{"id":1619,"date":"2014-03-09T09:33:22","date_gmt":"2014-03-09T13:33:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1619"},"modified":"2014-03-30T09:26:43","modified_gmt":"2014-03-30T13:26:43","slug":"a-personal-writing-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1619","title":{"rendered":"A Personal Writing Style"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Stephen<\/a>

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie as Jeeves and Wooster. (Artwork: hockypocky.deviantart.com)<\/p><\/div>\n

Michael Lydon, in an entertaining essay for Visual Thesaurus<\/a>, takes on the elusive question of how a personal writing style develops. Writing styles were something I used to take as they came, part of the background. Some were more old-fashioned, but beyond that, I didn\u2019t think about them. Not until I read the entire two-inch thick volume of John Cheever\u2019s short stories did I think about how a style might be something a writer could strive for. When I turned the last page, I was so marinated in Cheever\u2019s deceptively simple way of putting words together, his choice of subjects, and the kinds of characters who peopled his stories, I felt as if I could sit down and dash one off myself. Of course I couldn\u2019t. That writing style was Cheever\u2019s alone.<\/p>\n

Lydon\u2019s essay takes the experience of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse as his model, and how Wodehouse created \u201ca comic world centered on the quintessential featherbrain Bertie Wooster, his unflappable manservant Jeeves,\u201d and the memorable friends and relatives in the Wooster orbit. Over six decades, Wodehouse \u00a0produced dozens of best-selling novels and stories about Jeeves and Wooster. And they\u2019ve been adapted for television<\/a>, movies, and the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, By Jeeves<\/i> (title song<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Authors can certainly claim literary success when one of their characters enters the language as the only descriptor needed for a particular type of person, a Fagin or a Portnoy. \u201cJeeves\u201d remains the archetype of the unflappable, ready-for-any-unlikely-eventuality manservant. And Jeeves and Wooster are an instantly recognizable duo, brought to life in Wodehouse\u2019s lively stories.<\/p>\n

How is such a distinctive voice and style developed? Distinctive, but not too constraining? Comfortably familiar, but not tiresome? Lydon suggests the answer can be found in \u00a0Enter Jeeves<\/i><\/a>, a 15-story collection published in 1997 (Dover) that \u201copens a crystal clear window on Wodehouse’s work method which may be fairly summed up in four words: unremitting trial and error.\u201d The stories trace a stumbling path in the development of Bertie\u2019s eventual world view and the complex relationship the two men settle into. With each story, Wodehouse\u2019s prose became \u201csharper, more succinct, and\u2014there\u2019s no other word for it\u2014more Wodehouse-ian.\u201d<\/p>\n

The key to making one\u2019s own prose as inimitable as that of Wodehouse or Cheever or any other admired writer is to imitate\u2014not the style\u2014but the work method. Lydon advises writers to \u201ckeep honing, polishing, revising, rejecting, and rewriting\u201d until they begin to approach what they want to say, then do it some more. Lather, rinse, repeat.<\/p>\n

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