'The self-loathing cuts a bit deeper than that': Sam Kahn on substance over style
The Metropolitan Review editor questions Auraist's assumptions about prose technique
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IN TODAY’S ISSUE
—’You may not like this, but I try as much as possible to not ‘work’ as I’m writing – and, really, to try not to think about style at all.’: one of the great literary Substackers disagrees with much of our approach to prose style. Always welcome.
You can find Sam’s work at his impressive new venture The Metropolitan Review and at Castalia.
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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?
First of all, many thanks for this. It’s really a treat to do!
You may not like this, but I try as much as possible to not ‘work’ as I’m writing – and, really, to try not to think about style at all. I’ve developed a few idiosyncratic beliefs about writing, and the more experienced I get, the more convinced I am of them. What it is in a word is that I think writing really comes from the subconscious, and has only a marginal relationship to our conscious selves, so the work of writing is to try to get out of our own way as much as possible.
I get an idea from somewhere – which always feels like a gift that I can’t quite explain (although I think I did pretty deliberately develop the mental apparatus to be able to get imaginative ideas) – and then that idea almost immediately dries up. My job there is to write it down, which isn’t always so easy since these ideas have a way of showing up when I’m out on a run or something. Then, the hard part is clearing out my life enough to sit down and write – and the job there is just to follow that thread wherever it leads. E.L. Doctorow describes it as like driving at night using only the headlights of your car – which I think is the perfect analogy. You really don’t know where you’re going but you can go a surprisingly long way like that.
What’s nice about doing things this way is that you’re experiencing the writing of your own story very much like a reader would – you’re curious to know what happens in the way that they (theoretically) would; and your own rhythms somewhat match theirs (the moment when you get tired of a particular thread is likely when they are getting tired also).
I’m completely incapable of editing – it just never works for me – so I really only get one shot at a narrative, and I’m usually trying to figure out what’s happening next as opposed to thinking overtly about style.
That being said, I agree unreservedly that ‘style’ is the highest level of writing – and what it’s really ‘about.’ My suspicion, though, is that style is so deeply baked into a person – like their handwriting or the timbre of their voice – that it’s difficult to change by any act of will as you’re writing. What you can do is to live your life, and work on your energy, so that your ‘truest,’ ‘highest’ self emerges as you write – and it’s that ‘music’ (which is the best version of you) that comes through in the writing, above all in the ‘line’ of the prose.
We’re running a series on the best-written novels of the century, and the best-written works of nonfiction. Could you nominate one or more of each for us?
In terms of thinking about influences, it can be useful to divide it up between the people who are so great that you feel you can’t possibly touch them, and then the people who seem to leave something on the table for you.
I think the modern writers I’m most affected by are J.M. Coetzee and Thornton Wilder, maybe John Williams. And what they do I find to be of just a completely different level – it’s so simple, so compacted, but with overwhelming emotion. With people like that, you just read their books, applaud, go through a few days in which you realize that there’s a degree of mastery you’re never going to reach and you’re probably wasting your life by writing, and then pick yourself back up and move on.
The people who I’ve found more useful to read are (among others) Alan Hollinghurst, Roberto Bolano, Jhumpa Lahiri. Hollinghurst for the idea of writing ‘classically’ but with modern permissiveness about sex; Bolano for the way he ‘throws’ his voice to different characters (which is a surprisingly underutilized technique); and Lahiri for working backwards to a ‘plain style,’ just ruthlessly stripping her prose of any ornamentation.
People like Nathanael West and Richard Yates are also very much in my consciousness because their emotional register doesn’t seem so far out, but they seem to have done something in opening their hearts very wide to human suffering that is hard to replicate.
If they discuss them at all, writing guides tend to cover substance and style separately and pay minimal attention to their relationship. What have other writers taught you about this relationship, and what have you had to learn yourself?
Yeah, it’s very interesting how ‘writing guides’ seem to talk about almost nothing important at all. I think this is because it really is true that ‘writing can’t be taught’ – and the process of learning to write is this, just, agonizing journey of self-knowledge.
There are a few ways to parse this. For one thing, your style is so unique to you that it’s not really capable of taking in external inputs – and the people who write writing guides tend to be mature enough to recognize this.
