Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing Book

As I start, I am unsure how many stars I will give this book. I don't think that has ever happened to me before. The book is useful, and I enjoyed it, but I skimmed sections too and tolerated parts. It really depends on your current knowledge and purpose, I guess, whether or not this book is worth your time.

Style/voice is hard, and this did prompt me to think, to re-think, so I was happy most of the time. The author explored the history of thought on style in writing, touched on many genres, and explored a lot of ground. Yagoda interviewed many other authors and included transcripts, and they were often welcome and interesting, even when they were sometimes too long. Ultimately, the main ideas were not new to me, which makes me wonder if I know the topic better than I thought. Nevertheless, it was a good review and opportunity for synthesis. Understanding style in writing, of course, is not the same thing as having developed one.

So, a few details…

Yagoda puts Strunk and White into a greater context. They "purport to be talking about 'style,' but they are really advocating a particular style."

The debate about style is at least as old as Gorgias vs Plato. More modern combatants might be Natalie Goldberg standing in for Gorgias vs Struck and White for Plato.

Yolanda wrote his book because, "there didn't seem to be a book that held two different but hardly contradictory ideas about style in its head: writers express themselves through it, and readers draw pleasure and sustenance from it."

On p. 10 Yagoda writes that "almost everyone… since the start of the twentieth century has taken the same neo-Aristotelean tack that correctness, clarity, and simplicity are to be prized…" On p. 19 he remarks: "How odd, then, that so many current writers have such strong, distinctive, and affecting styles… clearly, discourse has not crippled practice." He explores this contradiction, claiming that "an accepted middle style exists for any form of writing you can think of…"

If you don't know a lot about the topic and want to, I recommend this book for sure, despite the filler in places. The descriptions and reflections on style are illuminating.


Other observations I liked:

p. 38 "The middle style doesn't merely alternate between the literary and the colloquial: it plays them off against each other…"

p. 59 "Hemingway… didn't have a sense of humor…"

p. 59 "Faulkner… has overtones of oratory and the pulpit."

p. 60 Chandler: "…alternates between just-the-facts-ma'am terseness (mostly used for exposition) and highly rhetorical figuration, usually deployed when Marlowe is emotionally invested…"

p. 60-1 About Rick Bragg: "...violates the Hemingway code… oratorical cadences, with personification, with alliteration, with general Faulknerian purple…"

p. 86 "Of course, style is not the only relevant factor in considering a literary persona. The other is content…"

p. 90 "…I offer seven tendencies: competence, iconoclasm, extroversion, feeling, single-mindedness, tension, and solicitousness. Each one is a continuum… Together… make up a style…"

p. 133 John Updike: "Style as I understand it is nothing less than the writer's habits of mind - it is not a kind of paint applied afterwards, but the very germ of the thing."

p. 138 Joyce Carol Oates: "The pleasure is the rewriting. The first sentence can't be written until the final sentence is written. This is a koan-like statement, and I don't mean to sound needlessly obscure or mysterious, but it's simply true. The completion of any work automatically necessitates its revisioning."

p. 157: "By the end of his writing career Hemingway was a shell - an encrusted style behind which lay pretty much nothing."

p. 158 About Tom Wolfe: "...was canny enough to change gears…"

p. 162 "The downside of this kind of approach… is in the area of marketing. Stylistic zig-zagging dilutes the brand."

p. 178 Susan Orlean: "Fundamentally, the most interesting writers are the most interesting people. I don't think it would be possible to be an interesting artist without having a complicated, intriguing way of looking at the world. All you're really doing is conveying that."

p. 181 "A good deal of best selling American prose… a homogenization and formulaic reduction of certain features of robust and muscular style introduced… by Hemingway…"

p. 181 "Their own style is subservient to the sound of the character's talk. Conversely, the more distinctive and assertive stylists among fiction writers tend to go easy on dialogue…"

p. 186 Michael Chabon: "I try to hit on the voice as quickly as I can. I will keep hammering away at the first sentence till I hit that tone…"