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The Magic of Style (1993)
(Part 1 of 3)

"Free lesson," he murmured and watched Luke smile. "Love and magic have a great deal in common. They enrich the soul, delight the heart. And they both take unrelenting and unabating practice."

--HONEST ILLUSIONS, Nora Roberts

No one can argue with that. In fact, many might argue that love and magic are identical. They would be wrong.

For those in love, the reason may be inexplicable, even groundless. Who needs to know why you fall in love? For magicians, however, magic doesn't just happen. Magic abides by rules. Though the famous illusionist David Copperfield has refused to reveal the secrets of his craft, he admitted in a Washington Post article that, "There are maybe ten different principles in magic tricks . . . . You break down even the most complex effect into simple components."

You can't do that with love except in the fictional world of the characters' conflicts. But you can do it with writing. Especially in learning about style.

Magic and writing style have a lot in common. Both magicians and novelists seek to suspend your disbelief in their particular fantasy worlds. This quality of enchantment keeps magic astounding and makes writing style seem elusive. It's not.

So what the heck is this style thing anyway? How do you get it?

You already have it. Your style is you. It's as integral to you as your personality and can't be divorced from you any more than you can estrange yourself from your dreams and passions.

Just as a magician starts by learning the sleight-of-hand, you learn writing style by mastering the tricks of the writing trade. In this first of a three-part series on writing style, we will begin with the basics. You have to master the simple card tricks before you can make the elephant disappear--or the Statue of Liberty (as Copperfield did in 1982).

The first step is to read the fiction in your genre. Study the books of the authors you enjoy and ask yourself, "How did she do that?" Some writers read right before they go to bed and swear that when they start writing the next day, they have found a rhythm to their work. This rhythm is the cadences and nuances of successful prose. You may even discover such a sensitivity to the rhythm that you can read only the type of book you are writing, such as historical, contemporary, or para-normal. In the words of Linda Howard, "When a writer finds a book's particular rhythm, then word selection becomes of paramount importance because of the nuance, the melody of that one word, the way it fits. No other word, even though it means the same, will fit so precisely."

Rhythm and tone go hand in hand. The tone of a young adult romance differs from that of a regency romance which couldn't be more different from the tone of a dark gothic. While the storyline, characters, and other elements of the particular line dictate the tone, the author enhances that mood by her choice of words.

Be specific, definite, and concrete.

When choosing your words, use the specific not the general, the definite instead of the vague, the concrete over the abstract. The English language is rich with words having a subtle difference in connotation. For just the word noise, Roget's Twenty-First Century Thesaurus offers over fifty choices. Consider this example from SLOW HEAT IN HEAVEN, by Sandra Brown.

A piercing whistle rent the still, humid air.

Or this one, from HEART OF FIRE, by Linda Howard:

The night crashed down with stunning abruptness.

We don't normally think of the setting sun, slipping below the horizon, as being noisy. Ms. Howard's choice of the verb "crashed" dispels any notion this is a romantic sunset.

Substitute action for adverbs.

Strong verbs matched with specific nouns make powerful prose.

A pair of saturnine lips cracked open briefly. (SLOW HEAT IN HEAVEN)

If Sandra Brown had written, "He looked at her with sarcasm," would you be able to picture the expression on his face? But with the eight words she chose, you can see his smirk. It's the old "Don't tell me, show me" rule. Ask yourself how you would appear if angry, happy, anxious. What does it feel like inside when you're full of pride?

Conjure up the physical in your image. Express it with specific nouns and verbs and, voila, you'll have conveyed the emotional, too:

These examples illustrate le mot juste, the French expression for the right word. Nothing assures your reader's involvement in the story like precise imagery. Only vigorous attention to detail achieves accurate images.

You may think adjectives and adverbs are necessary for creating the desired image. It's true that when we first describe something, we search for the appropriate adjective: tall, short, thin, brown, red, round. However, the question begged by many adjectives is, "How much?" How tall? How much red?

Nouns and verbs derive their power from their intrinsic value to the sentence: without them a sentence doesn't exist. They aren't window dressing like adjectives and adverbs. Make it your goal to pick the exact noun and verb you want, as LaVyrle Spencer did in HUMMINGBIRD.

Her nostrils flared as she glared hatred at him.

Or as Diana Gabaldon did in OUTLANDER:

Dawn was coming up in streaks and slashes over the foggy moor.

Notice that the adjective foggy is in contrast to the nouns streaks and slashes. Without foggy the image would not be nearly so vivid.

All verbs are not created equally. A verbs' strength comes from its precise meaning, but some are dull and flat, evoking only vague images. Avoid the lifeless verbs such as walk, talk, touch when you could choose strode, whispered, and scalded.

The verb to be is weak in all its forms; the laziest being was, were, will be, has, and had been. Sometimes these verb forms are necessary in order for the sentence to flow and make sense. But question your choice each time. What these verbs lack in power they make up for in stealth, sneaking into your narrative and description like snails seeking a dark, cozy spot in your garden. You won't notice them; all those was's will sound just fine, maybe even poetic. But before you know it they'll eat through the action, kill the story, and stop it dead in its tracks.

