How You've Changed My Writing

Issue 267

Milan, 2019

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While reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travel memoir A Time of Gifts, I couldn’t help but notice the ephemerality of his most artful sentences. The book seemed, in some ways, to arrive in my hands like a time capsule, perfectly recognizable but containing marks of its age. Published in 1977, Fermor gives a poetic, picturesque account of walking across Europe in 1933—and is, incidentally, my new favorite example of a writer who feels unencumbered by deadlines. The writing is elaborate, the scenes are vivid, and the language aligns with the polyglot and globetrotting life of its author. But it is that last point that lingers in my mind: nobody is too surprised by the antiquated language of a 19th Century novel, or of a Romantic period poem, but it is arresting when such a recent book possesses a tone and style and even vocabulary that feels so dated.

This is less of a complaint and more of an observation. I found the book delightful, a sublime escape into a remote, elusive past, but I hadn’t expected the writing to contain so many traces of that past. Even without the descriptions that date his pages—the Nazi flags in Germany, the details about clothes and rooms—I would have assumed the date simply based on his writing style. And I do wonder whether an equivalent version of me, born today, would still enjoy this book.

I have a few decades of reading behind me and this book is less of a stretch to my mind because I’m not as constrained by today’s customs for prose. This doesn’t mean that I’m a better reader than some hypothetical reader born today, or that I have anything special at all beyond an accident of birth in my favor, it’s just that I’m a bit closer in time to Fermor’s way of writing, to the metaphors that he uses, even to the history that he considers axiomatic. And that’s true even though—I must quickly, breathlessly add—I’m three or four generations removed from his time.

To just concentrate on the vocabulary, here are a few words from a single page: serried, quincunxes, salients, reentrants, impend, spinneys. Yet I wouldn’t call his prose verbose. There’s no excess of adjectives. No flabby descriptions, even when he’s feeling poetic. Just the slightest whiff of a different time. A sense that the sentences are composed in a previous decade, that the writer uses an antiquated language. Fermor is also an aficionado of grandiose paragraphs, these hyperextended, sprawling descriptions that aren’t as common in contemporary writing. His sentences unfurl in a style that I imagine fewer people are accustomed to today—which prompts me to wonder if this book, fairly soon, will be unreadable without a good dictionary and eccentric tastes.

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Although this shouldn’t be a surprise. Every writer has habits and idioms and standards that brand their words to a particular time. If you attempt to write something that lasts—an arrogant, excessive, yet excusable goal—this might be a frustrating truth, because you won’t be able to escape the constraints, the markers, of the culture from which you create. There’s no timeless style, as language, and artistry, is an ever-shifting, endlessly elusive target. Whatever feels most true in this moment—whatever works best for creation, in a novel, in a film, in a song—is contingent upon the culture, and will almost certainly look dated in a few years. There’s movement within the definition of the word fashionable, and to be fashionable today is just another way of dating yourself in the future. But I do think that it is possible to embrace this truth in a way that feels liberating. This isn’t to chase trends, or constantly adjust your standards, but it is to realize the irony: the best method of creating something that lasts is to reflect your time with precision.

Perhaps it took me too long to learn these lessons. Begrudgingly, I’ve resisted a few of my inclinations, a few of the ways in which I compose sentences, because I’m aware that I don’t use a chisel on stone tablets to write and what I create must take account of our contemporary world. Of course there is a balance. I want my writing to reflect the sensations that are intrinsic to me. It’s personal, specific, human. But I also believe that I need to meet readers where they actually exist—in a language that’s congruent to my time, in a manner that’s fitting for my subjects. I haven’t invented these words, I haven’t altered the conventions of grammar, yet I still, somehow, want to reflect what’s true, even ineffable, within these constraints. And there are a few aspects of my writing that I’ve consciously shifted over time, that I’ve simply adapted for our world, in a way that I hope reflects a desire to communicate effectively rather than a desire to ingratiate myself to readers.

I believe that this is most applicable when it comes to paragraphs. This is where I often think about how my writing must adapt to conventions. Deciding on the shape of a paragraph, where a paragraph should end, is where I resist my desires. Some of my earliest memories of immersing myself in a novel, the times when I felt that a writer had conjured something magical, simply dazzling me with technique, involved long, convoluted, nearly endless paragraphs. I particularly enjoy a paragraph that begins in one spot, takes a slight, almost imperceptible turn, and then ends up, pages later, in a very different place. Often, these are stories within stories in novels, little tales or flashbacks where a writer goes deep inside a character’s thoughts, starting in the present and seamlessly moving with a gust of memory far into the past—these are moments when you realize, pages later, that you’ve left the present and are in a completely different story. When I first started to dissect the best writing that I could find, these are the passages that I couldn’t stop studying. I wanted to understand and to see how writers accomplished these tricks. How could I follow a story so closely yet be suddenly thrust into another time? Perhaps the way some people relish the weightless, incredible feeling of a rollercoaster is how I relish the feeling of transportation in just a few sentences. Unfortunately—and I really do consider it unfortunate—I now read too closely and find that these moments of dislocation, of time shifts, happen less frequently without my awareness. Like an old detective who spots something suspicious in a walk, I notice the hints just as a writer begins to shift time, those first intimations of a more dramatic journey.

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One timeworn principle is that a paragraph should persist until its original trajectory begins to divert. Not because you’ve passed three or four sentences, not because you’ve reached a point that feels lengthy, but because you’re about to swerve, you’re about to change direction. If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, and aren’t worried about a misguided English teacher marking your text, then you can have the last sentence of your paragraph be the topic sentence for your next paragraph. This works especially well if you’re trying to develop an argument and want to keep your readers from paying attention to the people in their lives. But there’s a problem: both paragraphs and attention spans are short in our world. A long paragraph is both unusual and intimidating for many people. They’re unaccustomed to seeing large blocks of text, so you’re fighting against the concision that’s become their expectation.

If you look at the second and third paragraphs of this very essay—beginning with, I have a few decades of reading behind me and this book is less of a stretch to my mind because I’m not as constrained by today’s customs for prose—can you make a good argument for why those two paragraphs aren’t combined into one? Besides legibility, besides the ease of viewing them separately on a small screen, is there a logical, even reasonable, justification for the separation? Now look at the longer paragraph that’s just two above from this one—beginning with, I believe that this is most applicable when it comes to paragraphs. This would be divided into two or three paragraphs in most publications, but where would you actually use the scalpel? I would argue that it works better as one paragraph, as an argument that—ideally—builds and builds, only ending once I reach my next point. To arbitrarily slice it merely for convenience is a bit like taking a break in the middle of a speech.

Nevertheless, this is one area where I’ve adjusted to contemporary standards. It is a subject that I think about whenever I write, though that’s a tad misleading, as I am eternally, relentlessly obsessing about how a reader will absorb my sentences, as that’s pretty much the job description. I don’t consider this too much of a sacrifice. And it doesn’t feel like I’m denying something essential. Instead, it simply feels like I am attempting to write within the constraints of my time.