A Case of Style

When I teach my masterclass on Perspective and Style, I look at techniques that can make a piece of writing into its own distinct thing and develop our voices in writing. 

In my teaching on Voice, I stress the value of leaning into the natural speaking voice and getting it down on the page. It’s easy, it comes instinctively, it communicates – we can trust it to do a job. It’s authentic.

But of course the written word differs from the spoken word, and through drafting we edit and tinker and play with ways to make the writing more interesting. And this is where we start to develop a style of our own, and sometimes, if we practise enough, this sort of writing simply becomes the way we write, and perhaps we don’t have to edit much to make the writing distinctive. Our writing evolves a personality. 

What we mean by style is hard to pin down. Voice, narrative tone, diction, syntax, punctuation, vernacular forms, observance of convention or deviation through experimentation: these all have a bearing, and subject matter can also play a part. 

It also helps to think about specific types of style, and at this point I usually shift to examples of prose stylists who bring these types to life.

Case study: Our Souls At Night

One writer with a distinct prose style in English was Kent Haruf, a Colorado novelist who wrote about the everyday yet exceptional dramas of working people in the ranchlands of eastern Colorado. A quality in his writing always wakes something within me. Let’s look at some of those ingredients in the opening page of his final novel, Our Souls At Night (2015).

And then there was the day when Addie Moore made a call on Louis Waters. It was an evening in May just before full dark.

We jump into the middle of a conversation: And then there was. This brings an easy colloquial energy to the writing – a gossipy sense of being invited to listen in. Maybe even a taste of Once upon a time? We have an active sense of a story being told.

They lived a block apart on Cedar Street in the oldest part of town with elm trees and hackberry and a single maple grown up along the curb and green lawns running back from the sidewalk to the two-story houses.

Here we find a running-on style, with an unfussy list of ordinary but evocative items observed directly and relayed to us with syntactical variety. Hackberry: what a great specific word from the realm of botany, but too I’m feeling that the suffix hack- starts to introduce something a little sharp or even harsh into what mostly feels like simple, regular prose. And that maple: a single – what does that give us? The easy repetition of And helps establish a rhythm. And what does it mean always to follow the curb, or be set back from the road by green lawns? These apparently simple descriptions are setting a stage.

It had been warm in the day but it had turned off cool now in the evening. She went along the sidewalk under the trees and turned in at Louis’s house.

Turned off cool brings a particular idiomatic ring to the narration – vernacular, almost folksy. Otherwise we are getting an uncluttered and matter-of-fact description of a woman with a purpose. Even the weather is making way for her.

When Louis came to the door she said, Could I come in and talk to you about something?

No quotation marks! That’s quite radical for some readers, and as such a bold and emphatic touch that might scare off the faint-hearted, but it’s also another simple choice that shows us we are in the charge of a confident narrator. The telling of the story feels unseparated from the scene it’s describing: something happens there too. We continue to enjoy a pleasant ring in the rhythm of the writing. 

And this character – she’s direct.

They sat down in the living room. Can I get you something to drink? Some tea?

No thank you. I might not be here long enough to drink it. She looked around. Your house looks nice.

Diane always kept a nice house. I’ve tried a little bit.

Again, the lack of quotation marks runs dialogue and narration together, and the author has faith that the reader will grasp who’s speaking and when. That dialogue itself feels like a simple exchange, but Addie’s suggestion she might not be there long adds a little tension – it’s almost a threat things will be over before they’ve started. But a beverage was offered, and modest compliments are traded, and Diane is referred to in the past tense: again, little parcels of narrative detail that add up in the straightforward telling, and it’s good for any scene to have moments of exchange as well as curiosity.

I can’t quite figure out where the perspective lies here – probably a bit of both characters, and probably some omniscient guiding storyteller in whose safe hands we’re placing our experience of reading. 

And that’s just page one, before we even get to the fact of why Addie Moore made that call on Louis Waters. Gossipy tone, simple concrete observations, that particular eschewing of the conventions of dialogue: these are just three obvious elements of style, and there are others here, including a certain confident and expectant tone. We are not only curious to find out what happens next, but we are drawn in by the style of writing. 

The brief opening chapter is just four short pages long. In 700 words it does everything that a first chapter should do – it clearly gives us a setup, and it leaves us wanting more. It has a great closing line – What in the hell, he said. Now don’t get ahead of yourself – where the narration slides into the mind of a character. You can read the rest of this chapter here courtesy of the sample offered by a big global bookseller (though you might prefer to purchase here). 

I could listen to this writer talk about anything. He has a way of grabbing our interest. Here’s an essay on writing by Kent Haruf himself: The Making of a Writer. Writing small – writing large: such humility yet largeness in that essay.

And, if we are thinking about getting our writing published, isn’t this stylistic quality of voice something that agents and editors always tell us they’re looking for?

Too many books feel like writing-by-numbers – high concepts and plot twists and character arcs. We need telling as well as story, else we end up with disappointed readers conned by a stale marketing concept. Here speaks the voice of experience of wading through prize lists and apparently highly rated reading recommendations – insert horror emoji. I blame those grasping cookie-cutter writing courses, and a growing list of blurbers I can never trust again.

