Are prose snobs just plain old snobs?: Nina Schuyler answers our new questions on prose style

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Feb 07, 2025

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—The best-written recent releases in nonfiction

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IN TODAY’S ISSUE

—’Style adds another layer of experience’: Nina Schuyler, one of the few Substackers wholly unembarrassed about discussing prose style.

Her short story collection, In This Ravishing World, won the W.S. Porter Prize and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature and was published in July 2024. She teaches creative writing for Stanford Continuing Studies. Her Substack Stunning Sentences is here.

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NINA SCHUYLER ON PROSE STYLE

In your early writing career, did you ever consider not working hard on your sentences? Were there writers whose sentences permanently affected the standards of your reading and your own writing aspirations? Has your tolerance for less polished prose decreased over time?

In the beginning, all the macro stuff—character development, plot, point of view, dialogue, subtext—avalanched me. Buried, I was buried under it for years, trying to claw my way through it by understanding it. But understanding is never enough. You have to try it. And try it again and again because this is going to take a long time to master, if that’s even the right word. This is what makes writing hard, I think. You can learn it, but then you have to do it. The intellect can understand everything, but then there is the rendering. And that delights me. Writing requires all of you.

When I read Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, the top of my head blew off and I was never the same. All that she could do with a sentence, all that I was never taught about syntax and whatever else I could not name but wanted to know. I felt her sentences, I felt their rhythm in my body. For years, I’d been a ballet dancer and it was like reading prose that made my legs and arms want to wave in the air and spin. I’d never taken a creative writing class, only English with its rules and teachers who wanted no repetition, who demanded complete sentences and the standard of subject-verb predicate. And here was Woolf flaunting it all like a little Victorian rebel. It was very attractive. I know nothing, I thought. I want to know what she’s doing, all of it, the names for these fantastic spins and twirls and spirals.

Fortunately, I like to take things apart. At a young age, I took apart a radio to see what was inside (I could not, however, rebuild it). When our television stopped working and the TV repair man came to fix it, I stood by his side so I could see inside. Amazing that those wires and tubes can make an image. I studied law, and now I can take apart negligence and strict liability faster than the radio.

Woolf made me want to crawl inside her sentences and see the wires and tubes, and, most importantly, understand the magic because, though you can learn all the names, that’s not what’s important. What’s important is the rendered meaning. The meaning created for the reader by repeating a word five times. The meaning created by anaphora. The meaning rendered by a left-branching sentence. Woolf inspired me to learn and learn more and more about sentences. It will never be done, this learning, thank god. The bloodflow of inquisitiveness.

And so now, it’s true that pages of poorly written books can feel lifeless to me. I’ve given myself permission to put the book aside.

In a podcast Substack’s senior staff discussed the consumption of well-written books chiefly as a form of social posturing, and wondered how they might facilitate this in Substack’s design. Are prose snobs just plain old snobs?

Oh, not at all! You should envy these people. Their most intimate relationship is with words, which are highly reliable and dependable. Here’s my image of a prose snob (I collect words, by the way): picture this person walking down the street, her arms wrapped around words. They are on her shoulders, her head, inside her pockets, and she’s chatting away with these words, playing with them, listening to their sounds, and the words are delighted that someone is paying such close attention. It’s a deep relationship, actually. What good companions these words are!

Name a book published in the past year that you admire for the quality and originality of its sentences, and describe what’s accomplished and original about them.

How lucky I was to discover Kevin Barry, an Irish writer. I read his short story, “Finistère,” in The New Yorker (April 15, 2024), then went to do a reading, and the bookstore owner said I could pick any book as a gift. Her assistant was opening a box of books in front of me, and there was Barry’s new novel, The Heart in Winter. What could I do but point and say, “That one, thank you.”

After I read it, I couldn’t stop talking about his sentences. I made my husband buy the book because of the sentences. I analyzed several of his sentences for my substack, Stunning Sentences. This is why I will never say I’ve arrived, (I’ve heard a writer say this, unbelievable) because along comes Barry with his delight and shows me something else that can be done. I am more than willing to be influenced—influence me!

A person has to take a stand on something. Here I go: I love adverbs, the ring of the ‘ly’, and I will use them. Barry gives me permission. He pats me on the back and says in admiration—because he, too, loves adverbs—Go ahead. I’ve had enough of the writers who say, lock them up! Barry shows what you can do with an adverb. He enlivens his sentences, he makes his sentences pop as they defy the expectations.

“The eggs went down controversially.”

“Tom Rourke salted the eggs unambiguously.”

He loves unusual adjectives:

“A mug was poured to fill with the purgatorial coffee of the house.”