In terms of learning style, what largely seems to be happening is the gradual shedding of unwarranted influences. I think I knew for a few years after college that I really wasn’t going to get very far in writing because my style was ‘undergraduate,’ and my internal system was just sort of overwhelmed with all the different inputs it had. I had to go through a period, interestingly, of reading less, kind of starving my own organism to the point where it was capable only of writing as itself.
And another way to look at this is that good writing is a ‘holistic’ activity – what you write (if you really care about the activity) contains the entirety of you, the summation of your experience of the world. You always stand completely exposed when you write – the choice of what you’ve decided to write about, the degree of authority you bring to it, the ability of your organism to respond to the material and write buoyantly, are all of a piece, and so it’s very difficult to break apart these aspects of writing analytically.
When planning Melody Nelson, to what extent did you disconnect substance from style? And when editing it?
Everything I write seems to have a pretty different style based on the ‘world’ of the book. I wrote a couple of slender novels earlier this year, Camilla and Jubilee Street, both of which are realistic – and that grounding in the real world allowed me to indulge myself stylistically. The narratives are full of loops of what the character is thinking, and I can trust the reader to keep track of the external situation.
Melody Nelson is in a highly fictitious space where the rules of the world keep changing, and that very much constrained me stylistically. The narration largely had to be taken up by exposition and ‘world-building’ and a great deal of the ‘action’ occurred in dialogue.
The experience of writing that helped me to understand why sci-fi, in general, is so poorly-written – it’s very hard not to cram the text with technical details – but the ‘world-building’ (and the selective feeding of information to your reader so that they can catch on in the right rhythm) is its own artistry.
Some readers have misunderstood Auraist’s emphasis on style to mean we’re not fussed about substance, when in reality much modern writing lacks both these qualities (e.g. few high-profile writers appear grounded in philosophy). Has your own obvious attention to style ever resulted in equivalent misunderstandings?
Yeah, at the end of the day, I’m an aestheticist. I believe that morality is all good and well in daily life but that, at the highest level, we can exist in a realm without moral judgments – and that’s what art basically is, it’s like a planet where the laws of gravity are changed so that morality disappears and what’s left is pure perception and pure empathy.
What tends to happen in my writing is that I follow a thread somewhere – the characters are making choices that seem to be the only choice that they are capable of making, and it’s that inner tension between the characters’ compulsions and then the exigencies of the overall narrative arc that produces the aesthetic effects I’m after.
But very many readers – and I think more as time goes on? – don’t read in this way. They are reading looking to judge the characters, and that way of reading is anathema to how I think about reading and writing.
How close did you come to headbutting your keyboard in frustration at the minuscule nature of the prose issues you were working on in Melody Nelson? Is this headbutting business why hardly any writers obsessively polish their writing?
In terms of head-butting, I tend not to assail myself over the quality of the prose. I think I’ve always had a good ear and I’m generally pleased when I read back over a text at how it’s written.
The self-loathing cuts a bit deeper than that. It’s about my limitations as a person – phases of my life when I failed to develop necessary experience, a certain inability I have to be really observant, an almost-total inattention to the visual plane of existence.
Some of these things I can write around – it doesn’t really bother me that I’m not very visual, and descriptions in other people’s work bores me, so I usually just skip on description altogether and let things like how good-looking the character is emerge from the dynamics of the story – but it drives me crazy when I feel locked in my own experience or feel like there are all kinds of people whose inner lives I just don’t have access to. The anxiety I have when I write is usually a fairly holistic regret for everything in how I’ve lived my life.
Erik Hoel has stated that the MFA’s domination of modern literature has produced writers trained through gruelling workshopping to minimise their work’s ‘attack surface’. We might note the parallel influence of focus groups on political discourse and of test audiences on cinema. Has too much workshopping added to the volume of flavourless published prose?
That’s a very cool line and I know exactly what he means. For me – and I’m becoming daily more convinced of this – quality of writing is basically the same thing as courage. I’ve become progressively less interested in how ‘well’ something comes out – and far more attuned to where the writer seems to be taking risks.
I have recourse to all sorts of different analogies here. In mountain-climbing, climbers discuss the ‘crux’ of a rock face – the hardest puzzle of a particular climb. If the climber is willing to tackle that particular challenge, the mountain usually seems to relax and reward the climber with an easy journey the rest of the way. In chess, Mikhail Tal, the most creative player of all time, says, “You must lead your opponent into a deep dark forest where the 2+2=5 and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.” And, in acting, Uta Hagen says, “An actor’s talent is their courage.”
