My writing "style" if there is one

A reader's comment sparks an interesting discussion

Those of you who wandered through my Sunday piece about the hazards of shopping, may recall my skepticism about the whole idea of “style.” So with the serendipity that seems to follow me around these days, I received a lovely note — I think — from a reader across the pond yesterday morning.

“Just discovered you half an hour or so ago... I like your writing style. It's my style too. But I'm not a writer. Lol.”

Style. There’s that word again, only this time, it’s personal. MY writing style. Hmmm. What IS my writing style? To be honest, I’ve often wondered about how it connects with other people, how it compares with other writers. But it’s not the kind of thing you bring up in casual conversation. “Hey, tell me about my writing style.”

But I AM curious. What is my “style”? Can you talk about something like that without sounding like you’re in the middle of a tense literary forum debating the emotional ties of using fewer semicolons to save the environment?

Mark Twain’s “style” was unique to him. An autodidact, he left school way early, which helped.

Twain’s good friend William Dean Howells suggested this about the way his friend wrote: “His style was what we know, for good or bad, but his manner, if I may difference the two, was as entirely his own as if no one had ever written before…That is, he wrote as he thought, and as all men think, without sequence without an eye to what went before or should come after. If something beyond or beside what he was saying occurred to him, he invited it onto his page and made it as much home there as the nature of it would suffer him.”

One of the great elements of Twain’s “style” or writing technique is that unlike his predecessors Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville, whose prose styles definitely harkened back to the classic novelists from the mother country, Twain wrote as if that epic literature never happened. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that he absorbed all of it but what came out of him was something else. His voice, with a pen in his hand, somehow seemed fresh, distinctive, original. And I don’t think he was necessarily trying to be different, he just was. It was a gift.

Now, I’ve read a lot of Twain. A lot of Ernest Hemingway, Henry David Thoreau, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, some Gore Vidal and John Updike and Raymond Carver. But the writer whose style just delighted me — and still does — is the New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling, whose “The Sweet Science,” a book on boxing, is a volume I’ve returned to many a time, particularly on trips. I’ve read him so often, that had to have an impact, didn’t it?

In the classroom, I always taught Shakespeare, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, along with those I mentioned. It would be wonderful if some of their brilliance rubbed off but my guess would be my writing style was pretty much determined long before.

Growing up, of course, I read the Boston Globe so writers like Peter Gammons, Leigh Montville, Bob Ryan and Dan Shaughnessy certainly showed me how to write for a newspaper. Whether their own styles somehow shaped mine, is hard to say. What IS my writing style? Hey, readers out there, speak up! Love your input, as always.

Working with young writers, which I actually did long before I ever became a teacher, I found that one of the truly exciting elements of “style” is I believe every individual, if they pursue it, will discover or maybe uncover, their own unique “style.”

It always seemed to me to be about trust; if you trusted in yourself, your ability to share your ideas, with practice (and I made sure there was plenty of that) you could see these writing styles emerge. One fun second semester exercise was posting unidentified paragraphs on the board, asking the class to pick out who wrote what. They could almost always tell because by then, each student had a distinctive style. Talk about a confidence booster!

And the trust element, I found that to be essential, too. I remember teaching at Tallahassee Community College and one key assignment in my 1101 - Freshman English - was to write a compare/contrast essay describing your bedroom at home when you were a pre-teen and what it looks like now, as a first-year college student.

In class, they would share what they wrote and I remember the absolute silence that fell over the room once this jittery freshman from Oklahoma started in on her story. She was so descriptive and evocative about the two rooms then and now and before long was on such an emotional roll, it sounded as if she was a lonely young novelist in crisis, not a first-year English student.

She had so many in the class on the verge of tears that when she got to the final closing line, which I will always remember, there were gasps, sighs and yes, tears, too.

“And over on the door, “ she wrote with a ringing finality, “I can see the calendar with the number of days marked off until I get to go home.”

The class was stunned. I was awed. When I complimented her on such lovely, compelling writing, her face was a blank.

“But Mr. Nogo,” she said. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Yes, you did,” I told her, standing at her desk. “You trusted.”