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___________________________________________________________ Plotting Along
Best-Selling Authors Are Richer Than Ever. So Why Is Prose From These Pros So Poor?
By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 18, 2001; Page F01
Flat. Straightforward. Prose drained of all primp, prance and poetry.
Sometimes the authors write in long, plodding paragraphs. More often, they use short-spurt grafs.
Sometimes in choppy sentence fragments. Other times with no verbs. Or maybe. Single. Words.
These are the new masters of the No-Style style.
Pick up almost any best-selling work of popular fiction today and you'll recognize it at once. You may not know which writer you're reading (a telltale sign of No-Stylism) and you may have even read the same book before and can't remember (another sign), but you'll know the No-Style style when you see it.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Writers such as Tom Clancy, Ken Follett, Mary Higgins Clark, Stephen Coonts, Robin Cook, Faye Kellerman, V.C. Andrews, Jonathan Kellerman, Dean Koontz and Dale Brown are remarkable for a rhythmless beat, and a straightforward approach to writing that ranks zippy, superinventive plot first, stating the obvious second, concrete details third, and language, artistry, character development and the exploration of universal truths somewhere near the bottom of the list.
In great literature -- that is, the swirling, surprising and sometimes unsettling prose that saves souls and redefines reality -- plot, detail, language, characters, point of view, truth, beauty and other intangibles all clamor to be at the top.
The No-Style School of fiction makes no apologies. It was founded to procure mass quantities of readers and to entice us to turn pages faster faster faster. The result is a group of outrageously successful authors who are almost indistinguishable, one from another.
"The call was from the police. Not from Rina's lieutenant husband, but from the police police. She listened as the man spoke, and when she heard that it had nothing to do with Peter or the children, she felt a 'Thank you, God' wave of instant relief. After discovering the reason behind the contact, Rina wasn't as shocked as she should have been." That's the opening of "The Forgotten: A Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus Novel" by Faye Kellerman.
Now, Faye Kellerman, you might ask, is she that No-Stylist who wrote "Dr. Death" and "When the Bough Breaks"? Nope. That's her husband, Jonathan Kellerman, another No-Style style writer.
From his "Dr. Death": "The call came in at 8 P.M., just as Robin and I had finished dinner. I was out the door, holding on to the straining leash of Spike, our little Frenchbulldog. Pooch and I both looking forward to a night walk up the glen. Spike loved the dark because pointing at scurrying sounds let him pretend he was a noble hunter. I enjoyed getting out because I worked with people all day and solitude was always welcome."
Don't feel bad if you can't keep all the No-Stylists straight. Their names, like their No-Style styles, sometimes run together.
Six Keys to
A No-Style Bestseller
1. Keep characters simple. Good people are good; bad are bad. No ambiguities, please. Focus on the movement of the story and any high-tech or military aspects. Here, for instance, is what the official Amazon review -- traditionally a kiss-up -- says of Stephen Coonts's recent novel "America," which features Rear Admiral Jake Grafton: "Stephen Coonts describes the submarine at the center of the action so lavishly and lovingly that the U.S.S. America is much more real -- and even more human -- than any of his flesh-and-blood characters, including Grafton himself."
2. Put people in mortal danger. Plot is everything. Grisly murders, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, scientific emergencies, edgy sex and inexplicable events are essential. (Don't worry too much about plausibility. Inexplicable events are, natch, inexplicable.)
3. Pick a catchy title. Like those of Sue Grafton, author of 16 alphabetized No-Style mysteries such as "A Is for Alibi" and "B Is for Burglar." Or of No-Stylist Janet Evanovich, who has published "One for the Money," "Two for the Dough" and "Three to Get Deadly," among others. "When the Bough Breaks" is already taken. So are "Along Came a Spider" and "Clear and Present Danger."
4. Study the bestsellers. After his first novel failed, Robin Cook dissected a whole shelf of bestsellers. He made a note of each clever device. His second novel, "Coma," used every trick in the books. And sold like crazy.
5. Pay no attention to the critics, such as Pat Holt, a longtime book reviewer in San Francisco and editor of Holt Uncensored, an online newsletter for bookstore owners.
"Years ago," says Holt, "I noticed that the style of commercial fiction had shifted over to a television mentality."
Novels began to be written with "short paragraphs, a lot of switching of locations and lots of dialogue."
Recently, she says, "I was in an airport bookstore and I looked at the books and it really was to me a lot of propaganda." Many of the novels looked the same, she says, as though they had been written by advertising copywriters.
"The heroes we're supposed to look toward are strong silent men who get the job done," Holt says. The protagonists usually have some secret in their past that they must overcome. The books are designed "to manipulate."
"I don't know," says an exasperated Holt. "It's just, oh, God. One after another after another."
6. Know thyself. Many successful No-Stylists make no secret of the way they choose to write. When critics attack, the No-Stylists just take it -- all the way to the bank. "I have no illusions," occasional No-Stylist John Grisham told the Memphis Commercial Appeal in 1991. "I'm not trying to write great literature, can't do it. I'm just trying to write the best commercial novels I can."
Elements of Style
Occasional No-Stylists, such as Grisham, Michael Crichton and Stephen King, sometimes try to write with a discernible style. Or, as Ernest Hemingway once said, better than they can.
In "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft," King explores the notion of stylish prose. Like Grisham, King knows he is not in a league with William Shakespeare, William Faulkner or Eudora Welty. "They are geniuses," he writes. "Divine accidents, gifted in a way which is beyond our ability to understand, let alone attain."