Different styles

Kent Haruf’s style could be called minimalist, in which an apparently plain style uses simple tricks for deliberate effect: rhythms and repetitions, grounding details, subtexts, the unspoken. The clue lies in the title of another of his novels: Plainsong. Other writing I might describe in this way includes work by Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, and Lydia Davis. I also detect elements of this approach in the work of beat writers such as Jack Kerouac, and I feel it – with a twist of something else too – in the writing of Joan Didion.

Minimalism is perhaps a more mannered and tucked version of classic prose style, the sort of clear and direct English we find in the best journalism. It’s the default in composition classes; you can find further discussion in the excellent writing guide Clear and Simple as the Truth. Sometimes it’s plain or transparent, getting out of the way of whatever topics are being discussed, but sometimes it becomes more robust, using rhetorical devices to ramp up a message. 

George Orwell’s fiction and nonfiction come as classic classic prose. And I think of a writer such as Natalie Goldberg, whose teaching practice recommends a fast and direct style of writing, which is reflected in her own style: vivid, earthy, warm, clear, honest. 

I also think of a piece of writing of my own: the essay Fat Marrows and Runner Beans. I was almost embarrassed by its plainness when I first wrote it back in 2007. I’d been trying to write something clever and fairytale and magical realist for Uncontained, an anthology of garden writing edited by my friend Jennifer Heath. But it just wasn’t happening, so rather than fail to submit I dashed off something straightforward recollecting my grandparents’ garden.

When I looked back over some old writing some years later, I realised there was in fact something quite vivid and earthy and warm and clean and honest about that too: things to acknowledge. It has that quality of the natural speaking voice.

But sometimes we like a fancier style, perhaps something more maximalist. From the first time I read each of them, I loved the writings of Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie for their floridity, their excess, their baroque curlicues. Also Rikki Ducornet, and Jonathan Franzen, and the translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez – and beloved Anne Rice! Their styles reflect the energies and oddities and transgressions of the worlds and characters they’re creating. I sometimes wonder how such writing would fare in a writing workshop or writing group, which can have that effect of flattening style through writing by committee.

The Moth-Eaters was one of my forays into a more maximalist style. I indulged in descriptions and lists and sinewy syntax, things workshops often tell us to avoid, and the story places emphasis on setting over traditional conventions of character.

I hadn’t planned on writing about my own writing when I wrote the first version of this post over on Substack; I guess Substack turned me into a writer who writes about their own writing, hahaha! But it goes to show how writing takes form on the page or at the keyboard. It emerges in the practice. And my own experiments show we can modify our voice to create a style for a particular piece. I imagine it’s best to avoid seeming showy or laboured – but there’s no harm in trying. 

And there are many other styles too – there’s no definitive list. Another style I particularly enjoy is what I call blockbuster style – the slick and ballsy voice of classic pulpy bestsellers of the 60s and 70s. The temperature hit ninety degrees the day she arrived – Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail – Peter Benchley’s Jaws.

Feel free to name any of your favourite styles, using examples of writers, in comments below.

Developing your own style: writing, reading, copying

An obvious way to develop a style, a voice, is to write frequently. Sometimes it helps to do this work away from pet projects, which are encumbered with the burdens of expectation of creating a masterpiece. Instead we can take up a daily writing practice, or just write letters to our friends (emails are fine, but letters are best).

And, of course, read. Select a favourite book or a model you’re emulating in your own writing, and open a page and work out how it achieved its magic with the practical techniques of craft and syntax, placing word after word. 

To take this further you could copy a page into a notebook, bringing into yourself the cadence and rhythm of a beloved writer, and then on the opposite page creating your own version – aping the style, but adapting to your own content.

I did this once with Angela Carter’s The Werewolf, using a setting in a warm southern country instead of a cold northern one, and following the paragraph and sentence structure as well as the beats of action but adapting them to nouns and verbs and adjectives that suited my own content. 

I’ve also tried similar exercises with writing by Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac. This was not writing for typing up to share with others, but it was a good exercise in exploring styles for myself.

Copying in this way is not the same as stealing someone else’s material or copying someone else’s work and publishing it or calling it your own. That amounts to copyright infringement or plagiarism. This is an experiment to help in understanding how writing is constructed.

Learning from copying the work of the greats has in fact a long tradition in many arts and crafts, including the world of writing. Hunter S. Thompson typed out The Great Gatsby. Austin Kleon talks more about copying here: Copying Is How We Learn. I particularly like his last example.

Resources and a forthcoming class

Here are various resources and writing experiments on voice:

Voice 1: Listening
Voice 2: Tone
Voice 3: Passion and Purpose
Voice 4: Other Voices
Variations on the Form of ‘I Remember’
Dear Diaries
Voice Notes

And my next masterclass, Perspective and Style, on Zoom on 22 September 2025, is devoted to techniques that lend individuality to any piece of writing. We’ll start by weighing up some of the basic choices for any piece of writing – including point of view, tense, and narrative distance – and then we’ll talk about classic prose style and minimalism and maximalism and blockbuster style, among other examples: you’ll be invited to seek out your own.

An earlier version of this post appeared on Substack in September 2024.