Writing For Style: Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988) was a short story writer and poet. Carver is considered a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s.

Carver is my favourite author along with Raymond Chandler. I don't often put down a book and stare into the middle distance, but Carver does this to me frequently. He gives me shivers and shudders, he makes me glad I'm who I am and not one of his characters, yet he does it in such a gentle way-no gore, little violence, much is implied.

Carver Quotes:

It's been a continual series of starting-overs for me.

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places...

Carver cites Isaac Babel's dictum, "No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put in just the right place."

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.

"Writers don't need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing - a sunset or an old shoe - in absolute and simple amazement."

His writing feels like that melancholy bittersweet of a mourning dove cooing at sunset. I feel sad every time I remember he is gone and that there will be no more from him.

There's more on the Raymond Carver page of Writing Tips at Moore Partners.

Writing for Style: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Marquez, also known as Gabo (born March 6, 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia) is a Colombian novelist, journalist, editor, publisher, political activist, and recipient of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. García Márquez has lived mostly in Mexico and Europe and currently spends much of his time in Mexico City.

Widely credited with introducing the global public to magical realism, he has secured both significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success.

• In Evil Hour 1962
• One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967
• The Autumn of the Patriarch 1975
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold 1981
• Love in the Time of Cholera 1985
• The General in His Labyrinth 1989
• Of Love and Other Demons 1994
• Memories of My Melancholy Whores 2004

His work seamlessly combines the real and the unreal, and his writing is more sensual than intellectual. You can feel and smell and hear his novels. They are eaten and breathed as much as read.

There's more on the Marquez page of Writing Tips at Moore Partners.

Writing for Style - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who died in April 2007 at the age of 84, was one of the most playfully distinctive stylists in modern American literature.

I was introduced to Vonnegut through Cats Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five and I was completely captivated. I had never read anything like those books and, I guess, neither had anyone else.

He also had some useful stylistic advice to pass along. In 1982, Vonnegut wrote a short piece for the International Paper Company titled simply, "How to Write with Style." He begins the essay by considering why we should strive to improve our writing style.

"Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead--or worse, they will stop reading you."

He then offers seven deceptively simple principles:

• Find a subject you care about.
• Do not ramble, though.
• Keep it simple.
• Have the guts to cut.
• Sound like yourself.
• Say what you mean to say.
• Pity the readers.

There's more on the Kurt Vonnegut Jr. page of Writing Tips at Moore Partners.

Writing for Style: Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler's Tough Guy Prose Style

Modified from About.com

Chandler (1888-1959) is probably my favourite author, but then I think that L.A. in the 30's was heaven on earth.

His style is distinct. Here's the opening to a short story called Desert Wind, written in 1938:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband's necks.

Anything can happen.

Raymond Chandler, Creator of Philip Marlowe, Red Wind, 1938

"She's dark and lovely and passionate. And very, very kind."
"And exclusive as a mailbox," I said.
---The Little Sister (Chapter 19)

"It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way--but not as far as Velma had gone"---Farewell, My Lovely (Chapter 41)

"I put the duster away folded with the dust in it, leaned back and just sat, not smoking, not even thinking. I was a blank man. I had no face, no meaning, no personality, hardly a name. I didn't want to eat. I didn't even want a drink. I was the page from yesterday's calendar crumpled at the bottom of the waste basket "---The Little Sister (Chapter 25)

"I never saw any of them again - except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them." ---The Long Goodbye (Chapter 52)

"I'm an occational drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard." --"The King in Yellow"

"The big foreign car drove itself, but I held the wheel for the sake of appearances." --Farewell, My Lovely (Chapter 9)

There's more on the Raymond Chandler page of Writing Tips at Moore Partners.

Writing for Style: Norman Mailer

adapted from from Your Guide to Grammar & Composition.

Sorry for the long gap in posting, but I’ve been working on my Moore Partners website. Today starts a series of Writers on Writing. To keep the posts reasonably short, I’ve included website links where you can read more.

One of the best known and most controversial American novelists of the second half of the 20th century, Norman Mailer is mostly remembered for his private life of excess and activism. Mailer was married six times, and had several mistresses. He had eight biological children by his various wives, and adopted one further child. For many years, he had a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights as well as a house on the Cape Cod oceanfront in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Like many novelists of his generation, Mailer struggled with alcohol and drug abuse throughout his life. Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel.

Armies of the Night, Mailer's narrative about the march on the Pentagon, won the National Book Award in 1968 and the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Twelve years later, The Executioner's Song, his "true-life novel" about convict Gary Gilmore, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

That is the book of Mailer’s I remember most vividly. It knocked me out in the same way as In Cold Blood did. And the TV movie starring Tommy Lee Jones as Gary Gilmour was superb.

"I will certainly be remembered as a journalist," Mailer said to interviewer Gregory Kirschling (Entertainment Weekly, 2007). "In fact, I think the irony may be that I've had much more influence as a journalist than as a novelist."

In the more than 300 interviews given by Mailer over a long career, he freely expressed his views on a broad range of topics:

The Spooky Element in Writing
One Simple Rule
Doing What's Necessary
The Fiction of Nonfiction
The Value of Writing Classes
Style
The Influence of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner

All are under Norman Mailer on the Writing Tips page of Moore Partners.

Writing for Style: The Freight Train Part 2

Richard Lanham, in Analyzing Prose (2003), called a succession of compound written structures a running style—sentences that appear to spill from the mind as a "rambling, associative syntax of conversation."

And, in The New Oxford Guide to Writing (1988), Thomas Kane characterized the running style as the "freight-train style". Kane said the freight-train style was useful when you wish to link a series of events, ideas, impressions, feelings, or perceptions as immediately as possible, without judging their relative value or imposing a logical structure upon them.

This style directs our senses much as a camera directs them in a film, guiding us from one perception to another, yet creating a continuous experience. The freight-train style, then, brings experiences closely together and can achieve a high degree of fluidity.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens uses the running (or freight-train) style to give an impression of the contradictions of the time:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

The freight train style can be effective in short bursts, but its limitations lie in its lack of subtlety. Thomas Kane comments that the downside of the freight-train style is that it implies that the thoughts it links together with grammatical equality are equally significant. But usually ideas are not of the same order of importance; some are major; others secondary. Moreover, this type of construction cannot show very precise logical relationships of cause and effect, condition, concession, and so on.

The only writer I know who can sustain the freight train style is Roddy Doyle. In his hands it conveys passion, excitement, complexity, and the pull of fate. It can be spectacular.

From A Star Called Henry:

(My Mother) walked into my father. Melody Nash met Henry Smart. She walked right into him, and he fell. She was half his weight, half his height, six years younger but he fell straight over like a cut tree. Love at first sight? Felled by her beauty? No. He was maggoty drunk and missing his leg. He was holding himself up with a number seven shovel he'd found inside an open door somewhere back the way he'd come when Melody Nash walked into him and dropped him onto Dorset Street. It was a Sunday. She was coming from half-eight mass, he was struggling out of Saturday. Missing a leg and his sense of direction, he hit the street with his forehead and lay still. Melody dropped the beads she'd made herself and stared down at the man. She couldn't see his face; it was kissing the street. She saw a huge back, a back as big as a bed, inside a coat as old and crusted as the cobbles around it. Shovel-sized hands at the end of his outstretched arms, and one leg. Just the one. She actually lifted the coat to check.