Style wins

Style wins every, every time.

Susan Hill, Howards End Is on the Landing

Susan Hill

What separates the great writers from the pretty good writers? Style, says Susan Hill in Howards End Is on the Landing. It's not their story plots or their characters or even their message. It's always their style. Ultimately that's why we return to their books again and again, even long after their deaths.

She mentions several writers to illustrate her point. Raymond Chandler, for example. You may not always understand what's going on, but his writing style places him at or near the top of most lists of great hardboiled  mystery writers. John Le Carre holds that position for espionage novels for the same reason.

Mostly Hill writes about P.G. Wodehouse, whose plots, as I've mentioned before, are usually very similar. But one reads Wodehouse less for the plot than for the Wodehouse style, his humorous way of saying things that no other writer of comic novels has been able to equal. (Donald E. Westlake came close, I believe. And what's remarkable about Westlake is that he developed a very different style for his many serious, totally humorless novels.)

We can all think of writers we love mainly for their style. In my youth I devoured books by John Steinbeck and J.D. Salinger for this reason. Ernest Hemingway's reputation has everything to do with his unique, often imitated but never equaled style.

For young writers trying to make it in publishing, developing their own style is usually the key. Often this is called their voice. The clearer, the more distinct the voice, the more the writer will stand out from others. Writers with style still have to have something to say, of course. But writers with something to say will be more likely to find readers if they also have a style.