'If a sentence takes an hour or a day or a week to find the form for, that’s fine': Han Smith on prose style
Detailed discussion of sentence-building by the author of Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking
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IN TODAY’S ISSUE
—’these aspects of style have a political root too: both characters’ isolation and estrangement are caused by their context’: Han Smith on prose style.
We chose Smith’s Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking as the best-written work on the shortlist for the Goldsmith’s Prize for innovative fiction. You can read an extract here.
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HAN SMITH ON PROSE STYLE
What stylistic issues were most important to the writing of Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking?
There were several, although I would definitely say first that I wasn’t always totally conscious of how important they were while I was writing it. Working backwards, I can see now that one issue was developing a sense of detachment and discomfort through the language: partly this is because the main ‘almost daughter’ character is herself unsure of exactly what her own instincts and feelings are, and this needed to come across in the style. For instance, I can now see that her reactions and thoughts are often only indicated in one small part of a longer, obscuring sentence focused on observing something much less personal to her, or are completely ‘outsourced’ to external objects.
It’s also connected to the fact that the events and thought processes recorded in the book are not assumed to be happening in English. It really only made sense to avoid set English phrases and clichés as far as possible to leave this open space and not be too settled in familiarity. This is important to me in writing in general as it’s kind of the whole point to be finding slightly new ways to say things and actually discover something, but for this book it was especially crucial.
For the sections of Portraits that follow the older ‘woman with the cave inside her’ character, forming the right style and voice were maybe even more significant. Her apparent memory loss, confusion and partially wilful distancing from her past had to be there in the words and syntax. I think this is seen in the repetitions, the fragment-sentences and the terms she creates internally for certain objects and people. Some readers have said that these sections and scene have a dreamy or hallucinatory atmosphere, and I suppose that comes from the language. In some ways, these aspects of style have a political root too: both characters’ isolation and estrangement are caused by their context.
It’s strange to be reflecting on all this now as I would emphasise again that I wasn’t consciously seeking out language that exactly ‘illustrated’ things I had firmly decided about the characters and ideas in the book. Still, these currents must have been on my mind at some level as I definitely knew when I was writing something that did not fit into and keep shaping the style.
In your early writing career, did you ever consider not working hard on your prose? Were there writers whose sentences permanently affected the standards of your reading and your own writing aspirations?
No, style for me is an integral part of writing and I wouldn’t be interested in writing the ‘content’ or story of something without attention to language.
I’m not sure to what extent any writer has affected me, but I can certainly recall ones I came across at an early age, relatively randomly, who made me realise that things could be happening at the level of the sentence, rather than (or as well as) across the wider plane of plot or ideas.
I know that I picked up Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson as a teenager, and felt exactly this sense of beauty and spiralling depth in the sentences, even if I was not totally following the events of the book.
At a similar time I semi-accidentally read Lolita and again was stunned by this strange magnetism in the language, and confused by how I could feel more haunted by that power than by the content I vaguely knew should disgust me.
Looking back, I think those are the earliest writers I came across to stand out to me in this way: it wasn’t just a matter of unusual vocabulary, but something about each individual word already pushing at the limits and heading in multiple directions, and then the connections between them doing the same, so that the result is exponentially more vast than the sum of its parts.
Think of sentences like: “I produced Delicious. She grasped it and bit into it, and my heart was like snow under thin crimson skin…” Or: “She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland…” Or: “Our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night – every night, every night – the moment I feigned sleep.”
This isn’t to say that I’m only interested in abundant, hyperactive, (‘showy’?) writing. I suppose just writing that is always reaching just beyond the edge. I’m equally struck by work by JM Coetzee and Rachel Cusk, for example, where the skill and wonder is often in the restraint, but still also in the connections that indicate perspective and voice.
Audiences avoid music or cinema with amateurish or dated production values. So why is inept or dated technique often welcome in published prose? Why do reviewers, interviewers, and creative writing teachers pay so little attention to style?
