In a post on Lit Hub, Sam Lipsyte discusses style, the element that differentiates your writing and makes your content pop. “Content and style are not separate things,” he says. “They are different aspects—the what and the how—of the same thing.”
“What” is your topic: love, hate, sex, death. “How” is the way you tell it, “the way certain syntactical arrangements of words set off chains of thought and emotion and even physical sensation in the reader, create a kind of energy field within which one experiences the text,” Lipsyte explains. “Style is your filter on all of this, the way you see it and feel it— tragically, tragicomically—and how it summons language in you, how life comes to be alive on the page.”
Lipsyte examines a selection from the short story “Even Greenland” by Barry Hannah, noting the rhythm, idiosyncratic syntax, and assonance. “Attending to them, cultivating them, makes your writing flow and jump,” he says. “It’s one of those things that generally happens unconsciously, after you’ve trained your ear a little. But it’s really finessed in revision.”
Hannah also has what Lipsyte calls “swerve.” The narrator describes his role on an F-14 and then negates it, stating he actually does nothing. He says the plane is traveling over Mexico, then says he isn’t sure, then says it doesn’t matter. When the narrator notices the plane has caught fire, Hannah omits any telling of the emergency, and allows the narrator some evocative observations. “What moves us and delights us is not some immediate shift into pinched action prose, or an explication of flying technique, but this pilot’s detached yet fascinated stance with regard to his looming demise, his courageous fidelity to the how, to style, to what in this case I want to call and so will call a groovy lyricism, achieved by these little shifts, as though he’s holding a gem and turning it slowly, showing us all the marvelous facets, even as he plummets,” Lipsyte says. “And we are all plummeting.”
