blogGeros

The easiest definition of style is pragmatic. It’s not from the viewpoint of the writer but from the viewpoint of the copyist: style as the recognizable-because-recurrent linguistic features that we’d copy if we were trying to pastiche or parody another’s writing. It’s the features of another writer’s prose you would use if you were trying to do something ‘in the style of X’. These could be techniques of paragraph construction like bathos (One long, convoluted, intricately articulated, perhaps pompous, sentence. Another long, convoluted, more intricately articulated, and perhaps pompous sentence. And yet another long and convoluted, even more intricately - indeed pointlessly - articulated and quite definitely pompous sentence.It could be a matter of sentence construction, where the writer consciously or unconsciously favors particular grammatical forms. It might just be individual words like ‘gibbous’.

I think this is where the idea of style as a patina comes from. The most notable stylistic features are technical - to do with syntax and lexicon - and so self-evident in the text; and that means a copyist can produce a fair simulation of another writer’s style by copying only these most obvious features of their writing. Because the similarities may be only “on the surface”, because the copyist’s prose style may achieve a purely formal sophistication by mimicking the original, while the corresponding thematic intricacy may be lacking because the complexity of the prose is... decorative rather than architectural... because of this, we often see style as purely composed of a sort of technical ‘finish’ to the prose. This sort of second-hand facsimile of another’s style can be, at its worst, like the difference between a Gothic cathedral and a Victorian Mock-Gothic folly. Style, to many, is mere ornamentation, a glossy polish or a crusty patina put on the story.

I think to some extent this type of copying may be part of the learning-to-write process. Writers starting out will often be heavily, *ahem*, influenced by a favorite author’s style. In other words, they (*ahem*, we) copy it. A healthy multiplicity of influences might give us a distinctive style in the pick’n’mix of tricks we’ve picked up from a wide range of reading; but we can still be using these devices more because we like them, because we see them working well in others, than because we actually understand the how and why of them. When we talk of writers having “found their own voice” I think this is just an attempt to distinguish a level of stylistic competency. Learning why the author(s) that influenced us actually used those features, understanding what functions the various tricks, tropes and techniques serve, we only then gradually start to use them consciously and deliberately (or maybe not-quite-consciously but at least purposefully) rather than as simple mannerisms that make our prose sophisticated.

Part of this maturity comes I think when we start to recognise deeper stylistic features of writing - character types, plot structures, recurrent themes. These may be less obvious than textual markers but they are often as much a part of an author’s idiosyncratic voice as anything else. These are stylistic features, I’d maintain. Certain characters are so identifiably Phildickian that Dick himself wrote A Maze Of Death as a deliberate attempt to kill them off, to widen his range. Peake’s use of the grotesque in characterization is stylistic. Indeed, that type of characterisation is so deeply associated with another writer's style that we call it ‘Dickensian’. Likewise we associate certain story forms with this or that writer. Asimov’s interest in crime fiction leads to his use of a particular plot structure with a mystery at its heart and a reveal at the end. Yes, we might prefer to differentiate low-level syntactic and lexical features from these higher-level constructions, to call the one ‘style’ and find some other term for the latter, but if paragraph structure can be stylistic then so can scene structure, I’d argue, so can plot structure, so can character structure.

I suspect that recognizing those sort of macroscopic features goes hand-in-hand with understanding how language can be used best at the microscopic level. From seeing the mere surface details of gargoyles, rose windows and other Mock-Gothic fripperies we come to understand the layout of naves and chapels, the use of vaulted ceilings, the real core features of the Gothic architectural style. That’s when we actually begin to understand architecture in general. That's when we begin to understand how stories work. That’s when, as I see it, the author is usually said to have ‘found their voice’.

Style Snatch 

Fashion is something we deal with everyday. Even people who say they don't care what they wear choose clothes every morning that say a lot about them and how they feel that day.

One certain thing in the fashion world is change. We are constantly being bombarded with new fashion ideas from music, videos, books, and television. Movies also have a big impact on what people wear. Ray-Ban sold more sunglasses after the movie Men In Black. Sometimes a trend is world-wide. Back in the 1950s, teenagers everywhere dressed like Elvis Presley.

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