“It was to be read in the white aching of the sky beyond his tiny window.”

“The light among the trees was hazed and elegiacal.”

He’s not shy about charging to the unexpected: “There were ramifications in her eyes.”

There’s a playfulness here. He creates a register of the joy of language and life—such daring, risky sentences. Sure, sometimes they don’t work, but I’d rather hang out with the risk-taker than someone who is playing by all the grammatical rules and repeating the popular trends floating in the air. He’s a writer I’ll read and re-read to prod me to do more--no room to be lazy at the sentence level. Pour that language down my throat! Language as an engine, a propulsion, a force, so let it rip.

What do you understand by the terms substance and style? How have these understandings influenced your prose in In This Ravishing World?

Style is not the icing on the cake. Style is not little sparkly ornaments on the tree or the scarf around a neck. It’s substance, sometimes the richest of all. Style can make a reader feel anxious, relaxed, or hurried; it can make a reader sense what the character might be feeling without that emotion ever being explicitly stated on the page. It can make a sentence feel like someone running, breathlessly, going in circles, riding a rollercoaster.

Style—syntax, diction, schemes and tropes, sound and rhythm, imagery—creates meaning or, to use your word, substance. And that’s what people are looking for; it’s how people are designed, and in this modern era, everyone is deficient in it, like Vitamin D. We are meaning-seeking beings, so as a writer, I’m interested in using all ways to create meaning, which means I’m endlessly fascinated with style techniques and the meaning that can infuse a sentence, plumping it up.

Many revisions of In This Ravishing World focused exclusively on sentences: is this the right syntax? The right rhythm? The right sound? Can I build a metaphor through verbs (something I love to do)? I read every sentence out loud to hear it and feel it and ensure it’s the right substance for the moment.

Writing the voice of Nature for my book was particularly challenging. Writers, like actors, use their imagination to become other. But how to become Nature? I wrote pages and pages until I began to understand we, humans, are nature, and that opened vistas of writing and language for me. Nature, too, is devastated and alarmed and wishes the ecological collapse was not happening. When I also remembered Nature has a very different experience of time, Nature (some read this first-person omniscient voice as the Earth or God or an omniscient storyteller) became far more complex and dimensionalized, invoking all registers of language.

When planning In This Ravishing World, to what extent did you disconnect substance from style? And when editing it?

Many times, I climbed to the top of the book-making mountain to take a look at the whole. Many, many times. Not during the first draft but during revision. I looked from a high vantage point at the plot, the story trajectory, and particularly the shape of the character arc, that big swoop from beginning to end that requires—at least in Western literature—a glimmer of change, if not a full-blown transformation. Then, back down to the granular sentence level, and then back up to the mountain. Back and forth, an epic journey over many years.

How can literary style be defended against widespread distaste for the slick linguistic style of marketing? Do you ever find yourself agreeing with readers or writers dubious about style?

Marketing and literature are different countries. You go to the first country, which is a place of transaction and monetary exchange and manufactured desire. The slick has to do with conjuring that desire. It didn’t exist a moment before you looked at the magazine with the young woman in a dark red shirt. The slick makes you believe you could become that woman if you had that shirt. You believe it, the way the light glows on her teeth. Her hair seems to swing, and the little baldness that you suffer from, a small patch at the back of your head, will instantly vanish if you have that dark red shirt.

Literature opens its arms, and if it’s got style, these are full, rich arms that invite you into experience. Come on, those arms pull you closer, let’s go on this ride up the mountain, a bit treacherous because of the falling snow, but hold on, because soon it’s going to happen, oh, there, now you feel the snow falling, the cold as one snowflake finds the back of your neck. You hear it with the slight rustle on a coat, see it with the vaporous, ghost-like breath.

Style adds another layer of experience. It comes through the right word order, the right word, even the repetition of a word. Layers and layers of meaning. You walk away from literary tyle sated, drenched with meaning and maybe even a new way to see the world.

And if you went to the slick marketing country? What did you get? A new red shirt that already has a stain on its sleeve.

Many readers who no longer buy novels cite their inability to fully immerse themselves in fiction, to suspend their disbelief. How important are voice and style in In This Ravishing World to casting the fictional spell that helps such immersion?

Voice and style were immensely important in my book, In This Ravishing World. It’s a collection (some call it a novel) of nine different characters. To differentiate them, I relied heavily on voice and style, taking the imaginative leap and becoming these characters (with the help of close readers who gave me feedback). The voice of Eleanor, a 70-year-old woman, an environmental economist who has spent her entire life trying to prevent where we are now ecologically, is very different from the tech dudes holed up in a warehouse in San Francisco, hacking into cars’ computer systems and playing indoor hoops and chomping on chips. Eleanor’s language is composed and measured until it isn’t, as heightened emotion then rattles and disrupts the sentences. The techies have their own language, showing off the flexibility of words, which used to mean one thing and now mean another thing.