In writing, there is almost always an equivalent to the ‘crux’ of a mountain or the ‘critical position’ in chess. There is a fork in the road and the piece of writing has a way of telling you that the right way is exactly the way that you least want to travel – whether that means that the text is going to take six months longer to write than you want or that you need to include some personal detail that will make it ethically irresponsible for you to publish it in the end. When you get to that point, you usually need to tell your daemon to go fuck itself and then to do as it requests, even if your manuscript ends up being buried in a desk drawer as a result.
I think it goes almost without saying that what’s coming out of the MFAs and the publishing industry in general is beneath contempt because they aren’t thinking in this way at all – they’re just trying to get on the publishing conveyer belt and tend to steer clear of aesthetic risk altogether.
What do poor stylists most lack: guidance, accurate self-estimation, or something else?
Writing is almost entirely confidence (true confidence as opposed to bravado), and it’s really a lifelong task to develop that confidence. I think there are a few ways to get it. One is just doing the activity a lot – that way you gradually shed your external influences and your own critical voice and come into contact with your true self.
Another is through altered states – my experiences with psychedelics in my late 20s were a big deal for me and really knocked out a lot of the anxiety I had.
And probably the most important one is through a certain disillusionment and disgruntlement that comes with age. At a certain point, you look around and say, you know what, I’m not really going to get any better than how I am right now, but nobody else is all that much better than I am either, and so I guess I’ll just do the thing that I love to do to the best of my ability and if other people don’t like or don’t want to publish it, then they can go fuck themselves.
It’s very good to get to that place – it usually involves a simple trick of the mind but it can often take a lifetime to manage that – and most of the bad writers I come across seem not to have managed that turn in their psyche. They’re writing from a place of fear or defensiveness, and they’re writing as they think other people want them to write.
Can you think of any classic works of literature with mostly clumsy sentences?
Yes. This is an interesting question. There are some ‘classic’ writers who were really terrible stylists. Edgar Allan Poe, Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick come to mind.
I do think that style matters less than having an idea – and investing with confidence in that idea. Some people just have tin ears and that’s okay actually – they’re able to say something interesting if they have the right kind of determination. (Cézanne’s difficulty with painting technique is a very interesting example of how idea can trump style.)
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 your book Melody Nelson to casting the fictional spell that helps such immersion?
Yeah, there’s a very interesting theoretical discussion at the moment about whether, as a society, we have lost the ability to be immersed in storytelling and can be captivated only by non-fiction. David Shields made this point in Reality Hunger and then Benjamin Labatut provided the creative answer to Shields with his invention of the ‘non-fiction novel’ in When We Cease To Understand The World.
Personally, I don’t think that literary fiction, or literary realism, is dead. I think there’s plenty of room to use fiction to understand the inner life of our era – and most of my writing is pretty straightforward realism.
However, I’m aware that the collective unconscious is moving in a different direction. Exactly as Shields predicted, people are losing interest in fictional worlds – people’s imaginations can be bought off with a budget of $10 million or so for elevated production values, but it seems to be very difficult for people to construct imaginatively in their minds, as is a cinch for other cultures.
And I’m the same way – something in me goes dead the moment I even glance at a New Yorker short story. I am trying to adjust to this and to write in a way that takes in more of ‘reality.’ My novel Melody Nelson is full of ‘real’ people – Humphrey Bogart, Philip Roth, Serge Gainsbourg, etc, etc – whom I am entirely manipulating as I would fictional characters. And I think in general this is a direction that I am pushing in.
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?
Yeah, my expensive education set me back by years in my development of a writing voice. Something particularly pernicious has happened within the academy – academics used to be beautiful writers! – but I think it’s useful to just separate out different domains. Anything market-related, the academy included, operates by different rules than art. The economy has its own beauty in it – which is to find employment for as many people as possible, and this is often by lowering the bar for what’s considered ‘acceptable work.’
Art has a completely different impetus within it, which is for an individual to push themselves to be the best possible, and most distinctive, version of themselves. There’s no particular reason why this activity would ever be rewarded in a marketplace.