Unfortunately, I think we know that much of this comes down to money and business models. If big money is behind a certain book that fits in with either trends or tried-and-tested templates in terms of story or ideas, it will get attention regardless of the language. I don’t have sufficient experience of creative writing teachers to know about that part of the question, but possibly it’s ‘easier’ to teach things like plotting and character development, and more difficult to work meaningfully on style.
(Continues below)
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Han Smith on prose style (continued)
A novelist pitched to us a piece arguing against Auraist’s emphasis on accomplished sentences. What truly mattered in fiction, he believed, was daring plotlines and ideas. We admired his cheek and said we’d publish his findings, if the piece was well-written. We never heard back from him. Do theorists from this school ever corner you at parties?
I think I may be going to the wrong parties…
Can you think of any classic works of literature with hundreds of clumsy sentences?
I don’t think I’d name any specific examples, but I will just say that even more than clumsy sentences, I find clichés and tired phrasing very boring and unnecessary. If we’ve already read something described in a certain way in another book (or twenty), why would we want to read that same formulation again somewhere else?
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 to casting the fictional spell that helps such immersion?
Almost matchlessly important, as far as I’m concerned. ‘Spell’ is maybe a good term for part of what I was trying to describe about the exponential effect in Nabokov’s writing. It’s also about feeling, through the language, that you as the reader are in touch with a mind that has its own energy rather than just with a secondhand tool that serves the purpose of mediating the story.
When I think of voice in fiction, I’m thinking of, for example, Milkman by Anna Burns, The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, Nobody is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey… The language has its own distinctive vocabulary and often even elements of its own grammar, creating a texture that is unexpected and ‘out of place’ as compared to everyday speech and more conventional style, but never out of place within that texture and its own terms. That’s what makes it so immersive and spell-like.
This is from just the first page of The Member of the Wedding: “Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid… At last the summer was like a green sick dream, or like a silent crazy jungle under glass.” You really feel like you’re right inside something – or I do.
Again, the voice can also be spare with just incremental, nearly-hidden indications of the mind behind it, as in a lot of Coetzee’s writing. And of course, there are also books that I’m interested in primarily for their ideas, and/or for unexpected, unusual macro-level structures, as well. But in a desert-island situation, voice would be the one to stay and share our dwindling resources.
Do you have any stylistic tips that for Auraist’s readers?
I have to preface this by saying that I’m mostly wary of giving tips and advice as I really do think that different things work for different people. These are therefore just some ideas that I’ve come across or gradually realised myself, and that may or may not be useful to others.
In terms of developing the style and what we’ve called voice for a particular piece of writing, one thing I can honestly say has been vital to me is noticing and finding a balance between plotting and structure on the one hand, and leaving space for that development of language and style on the other. I have certainly found that if I work too much on plot and make too many decisions about direction and ‘events’, it can really stifle the growth of the voice.
I’m not at all sure what the magic formula is in striking this balance, and not having any story framework at all would be pretty terrible for me too, but leaving these windows of openness for more of a discovery mode is (again, for me) how the style emerges. Sometimes it is just about following the language out of the pen.
In what I hope is not a contradiction, I would also say that in some cases, waiting is important. Particularly when trying to write scenes or thought processes that I know are especially significant for a project, I’ve become aware that it can be better to keep those windows of discovery short and not get too much down ‘too soon’, as it can be difficult to edit unready placeholder text back into the voice retrospectively. Sometimes, if a sentence takes an hour or a day or a week to find the form for, that’s fine, if the rushed version might jar with the style and not lead in a more interesting direction.
Sticking with voice, I also feel it’s useful to be thinking really, really hard (somewhere, at least) about perspective, and where this voice is actually coming from. In first person, this means considering some seemingly obvious points about whether the speaking character at this point would use particular words and images, and also particular sentence structures: is this really someone who has the time and energy to think in planned, multi-clause sentences? It might be, but it might well not, and the language gives us a sense of that.