But what does this have to do with style? Actually, tracking down the to be forms in your prose and changing them is an excellent way to start exercising your style. In order to change an it was or a there will be, you have to ask questions, examine what you were trying to convey and come up with an alternative. Your solution, a product of your own creativity and logic, is part of your own style. Unwittingly, you'll be forced to create images.

One group of adjectives is particularly troublesome because of its importance to description: color. We get tired of saying his blue eyes, so we improvise--cobalt eyes, lapis eyes, eyes like midnight. How about:

His eyes were a violent blue, like the heat at the center of a flame. (HONEST ILLUSIONS)

Or:

His eyes, I thought, were the color of lakes and skies, and as fathomless as either. (OUTLANDER)

I have noticed that most authors don't mess with the real color name when describing the character. Instead of trying for a more imaginative color, they draw a parallel to something that has that color. Where they use more shades of a color is in describing the setting:

The river itself was fascinating. It wasn't black at all, but the color of tea, changing in shade from a clear brown to gleaming amber. (HEART OF FIRE)

You've heard that written dialogue should sound real. The same is true of the whole book, including your narration and description. The operative word is sound. What makes the style of an author compelling is her rhythm in time with the tone and context. When we talk, we naturally vary our sentence lengths.

We use long sentences, then short. Like sentence fragments. Thus, a part of creating an effective style is pacing.

Keep in mind that sentences are made of movable parts. You, the writer, can arrange them at will. Like a shell game. Bend, even break grammar rules to suit your purpose of manipulating the reader's emotions.

Sentence Fragments.

Very ancient trees, pines, and eerie in the gloom.  (OUTLANDER)

She was everything he'd imagined and more. Soft, strong, sexy. The moan came from her instant and torrid response. The way her body strained and trembled against his, the way her mouth met demand for hot, violent demand. (HONEST ILLUSIONS)

One-sentence paragraphs.

The stone screamed. (OUTLANDER)

He frightened her. (UNTAMED, Elizabeth Lowell)

Militant English teachers from sixth-grade on warred against the use of one-sentence paragraphs and sentence fragments. They sought out and eliminated improper grammar like storm troopers retaking a city from the enemy. In the process they annihilated creativity. Consider grammar rules the favorite family recipe for cake. It may have mayonnaise instead of oil. You may throw in nuts sometimes and other times leave off the icing. You never sift the flour, but you always melt the shortening. The basics are there, just rearranged, added to and individualized.

Using trial and error you played with the recipe until you made it your own, a delicious cake you're known for. Taste told you whether it worked.

In writing, you must rely on your inner ear to tell you if your experimentation works. For instance, ending a sentence with a preposition. If you fear reprisals from Sgt. Grammar, our dogmatic English teacher, just call upon this quote from Winston Churchill: "This is one rule up with which I shall not put!"

The same goes for splitting the infinitive:

She wondered how spelunkers learned not only to tolerate the sensation of being buried in the bowels of the earth and to endure the oppressive darkness, but to actually enjoy it. (HEART OF FIRE)

Ms. Howard's transgression (I have underlined the split infinitive) is not offensive. Moreover, it emphasizes the irony of her observation, and it fits the rhythm of her sentence.

Parallel Structure

As defined by Lucille Payne in THE LIVELY ART OF WRITING, "The common denominator is the repetition of some element in the sentence. It is not the repetition of an idea. A parallelism does not say the same thing in different words."

Twenty-seven years of propriety were no match for several hundred thousand years of instinct. (OUTLANDER)

Common sense told Meg to refuse. Curiosity made her accept. (UNTAMED)

Most often the parallel is drawn for only a few sentences. There are the rare exceptions:

Progressively . . . painfully . . . he became aware of raw, gnawing heat in his flesh. But this he could not identify, knew only that it pained in a way nothing ever had before. (HUMMINGBIRD)

Another delight is when the parallel structure includes other figures of speech, such as similes or metaphors:

Veda's ample bosom was as comfortable as a goose down pillow, as protective as a fortress, and as reassuring as a chapel. (SLOW HEAT IN HEAVEN)

But Luke realized tonight that what he had found in Katy was something infinitely more precious. She was not a reflection of him, but his natural opposite. Day to his night, sunlight to his shadow, equal and opposite. Both necessary to form a complete whole. (FAMILY MAN, Jayne Ann Krentz)

Parallel structure is rhythm. The natural symmetry of the structure draws the reader into the image and, thus, into your fictional world. And, not coincidentally, it embodies the theme of this article: writing style has everything to do with how you arrange the specific words you've chosen to create the imagery.

In the foregoing, we have covered some basic tenets of good writing: choosing the right word, the use and abuse of adjectives, using parallel structure, and ignoring grammar rules. As you incorporate these into your writing, you will discover that some skills come easier to you than others, that you bring your own sense of rhythm to your story. Recognize this tendency and capitalize on it. Don't feel you have to include every type. In fact, when you study your favorite novels for use of these techniques, you'll discover that every author has her own specialty. This is her style.

In the next article of this series we'll study how to create vivid images to illustrate an idea. You'll learn the three things imagery is all about, the four techniques for evoking imagery, and the meaning of Weltanschauung.

Go to Part 2