Style... and Plot

A few days ago there was a terrific piece on writing style in the Washington Post. The author, Linton Weeks, talks about how distinctive style is almost absent from today's popular fiction, replaced by what he calls "No-Style." Weeks offers several tongue-in-cheek tips for writing a "No-Style bestseller," including "Put people in moral danger" and "Study current bestsellers" so you can "use every trick in the book."

Weeks goes on to contrast the effectless prose of Stephen King with the master of understatement, Ernest Hemingway, and quotes Vladimir Nabokov and Raymond Chandler on the importance of distinctive style. It's a great article, and gets more interesting as it goes along. At first you think it's going to be a sort of funny, shallow swipe at modern bestsellers, but it gets more and more thought-provoking as it goes along.

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I love distinctive style and beautiful language in writing. I never went to creative writing school in the 80s or 90s, so I never learned to write in the flat, declarative, post-modern style that Weeks calls No-Style. I never pledged allegiance to Strunk & White's dictum of cutting everything that isn't essential. I've kept things in my own pieces that a post-modernist on the warpath would have cut.

On the other hand, I envy the ability of modern thriller and mystery writers to construct intricate, action-packed plots. My partner Cris reads a hundred mysteries a year; every month we pick up an armload of them. When she has something she wants to share with me, she always points out a sentence or paragraph that has a stylish ring to it, true. But I know what's really keeping her turning pages is the plot.

I have such a hard time with plot. Even though I developed a plotting exercise that helps me think of simple plots with a beginning, middle and end ( not too sophisticated), I'm intimidated by the level of plotting required in even the most pedestrian best-seller. And that's why it's hard for me to condemn people who write what my friend Marilyn referred to as "pre-digested crap." I can't do it, so I feel I have no room to act superior.

When I wrote a few days ago about the people doing National Novel Writing Month, one of the things I didn't say was that in order to write a novel that means anything at all, whether you're doing it in a month or not, is that it has to have some kind of story. It wouldn't be worth it for me to jam down 50,000 words (as their rules require), whether it's in a month or a decade, if there was no story that led a reader through.

That's what gets me. I feel I have to have a story worthy of putting down fifty or a hundred thousand words. Of course, I started my present novel project with just an image: the Rat Pack driving back and forth from L.A. to Las Vegas. (My misunderstanding of how they filmed "Ocean's 11" and appeared at the Sands each night.) I started with that image, did some research and corrected it, came up with a number of real and fictional incidents I wanted to portray, and just started. Of course that was three years ago, and I'm still only up to chapter 12.