He seems to consider himself a "really good writer." And arguably he is. One trait that may separate King from the geniuses, though, is their sure and recognizable style. Here's the beginning of " 'Salem's Lot":
"By the time he had passed Portland going north on the turnpike, Ben Mears had begun to feel a not unpleasurable tingle of excitement in his belly. It was September 5, 1975, and summer was enjoying her final grand fling. The trees were bursting with green, the sky was a high, soft blue, and just over the Falmouth town line he saw two boys walking a road parallel to the expressway with fishing rods settled on their shoulders like carbines."
Here's the beginning of Hemingway's short story "In Another Country":
"In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains."
Granted, comparing Hemingway with just about anybody is unfair. But there's a point to be made here. Though Hemingway wrote short, simple sentences, he had style. Nobody sounds like him.
King offers advice to writers on how to write breezy, short-paragraph prose. He extols "the well-turned fragment" and holds up this excerpt from Jonathan Kellerman's novel "Survival of the Fittest" as a successful example: "The boat was thirty feet of sleek white fiberglass with gray trim. Tall masts, the sails tied. Satori painted on the hull in black script edged with gold."
King also sings the praises of plain and direct writing and, at the front of his book, says that "every aspiring writer should read 'The Elements of Style.' " The truth is, the slender little dictatorial volume by Cornell professor William Strunk Jr. and his student E.B. White -- a grand stylist -- may have been more harmful than helpful in enabling recent generations of American writers to find a style.
Whole classrooms of aspiring novelists took to heart Strunk's admonition: "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts."
Today No-Stylists deliver the stripped-down stories. Readers eat them up.
In his 1898 "Dictionary of Phrase and Fable," E. Cobham Brewer defined the "Dry Style" of writing as prose "without pathos, without light and shade; dull, level, and unamusing."
Whatever happened to the cadences and fireworks and transcendent detail of Mark Twain, Katherine Anne Porter, Richard Wright, Terry Southern, John Cheever, Flannery O'Connor and James Baldwin? There are the few dinosaurs left -- Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, John Updike and J.D. Salinger.
Half a century ago, even the pulp fictioneers strove for style. That's why Raymond Chandler's private-eye stories are still in print. Like today's No-Stylists, Chandler trafficked in deception, murder and social mayhem, but he did it in his own distinctive voice.
"The most durable thing in writing is style," according to Chandler, "and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off."
Vladimir Nabokov put it this way: "An original style is the only true honesty any writer can ever claim."
Cormac McCarthy, Terry McMillan and Michael Chabon are among today's best-known stylists. Chabon says, "A voice, not merely recognizable, but original, unique, engaging and above all derived from, reflecting, and advancing the meaning of the story itself, is necessary to good and worthwhile literature."
Here are the opening lines of Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay": "In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini."
While the books of great stylists usually demand a greater commitment from the reader than the No-Style offerings, the literary and artistic payoff can be rewarding. The problem is: No-Style writing, as a whole, sells much better than High Style writing.
Chabon points out that some so-called popular writers -- such as Elmore Leonard and Ray Bradbury -- are also exquisite stylists.
But there are plenty of highly lauded literary artists whose style is difficult to discern. The late John Gardner, author of "The Sunlight Dialogues" and "Grendel," comes to mind. Alfred Kazin once wrote that the trouble with Gardner's writing was that it read like anybody else's writing.
If you were asked to satirize a No-Style writer's style, the way people used to satirize Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald, you couldn't do it. It would be like satirizing the phone book.
So where did the No-Style style come from? Hemingway perhaps. He was the granddaddy of simple, pared-down sentences. But he developed characters and explored personal lives and wrangled with universal verities, when he wasn't fishing, hunting, marrying, reporting, fistfighting, appearing on the cover of Life magazine and drinking himself silly.
"Poor Faulkner," Hemingway once said. "Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."
Hemingway's hard-boiled influence was powerful. He was both parroted and parodied.
The Bottom Line
So. In the end. What's wrong with short chapters? Or sentence frags? What's the harm in a little mind candy? Some beach reading? McBooks? Who cares if one writer sounds just like another? After all, many of us scarf up the No-Stylists as if they were going out of style.
Eva Brann cares.
Brann teaches at St. John's College in Annapolis, where the curriculum is driven by the classics and professors are known as tutors.
Years ago she read one of Stephen King's books. She was greatly disappointed. "It was mere plot," she says. "Everything was geared to stimulation by way of action."
Asked if she could recall the name of the King novel, she says, "It left no impression. It left no impression whatsoever." That, she says, is a characteristic of popular fiction.
"There's a pornography of sex and a pornography of the nerves," she continues. The No-Stylists, she says, are penning the latter type of porn. "Things happen -- crude, wild, exciting things. They have no human depth. They're just occurrences."
Writing with a style "puts the human dimension beneath the occurrence," she says. "It isn't that there is action and then there is style. It's that the style, the action, the plot and the events embrace each other and belong together. If you read a book that is written with style -- well-written, that is -- it comes to you not as bare occurrence, but as something that has come through someone's imagination."
The upshot: everlasting, life-transforming literature.
But at least, you say, the No-Stylists churn out fast-paced, highly imaginative, escapist fiction. Brann has some thoughts on that, too.
"You might have wild invention ratcheted up to be as stimulating as possible," Brann says, but . . .
She searches for the perfect phrase. "An absence of style, a neglect of style really means the imagination is unplugged."
2001 The Washington Post Company
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