How to Buy Great Poetry Books Using Spot Criticism

Here's how to do on the spot criticitism of poetry books:

1. Go into a bookshop and pick out two to four books of poetry.
2. Buy a coffee and read the opening lines of the books. Read no more than twelve lines of each unless they are compulsive reading.
3. Imagine that you must decide whether or not the whole book is worth reading based on their opening lines.
4. Ask yourself about how you feel:
- Do I find the opening lines interesting or dull?
- Am I surprised by distinct impressions?

5. Ask yourself about the strategy of the poem:
- What is the strategy of the poet obvious from the poem's opening lines? Is it obvious?
- Can I predict how the poem will go?

6. Ask yourself about the precise nature of the poem by looking for its center:
- What is the emotional or intellectual center of the poem?
- Given all this, then, is this book worth pursuing further?

7. Take the book you learnt was worth pursuing. Dip into the openings of two to four poems within that book.

8. Ask yourself:

- Are these openings of the same quality as the first poem I read?
- Is this book good enough to buy?

And you're done!

Buy or not buy, following this strategy with speedily educate you about modern poetry and poets, and let you get on the inside track of poetry publishing.

I love the Gateway to the Great Books of the Western World

Imagine having the perfect uncle.

Not only does he introduce you to the world at large, but he is a relentless adventurer. He travels far and wide in search of brilliant trophies.

Your perfect uncle (or aunt) knows all the best stories. He knows all the best places to go.

But more than that, imagine he is of the highest discretion and so only speaks to lead you out into further adventures of your own. Imagine his tact and forebearance allow you to explore exactly what you need to at your own pace and depth.

This is what the Gateway to the Great Books are.

"The works in that set [the Great Books] have a certain magnitude, but they also occupy a unique place in the formation and development of Western Culture. Each of them represents a primary, original, and fundamental contribution to man's understanding of the universe and of himself. It has been said of them that they are books which never have to be written again, that they are inexhaustibly rereadable, that they are always contemporary, and that they are at once the most intelligible books (because so lucidly written) and the most rewarding to understand (because they deal with the most profound and important subjects). It has also been said of them that they are the repository and reservoir of the relatively small number of great ideas which man has forged in his efforts to understand the world and his place in it; and that they are over everyone's head all of the time, which gives them the inexhaustible power to elevate all of us who will make the effort to lift our minds by reaching up to the ideas they contain."

The above sustained and sublime piece of prose is from the Introduction to the Gateway to the Great Books. From the prose style I believe it may be written by Hutchins, but it doesn't say.

I read and reread this paragraph with wonder. The Great Books are larger than my comprehension. And it is the Gateway to the Great Books that have enlarged my sensibility bit by bit so that I can appreciate the truth of these words.

For the last 18 months I have been taking a liberal arts degree through the Gateway to the Great Books. I am just over half way and feel my sense of myself, the world, other humans, nature, and God has been profoundly deepened by this study. It has been liberating. Becoming an autodidact has been empowering. And sharing what I have learnt has been enriching.

What Prose Style Can Teach Us About Moral Character: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Macaulay.

I do not like F. Scott Fitzgerald. I find him an irritating sot, a malignerer, and a kind of prose poet whose sentimentality repulses me. But I get that Fitzgerald has made virtues out of his necessities, and even though his vices may repel they nevertheless glitter with the sprayed-on gloss of honest and vital emotion.

So I sat down to read 'The Diamond As Big As the Ritz' with little expectations of more than a pretty read a la the Great Gatsby. And so it was!

Macaulay's prose reminds me of Gibbon's, but Gibbon's is the purer style. They are very similar, so contiguous that the distinct quality of Macaulay's is obscure. Gibbon's style is nobler, less opinionated, and more just; Gibbon's fine way of applying multiple verbs to a single actor is so stylish and unique that it has no compare anywhere; I am so impressed by Gibbon's style that I can only find him a better writer - I was about to say a better man - than Macaulay.

I do not dislike Macaulay. I don't know him well enough from the one essay. But I receive an overall impression of journalistic quality in his work which leaves me cold.

Please let me clarify that view.

Macaulay's essay on Machiavelli goes to pains to contextualise Machiavelli in the social context of his times. When he compares the social context of his (Macaulay's) own time with Machiavelli's time, I became skeptical. Macaulay is trying to be an apologist for Machiavelli by shifting the blame for Machiavelli's 'evil' onto the entire Italian people in Machiavelli's time and place; and instead of making sense of Machiavelli's morality, by asserting that every age has its own morals he relativises moral considerations into nonexistence. Macaulay implies that every age has its own morals, which are incommensurate to another age's morality; if this is the case, why do we even bother to judge the morality of people and nations outside our own time and place? How can we learn moral lessons from history if morality is incommensurate from age to age? It is a nonsense argument.

And the review of Machiavelli's works, while interesting, seems a little irrelevant; we are only really interested in the political thought, and the moral questions around that. Macaulay rambles here.

So too the comparison of Machiavelli with Montesqieu. Macaulay reckons Montesqieu is popular because of the sentimental fads of his day, not because of the excellence of his book, the Spirit of Laws. But if this were true, then why is Montesqieu in the Great Books and Macaulay is introducing them? Macaulay accuses Montesqieu of matching a far-flung example to a principle, instead of finding principles to fit the proximate political circumstances. This is just to say that Montesqieu argues his case as best he can, and Machiavelli does too; to question the evidence is not to invalidate the theory's weight, and Macaulay does not broach the theory behind the Spirit of Laws.

