Style Matters, a Craft Essay
A craft essay on learning from the masters, writing in a foreign language, magic tricks, clichés, metaphors, overwriting, and self-editing strategies.
In early August, the Auraist selected my latest book Woman of the Hour: Fifty Tales of Longing and Rebellion as one of the best-written recent releases.
The editor also published an interview with me that reads like a craft essay.
I didn’t properly publicize these things at the time, reluctant as I am when it comes to self promotion, but I’d like to share the text with you today.
Auraist: In your early writing career, were there writers whose sentences permanently affected the standards of your reading and your own writing aspirations? What have you learned about prose style from these writers?
Let’s begin here: English is not my first language. I only started speaking it daily when I lived in Paris during my mid-twenties and met the American man who later became my husband.
I wrote my first four novels in Dutch, and although I published newspaper articles in English during my college years, I didn’t dare writing fiction in English. I feared I would mangle the language I revered and ridicule myself, throwing words on the page without truly knowing their connotations. I believed it was pretentious: I wasn’t Nabokov!
When I finally gave myself permission to write fiction in English, about ten years ago, I made the mistake of starting a novel before I felt comfortable in the language. I could neither focus on the story nor the prose: All my attention went to avoiding mistakes. When I asked my screen-writing husband for feedback, he corrected my grammar instead of commenting on my ideas. Frustrated, I paused the manuscript and explored a more accessible genre: flash fiction, stories of less than a thousand words.
I read the contemporary flash masters—Kathy Fish, Thaisa Frank, Lydia Davis, Etgar Keret—and the classics, such as Italo Calvino, Yasunari Kawabata, and Luis Borges. How were they able to say so much in so few words? How did their sentences make me imagine the parts of the story they hadn’t written?
While I wrote my first flash fictions, I studied the prose of many other authors. I learned to use alliteration effectively from A.M. Homes, write flowing run-on sentences from Javier Marias and W.G. Sebald (and their translators), construct declarative sentences with multiple clauses from Renata Adler and Joan Didion, experiment with voice from Zadie Smith and Clarice Lispector, be more poetic from Anne Carson and Maggie Nelson, and write more clearly with strong nouns and verbs from John Berger, J.M. Coetzee, and James Salter.
I forced myself to write in complete sentences at first. There’s a rule about not being able to break the rules unless you know them well. My style became more natural when I added sentence fragments that didn’t contain a subject or verb. Start or end with “and.”
I still don’t have the rich understanding of native speakers, yet what I lack in immersion, I can make up in awareness. I don’t write on automatic pilot. After each sentence, I reflect: Am I saying what I want to say? Can I say something more unique or interesting by replacing my words?
I’ve grown as an author since I switched to writing in English because I’ve slowed down. My prose may never be as powerful as that of the authors I admire, but I can live with that. I don’t need to be the best. I just need to express myself with as much nuance, appeal, and clarity as possible. That’s enough for me.
