Sculptors and Speakers
Issue 125
Here is a dichotomy about writers that I want to introduce: there are sculptors and there are speakers. Sculptors treat prose as marble, with every sentence chiseled and shaped and sanded long into the night, the perfect form a Platonic ideal that’s almost always one edit away. Speakers, however, deem conversational prose the best prose, especially when a sentence flows across the page with verve and ease and exhibits the confidence of a storyteller holding an empty glass on a late night. As with many dichotomies, this is simply a heuristic, and there’s certainly a bit of overlap, as only the rare writer is a fundamentalist—plenty of sculptors want smooth sentences, and plenty of speakers fiddle around with their words. Nevertheless, with a little thought, you can still toss most writers to one side.
One obvious sculptor that comes to my mind is Vladimir Nabokov—because you don’t write entire novels on index cards without being persnickety about sentences. To read Lolita or Pale Fire is to observe how Nabokov carves his words—his attention is on the microscopic, the vivid, the musicality. Or you can simply discover his relentlessness about perfection from a single comment about Flaubert’s struggles with Madame Bovary: “…eighty to ninety pages in one year—that is a fellow after my heart.” Virginia Woolf is almost certainly another sculptor. Her sentences are labyrinthlike, full of reversals, pauses, and accelerations, yet are, somehow, still precise. Perhaps the best evidence for her obsessiveness—as Brian Dillon recounts—is how she continued to adjust commas and fuss with individual words long after publication, in changes that are, for most readers, almost imperceptible. Woolf’s prose is unmistakable, however, and it is easy to conclude that all this sculpting is what inserts her personality on the page—it is what makes the sentences feel most human. Of course any list of sculptors is personal and endless—with James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion most prominent in my mind. These are the writers who hunt for the perfect word. These are the writers who demand countless drafts for every sentence. These are the writers who care more about the sentence than the paragraph and who care more about the paragraph than the page.
Though it might be just a bit easier to find writers who are speakers. Sentences that are crisp and clear and conversational and that maintain a trancelike hold on readers are the preferred style in narrative journalism, the majority of online writing, and even in some fiction. Perhaps the most notable example of this style in recent years is Karl Ove Knausgård, the Norwegian writer of a six volume few thousand page memoir along with several novels and collections of essays, who has written more words in the last ten years than some writers have spoken—his voice always crisp, breathless, pushing the reader forward. Knausgård’s most famous book begins, it is curious to note, with an exception to this style; a scene about death and fate and mortality comes with a clear sculpted perfection, which he, later, described as a failure. This distaste for artifice, for a posture on the page, for any intrusion of a literary voice, reminds me of Georges Simenon, who was ruthless in what he cut from his novels:
Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence—cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.
And in those words you’ll find both a good description of a speaker and a good description of what a sculptor loathes. This is writing that wants to pretend it isn’t writing—and it is also what you might call the dominant tendency in contemporary writing culture. Nearly every popular non-fiction book, journal article, and modern style guide follows the principle that writing shouldn’t be conspicuous. Readers should forget, so the convention goes, that they’re reading. Now this isn’t what you get with Knausgård or Simenon or literary speakers—who still give readers sentences that have pep and vibrancy and weight—because a conversational style doesn’t preclude good writing. You can be conversational yet still passionate; just as you can be conversational yet still evocative. But that isn’t what’s distilled down as conventional writing advice, so that most attempts to imitate the conversational, easygoing style end up with prose that’s flavorless, wearisome, and inoffensive.
Although this shouldn’t be a surprise when nearly every aspect of contemporary language instruction involves deletion—with the desire for clarity achieved through the removal of excess. The complaint is about wordiness and the demand is for brevity. Shorten your sentences. Keep those verbs active. Avoid repetitions. And then you, too, can achieve that conversational style, that crisp style, that mellow and forgettable style, a style that doesn’t demand any backtracking or ever ask the reader to labor, because this is a style that’s chatty, colloquial, informal, a bit bland, yet never uncertain. It is the everlasting style that we’ve come to expect from investigative journalists and company press releases and campaign speeches—despite the obvious incongruities of those interests.
What’s curious, however, is that this simulation of a conversational voice is most ubiquitous right when it’s most irrelevant. Because so many people write such similar sentences—and because there’s such an abundance of writing today—there’s little to gain by following the trend. Nearly every publication prizes brevity. Nearly every columnist prizes short and crisp sentences. And a surprising amount of fiction writers insist on sparse prose. A simple glance at the norms of contemporary writing reveals that we overvalue the breezy, safe, and expressionless, and that we undervalue the expansive, distinctive, and passionate. And all of this conformity in writing comes right as new software advances into the territory of sentence creation—is the goal to have everyone write in the style of an instruction manual just as artificial language systems leap ahead? How curious it is that at least a few artificial systems currently in use generate bland, flat, and predictable text automatically—for corporate releases, for headline news stories—but almost nobody notices that these reports are computer generated because such a forgettable style is the norm.
Of course it would still be mad to describe most contemporary writing as overrun by clarity. Just because people write short sentences doesn’t mean that they write clearly. And just because people write expansive or circuitous or intricate sentences doesn’t mean that they sacrifice clarity. But it does seem perfectly reasonable to conclude that we’ve been undervaluing those writers who sculpt sentences in recent years—the undeniable fashion is brevity and the affectless in both journalism and fiction. And this undervaluing has also, unfortunately, subtracted much of the passion and emotion from public writing. At least there is a wonderful paradox in how today’s conversational tone is achieved through one form of sculpting: the goal of a human voice comes from deleting all the human aspects of speech from the page.
As a storyteller from a long line of storytellers, I can appreciate your analysis. Spot on.
Dayummm! Fine!