And – when are they speaking from? What do they have knowledge of, in terms of events that have happened or are ahead? No less crucially, who are they speaking to? A real person, an imagined one, themselves? I think it’s about defining and discovering where this narration sits.
In third person or other perspectives, these questions can be even trickier; maybe agonising over them would be too constraining, but I do believe that having them in mind on some level is enriching and integral to finding the shapes that work.
Finally, there’s something I’ve been thinking about recently that seems relevant here, when it comes to developing your own style rather than using existing modes at face-value, and that is reading as much as possible in other languages and/or translation. This is elevating and mind-expanding in terms of content and world events, of course, but it can have a similar effect on language as well. It necessarily brings you out of tired, set (English) phrases, and challenges assumptions about what seems universal, even in things like verb tense, perspective, and word order. (Spoiler: almost nothing is universal…)
Books not picked for Auraist tend to lack appealing rhythms, and musicality more generally. Can musicality be taught? Do you have to work on this in your own sentences or does it come naturally?
I haven’t thought a huge amount about musicality directly. I can imagine that there is some connection between music and spell/voice(/aura?) in writing, but I don’t know enough to say anything strongly meaningful about it.
In terms of rhythm, I certainly do often read out or syllable-beat certain sentences, and am thinking about that aspect alongside the actual words. However, I do wonder sometimes if I’m guided too much by particular rhythms sometimes, and overuse them; it was fascinating to read in Samantha Harvey’s response to this question that she notices this in her own work as well.
I also have a feeling that rhythm and sound may matter more to the writer of a text than the reader. I am (as above) very conscious of syllables in my own writing, but I don’t tend to be so aware of and provoked by rhythms in other books, unless this is an especially prominent feature or if it is a case of very clearly using too many short sentences for some kind of dramatic or ‘writerly’ effect.
For something I’m working on at the moment, I’ve found myself thinking about crisp sounds as opposed to bland sounds in words, in order to create a particular feeling, but again I don’t think this is something I notice quite so much when I read.
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.
For me, it has to be Nadezhda in the Dark by Yelena Moskovich. This is absolutely writing where things – dismantling, eletricky things – are materialising at sentence or phrase level: where thoughts, scenes and relationships come into shape through new moments of language, instead of set paths of words being somehow recycled to pass on a story. Moskovich’s narration is always heading for something stretched over the edge, with patterns and images looping back in variations:
You need darkness
to be loved, that’s something
Pasha would say,
he’s still here, he sleeps in
stanzas, he sleeps
like a kitten, his wrists crossed and tucked,
there is a stanza
with insomnia, it climbs though my thoughts,
there is a stanza
by Sophia Parnok,
our Russian Sappho, it climbs
up the stairs
We’re running a series on the best-written novels of the century, and the best-written works of nonfiction. Could you nominate one of each for us?
This is hard. But here goes. For fiction, Milkman by Anna Burns, and Atemschaukel by Herta Müller (there’s an English translation by Philip Boehm). Voice, immersion, precision, spell-texture.
In non-fiction I’m afraid I’m often looking for information rather than the writing or style so much, but I think I would say Secondhand Time or Last Witnesses, by Svetlana Alexievich. I read the translations by Bela Shayevich and Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky, respectively.
Han Smith grew up in Japan, Russia, the UK and other places. A queer writer, translator and adult literacy teacher, Han is the recipient of a 2019/2020 London Writers Award, and has been shortlisted/longlisted for the Mslexia Novella Award, the Bridport Prize, the Desperate Literature short story prize, and the Brick Lane short story prize. She has also been commissioned and published by Lunate Journal, Five Dials, Cipher Press, Hotel, Versopolis, LossLit, Litro, The Interpreter’s House and the European Poetry Festival. Her first novel was published by John Murray Originals: Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking (shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2024).
