I must be the Charlie Brown of writers because I’ve never been able to figure out what “style” is all about. What does that word, ‘style,’ mean? I’ve always had a problem with it. If there were such a thing as “styleblindness,” a disease like colorblindness, I’d be the first to test positive.
“But,” you say, “everyone knows what style is.” Wrong. Everyone thinks they know what style is. But when you ask them, no one can define style precisely. No one can tell it to you straight.
I first became aware of my deficiency back in grade school when I was learning to write long hand. I was the only left-handed kid in Miss Gorham’s third grade class. She tried to figure out how I was supposed to hold the paper and pencil so the page wasn't smeared. She kept changing my hand position on the desk until my arm curled around the paper like an upside down ‘G.’
The other kids laughed when they saw me writing. “Why are you holding your hand like that? Why is your paper upside down when you write?”
They thought it was funny. I didn’t. Long after they went out to the playground for recess, I was still hunched over my little desk, tongue sticking out of the corner of my mouth as my crabbed hand slowly but diligently moved my number 2 pencil across sheets and sheets of that brownish, newsprinty writing paper in the Chieftain tablet they gave us. I remember three parallel lines, two solid with a dashed one in the middle. I was supposed to make the small vowels come up to the middle line. The tops of the capitals were to come up to the top line.
I copied all the letters from the book. Over and over.
I kept turning pages in.
“No,” Miss Gorham said, “that’s not right. Do you see how the top of the ‘D’ is supposed to look? Now go and try again.”
I must have gone through a whole tablet of pages like that.
Finally, I achieved it. Perfection! I had exactly mirrored every letter. I even had the X, Y and Z on their own separate lines, just like in the book. I had mastered cursive.
After rechecking each letter, I turned in my cursive alphabet page along with my written theme for that week (“what I did on my summer vacation” of course, the perennial grade school theme) in cursive. I had checked every letter in the theme too. I was very proud.
A few days later, Miss Gorham gave me back my paper.
She frowned.
“Your writing is too mechanical,” she said. "You have to develop some style.”
Then she held up my theme. It had a big red ‘C’ on top.
“There’s no style here either. You need to be more descriptive and expressive in your story telling. Look at what you wrote: ‘We went to the river. The river was there.’ The writing is flat. I can’t picture anything. It’s not descriptive at all. You have to write so that the reader can get a mental picture.”
“You need to develop some style in your handwriting and your writing.” She handed the theme back to me.
I was too stunned to speak. I could only sputter, “But—”
I went back to my desk and took out the writing book and compared it with the letters in my writing. Yep. I had matched the book. Every single letter. Where was the ‘style’ she was talking about? What was I missing?
And then there was my theme. I had told the story of my family’s Sequoia National Park vacation, just as it had happened. I reread the piece. It sounded just like the Dick and Jane stories we read in our textbook. Why were those stories right and my story wrong?
Thus began the curse of the style. The word has haunted me all my life.
I spent many years studying Kenpo Karate, and recall preparing a kata or form for an upcoming tournament. One day, as the tournament date approached, a group of senior black belts watched as I sweated through my performance after which I stood in a corner. They huddled, conferring.
At length the oldest came over to me and said, “Your execution of the moves was flawless. But you have no style. Frankly, it’s boring. Everyone agrees. When are you going to develop some style?”
There it was again. Style. The dreaded word.
I decided to look up what other martial artists had to say about style.
Bruce Lee wrote a lot about style. In fact, he was famous for his own style. He called his martial arts style “the style of no style.” Hey, I thought, that was good. At least, if anyone brought it up to me again, I could say that, just like Bruce Lee, I practiced the style of no style. It sounded perfect -- so eastern, so Zen-like, so bushido. Nobody could criticize me for following in the footsteps of a martial arts master, could they? Well, at any rate, it got me off the hook when I was asked about it.
Throughout the years, whatever I did, ‘style’ bedeviled me. For instance, there was drawing: “Too photographic.” Skiing: “Good but lacks style.” Even cooking school: “Too plain Jane. It lacks a certain something.”
Now that I’ve decided to be a writer, the style beast again confounds me. I thought maybe other writers could help, so I looked up what they had to say about style:
E.B. White: “Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from principles of composition.” But he was writing about principles of composition at the time!
Norman Mailer: “Style is the cutting edge of content.” What the heck did that mean?
One day I determined to lick this style problem once and for all so I decided to ask my teacher at the writing co-operative. Our class had been going well. She seemed to know her stuff and I was certain she could point me in the right direction. But my past encounters with the style monster had taught me not to ask straight out for a definition. I knew all I would get would be the same old, same old: “Style is the essence of the ineffable,” or some such cryptic nonsense in response.
Instead, I asked, “Ms. Jensen, I see a lot written about style in our textbook, and I was wondering, in literature, which writer has a good style? I mean, can you point to someone who has a distinct style, a style that would be obvious to anyone, someone whose writing could be considered exemplary?” This time I was going to get it even if it took me a writer’s lifetime.
“That’s easy. Ernest Hemingway.”
“And what should I read that best shows off his style?” I asked.
“There’s a famous short story he wrote called, “Big Two Hearted River.” Look at that story. I’m sure the style will be obvious.” She beamed. “His style is what made him famous.”
I found the story in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway and scanned down the page.
My eyes lit on two sentences.
“He went to the river. The river was there.”
I put the book down. Even after all these years, I still don’t know what style is.
Bio: Frank Richards’ short stories have appeared in The Menda City Review; War, Literature and the Arts; Sanskrit Literary Arts Magazine, and many others. He and his wife live in rural Virginia where they care for eleven rescued cats and five German shepherds.
The Style of No Style