What do you understand by the term overwritten, and how often do you come across overwritten books?
Yes, I’m at war with a great deal of what is understood to be ‘style’ in the contemporary writing marketplace. What has happened is that the genuine market has completely vanished – almost no one opens a novel to be entertained (they have Netflix for that).
There is a false literary scene that has continued in fetishistic form – they award prizes to the books that seem most like ‘classic novels’ and consumers can be persuaded like one of these books a year as a Christmas present (more if they’re in a book club) – and the incentive is for writers to dedicate all of their attention to writing ‘high-quality’ sentences even if they don’t actually fit together into a coherent whole. Emma Cline is the queen of this school. Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake is a perfect example of a book of like a thousand different threads that doesn’t actually fit together.
It doesn’t have to be this way at all. If I think about people like W. Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, I don’t think they were particularly thinking about style – they were just writing, and they had good technique so the style followed from the subject matter.
They were able to do that because there was a sophisticated mass reading public at that time, but that reading public seems to have disappeared. My fantasy is that it is in the process of coming back as people gradually realize that Facebook is boring and Netflix sucks.
Nabokov recommended never beginning two adjacent paragraphs with the same word, which many writers might see as overly fussy. Which stylistic suggestions have you rejected as too trivial?
I try to ignore most style tips. I like repetition. I love starting sentences with ‘and’ and ‘but,’ which my teachers always told me never to do. I get a secret thrill in ending sentences with the word ‘with.’
I’ve been in a long-running battle with verbs. Active verbs are supposed to be the glory of American writing, but I find them to be false, in general. I’ve had a recent phase of trying to write without verbs altogether, but I think my 500-page World War II novel without verbs was pushing things too far.
The only important thing is to pay attention to rhythm, and then to make use of ‘change of speed’ in sentence length, etc, to keep your reader on their toes.
What ratio between writing and editing would you recommend, and has this ratio changed over time?
So I’m an extremist in that I don’t edit at all. I don’t think this is especially a virtue – my understanding of the people who are at a much higher level than I am (Coetzee, Wilder, etc) is that many of them were maniacs about editing and kept finding deeper and deeper layers to their material – but I just can’t do it. The feeling is that the clay dries as soon as I’m done with a draft and then I can’t go back to it without breaking the vessel altogether.
As time has gone on, I’ve developed an elaborate justification for this shortcoming. Historically, writers barely edited at all. Editing came in with a generation of writers like Ernest Hemingway and Isaac Babel, who were after some very particular aesthetic effects that mirrored the machine age, and then it got codified with the publishing houses and eventually MFA programs.
It’s important to understand editing as a selling-point of the publishing houses to help convince writers that the publishers knew best. A piece of me dies every time I hear the words ‘Maxwell Perkins,’ and I regard Gordon Lish to be a curse on literature in general.
There is a miracle that happens as you’re writing, which is that some imaginative universe is pulled out of the sky and placed on a page just because you will it to be there. I believe that part of your job as a writer is to get out of the way of that process and allow it to unfold – very much in the way that a child develops without a whole lot of input from the parent – whereas editing (in my experience) is almost entirely a process of second-guessing your own vision in the interests of ‘craft.’ It’s very important to remember that we are invested in producing imaginative miracles, not well-made wicker chairs.
Describe your approach to stylistic energy and richness.
The important thing is to keep the narrative moving. I’ve come to believe that a narrative – I’m thinking especially of short stories – has only two moments in it, like a ‘before’ and ‘after’ picture. Chekhov’s ‘The Woman With The Small Dog’ conveys this perfectly. We meet Gurov as the cheerful adulterer on holiday, and then there’s a scene where he looks at himself in a mirror and realizes that he’s gotten older.
That’s really all that a short story is – I’m hard-pressed to come up with a different idea for it – and so the job of the writer is to move as efficiently as possible from that first image to the second image, but, of course, for that second image to have that emotional impact you’re after you really do need to fill in a great deal of time.
That narrative engine is the most important thing, and you as the stylist – or the creator of individual sentences – are often like a child staring out a window or hopping off at each station of a long journey. You’re welcome to spend as long as you like describing the sights, and making your cute little observations, but the important thing is that you don’t miss the moment when the train picks up speed again.