Or the voice of Lucinda, who prefers the company of dogs to humans and has few words for people, but many lush, loving words for dogs. Each of these characters demanded loudly a different style and voice, infused with their profession, education, life experience, and their little ecosystem in the greater world. I found it incredibly fun to play around with this language, fiddling and exploring and then I’d feel--yes, yes, I hear you, Hugh, a tech millionaire who is scared out of his wits, his sentences soaked in anxiety, who is deep down in the trenches of survivalist chatrooms, trying to make an escape plan out of the climate crisis.

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Humanities departments discourage humanity in academic prose, resulting in billions of pages of otherwise appealing subject matter ruined by writing engineered to contain minimal personality, i.e. to read like a machine’s. This never seems to change. Why?

Long ago, I was a journalist at a newspaper, so I got a taste of this kind of writing, though not to the full extent of academic prose. I think what’s happening is that the elimination of the “I,” in the hopes of achieving the objective, leads to stiff, stale, abstract prose. A note here: it’s impossible to bracket the “I” because the very fact of the selection of details requires an “I.” But let’s go with this.

If there is no “I,” there is no personality or emotion, and the prose begins to feel like the writer does not care about the subject matter, and it’s a short leap to the reader not caring.

Another huge obstacle seems to be mimicry and gatekeepers. The academic paper must look and feel like what has come before it. It must be derivative and fit the category of “academic paper.” So people write to that standard and the editors reject that which does not abide. Anything with a beating heart becomes suspect.

With academic writing, it often feels like the writer’s audience is other academics, and in this closed system, the greater public is excluded. Who cares if readers who are not versed in the subject can understand the paper—they aren’t the audience. The writer is doing great battle with those in the inner circle. The more esoteric, the better, a sort of—I’m smarter than you. The gates stay up; the public is kept out and the prose tastes like cardboard. Who wants to eat that?

There is widespread anxiety that our tech-overloaded world’s making our species more mechanistic, less human. Wouldn’t it be arrogant to assume that writers, traditionally well-attuned to their cultures, are above such a transformation?

Absolutely! I teach creative writing, and many of my students have trouble focusing for long periods of time—say, half an hour—without checking social media, roaming around the Internet, watching dog and cat videos, or experiencing any other technological distractions now available to our species. So… very little is written. I often restructure the class so students write in class. Phones away. No computer roaming, no checking on TikTok. One-two-three: go. Write for 40 minutes.

The technological era has seeped into the prose, too, which begins to mimic emails and texts: short, shorter. Style is stripped out, seen as an accessory, like a bracelet. Language is turned into a tool for conveying information and becomes pale and anemic.

The one stylistic quality you can never overdo is clarity. Do you agree? If not, please describe some sentence-level blurrings you find acceptable or admirable.

I don’t agree. When you’re writing the drama of the mind, that interior space of speculation, memory, dreams, and imagination, it’s a balancing act. The balance between rendering the privacy of the mind and accessibility for the reader. It’s a tricky balance because if it’s too accessible, it doesn’t feel like the mind. There is a sense of the audience, which is the opposite of a private reverie. A certain blurring needs to be there, as well as inexplicable imagery—at least inexplicable in the moment. It can later be revealed why the character is ruminating about a hat, but the reason can be delayed.

Another reason not to clutch too firmly this idea of clarity is trauma and shock. When a character encounters an unexpected, profound event, often the mind cannot immediately grasp it. It stutters. It can’t say the word that is violently shaking the inner world. I always think of the opening of “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin:

“I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn't believe it, and I read it again. Then perhaps I just stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling out the story. I stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside.”

What’s the worst piece of stylistic advice you’ve seen?

Don’t write long sentences. I hear this from writers who have been told by their editors or peers or those who religiously read Strunk & White to write short sentences. Look here, they’ll point to Strunk & White’s The Element of Style: “Vigorous writing is concise. When a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter.” But then I point to Rule #21: “Prefer the standard to the offbeat.” Which goes on to warn that the writer will be drawn at “every turn toward eccentricities in language. He will hear the beat of new vocabularies, the exciting rhythms of special segments of his society, each speaking a language of its own. All of us come under the spell of these unsettling drums.”

In response, I’ve launched a slow sentence movement. The slow sentence is long, like a run, like the wind, like a stroll down the block, like a merry-go-round that spins you and won’t let you off, not right away. It’s a container, if you will, for different registers and style and music. It’ll feel alive, if you let it.