Everyone’s got style, whether they know it or not.  Even in writing.

I’m halfway through The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing by Ben Yagoda, and it’s been an enlightening read.  Who knew so many authors have certain words they use all the time?  Who knew some authors use italics (and parentheses) and CAPITALS and exclamations!! as part of their “thing?”  Who knew some authors’ speaking voices are nothing like their writing voices (and some are)?  Now I know why I have a difficult time with Faulkner and McCarthy.  Their writing overshadows their story, but then again, that’s maybe what they intended.

Yagoda outlines the history of the written word, for it wasn’t too long ago that stories were told orally, so the delivery was exceedingly important.  “With words now confined to books’ pages–not necessarily alive and resonating in the marketplace, square, or church–ethos, emotion, irony, and meaning itself could no longer be expressed through delivery.  And so it followed that writers began to pack more figurative language and rhetorical devices–more style, in the generic, rather than personal, meaning of the word–into the choice and arrangement of words…it was writing as costume: one could put on any outfit that suited one’s mood that day, and the more flamboyant the better….The glorious result of this idea was the plays of Shakespeare, which, more than anything else, are about humankind’s use of language: how it lets people adopt any guise, shapes their actions and ideas, sometimes lets them reach the heights of insight and expression, and sometimes snares them in the cruellest traps.  The inglorious result was the phenomenon of writers and speakers who got drunk on their own words, most notoriously John Lyly (1554-1606), the ornate prose of whose two-part romance Euphues led the coining of the word euphemism–that which Kingsley Amis accused Nabokov.”

Much later in the book, when discussing how an author’s personality comes into play, and how rational essay-writing is less emotional than fiction and poetry, Yagoda quotes Judith Thurman, who says, “Great writing is always a synthesis of feeling and thought.  It has the illusion of spontaneity, yet it is very clear: the directness of blurting something out, the refinement of something that’s worked over and over again.”  I find that I strive for the same thing.  It doesn’t mean I attain it; it simply means that it’s my goal.

Yagoda has served up a fascinating stew of interviews and quotes, too, from all kinds of writers, and it’s like reading the private journals of many of them–to see their angst, their disappointment, their success, their process.

If you’re interested in voice or style in your writing, go get the book now and read it.  If anything, you’ll learning something about your favorite (or least favorite) authors, and that’s worth the price of admission.

On a personal note, I was sent an encouraging e-mail from my friend Clare today.  She sent me on over to Sarah Lane’s blog where Sarah had posted Alan Watt’s theory on music and life.  Excellent.  And a great reminder of what we’re supposed to be doing in this life of ours.

Trust me.  You’ll love it.