greg who’s a stand-up comedian. He writes his own stuff and is one of the funniest people I have ever met. He’s quick, and that quickness serves him well on stage, where he can turn a heckler’s taunts into the most hilarious bit in his already hilarious act. The audience loves him.

But when he wanted to write a book, those improvisation skills didn’t necessarily translate. Being funny on the page is not the same as being funny on the stage. You need a funny premise and funny characters, to be sure, just as you do on the stage, but for the page you also need to achieve (1) a tone that’s humorous, ironic, or satirical and (2) a style that incorporates wordplay and rhythm to comic advantage. Most important, you need to be perfectly clear, because if your readers have to stop to think about what you mean, you’ve lost them. Obscurity is not funny; hitting your mark is.

My client mastered comedic tone and style, learned the art of being funny on the page, and wrote a best-selling humor series. (Look for the WTF? series by Gregory Bergman wherever you buy your books.) Now he’s making movies, where he can use all the tools of humor—literary, visual, aural, dramatic, and so on—at his disposal. Wordplay and sight gags, if you will. What he learned about clarity through writing humor books applies regardless of medium.

Letting Go

As we’ve seen in this chapter, the best work has style and substance. You want your stories to be about something meaningful, and you can use voice, tone, and style to bring that meaning to life.

Now it’s time to let go—and dramatize it.