So as you have read so far my impression of Macaulay is that he writes like a journalist. No doubt more will be revealed.

I don't mean to be censorious of these guys. I believe the character of a writer matters, and vices and errors in superb writers are even more obvious because of the overall excellence of their prose. Both Fitzgerald and Macaulay are urbane and erudite sophists, and fine stylists. If either man were a poor writer then their defects would not be so clear.

How To Get Unstruck When Writing a Story: Michael Swanwick on Character Triangles:

Just in case you weren't aware, Michael Swanwick is a genius and writes science fiction. These are his words:

"A story requires at least three characters. So the triangle a useful tool when analyzing why a story-in-progress doesn’t work. Make a diagram of all the characters and who they interact with. Look for triangles. If there are none, then you’ve identified the problem:

"A protagonist needs to be pulled in two different directions, so there can be a resolution that is a synthesis of interpersonal forces. A protagonist and an antagonist (who would be represented by two dots connected by a line) don’t enact a story – they’re just playing tug-of-war. Which is no more a story than is a football game.

"So a man falls in love with a woman. Either it takes or it doesn’t. No story. A woman has to choose between two men. This might be a story. Draw the triangle.

"There’s a line from her to Man A and another to Man B. But is there a line between the two men? What is their relationship to each other? Usually when such a story isn’t working – when it doesn’t feel like a story – it’s because the two men have no direct relationship with each other, but only interact through the woman. Ask yourself how you can make their relationship interesting. Are they best friends? Father and son? Astronauts competing for a place on the first rocket to Mars?

"The insight can be extended to ask related questions. Is the relationship on one side of the triangle significantly weaker than the other two? Are there more than one triangle in the story, and if not should there be?

"As you can see, the utility of this is extremely dependent on the specifics of the story in question. The one universal that I insist upon is that the triangle is descriptive rather than prescriptive. We can all think of perfectly valid stories that don’t have character triangles in them.

"And it does no good to start with a triangle. Let your story find its natural shape. If you get stuck, diagram it out and look for the triangles. If the story doesn’t get stuck, don’t give it a second thought."

On Sainte-Beuve On Montaigne

Sainte-Beuve writes messily, but the fine feelings sweep you along quickly so you don't notice until the second read.

I have forced Sainte-Beuve to speak here of Montaigne in epigram, as I can only imagine he would have wished if he had a modern audience to communicate with.

Much as his work has been demolished for me by Proust's criticism, Sainte-Beuve's wonderful love and enthusiasm remains:

- "It may be said of Montaigne's style that it is a continual epigram, or an ever-renewed metaphor."

- "Montaigne is a writer naturally fertile in metaphors that are never detached from the thought, but that seize it in its very center."

- "If we desired to write with his severity, exact proportion, and diverse continuity of figures and turns - it is absolutely necessary to enlarge and extend the French language."

- "In imagining the expression and locution that is wanting, our prose should appear equally finished, inspired and emboldened, but not intoxicated, by the pure and direct spirit of ancient sources."

Some stray birds:

Can even a Frenchman still speak about enlarging the language? And now that English cannot be engrossed by any one human mind, can it even be called a single language, or is it rather a super-language or complex of languages?

I find in Montaigne's classicism the best possible kind: to treat the Roman and Greek authors as a matter for pleasure and wisdom alone, and to avoid all pretense of learning and unnatural composure.

The very same things said of Montaigne are also said of Dante by the critics. Can it be the sweet new style is anything other than a sweet fresh mind made intimate with the minds of the ancients?

Finally, how can we account for Dante in Italian, Montaigne in French, and Shakespeare in English? The mystery at least can be traced to the Roman writers. But that does not explain the light that entered the world through their work.

On Othello 5: the Character and Death of Othello.

Othello clearly has issues.

It's not just critical thinking skills Othello lacks; some sausages are missing from Othello's barbeque. And he dies strangely content with the memory of a cruel act of justice he once dealt to a Turk, a non-Christian like he once was. Does Othello recognize his karma coming back as a tragedy from that act of rough "justice"? I think so.

Where Desdemona's death is the shock of the play, Othello's is a relief. I burst into tears reading Desdemona's last lines; how could I have read this play four or five times as a teenager and NOT wept, I wonder? Nothing could underline the difference in kind and degree between the teenager and the adult than the fact that only the adult who is experienced in the extremities of suffering can be adequate to comprehend the astonishing moral victory of Desdemona's last words. Desdemona reveals herself a warrior; by forgiving, she defeats Othello.

Coming back to Othello: Othello seems to recognise that his brutal nature is the true man at the end, but does that mean that the noble and sophisticated Othello of act 1 to 3 is fake? This is clearly false, but not an easy charge to avoid.

Othello of act 1 to 3 IS the real deal, but so is the completely different Othello of act 5. The intervening tormented Othello (act 4) is merely the alembic of Iago's alchemical psychiatry, not a man but a patient, a case study. What are we to make of these two different Othello's? And what are we to make of the transformations of youth and adulthood, whereby the same individual can become as different in himself as night from day?

The key lies in Iago's silence.

Is Iago the first psychiatrist? Undoubtedly.

I can't feel anything other than genuine satisfaction in Iago's total silence. Iago is complete, having returned to that avenging Element from which he arose; we feel the human aspect of the man was merely for show, and that in his silence the real man at last is revealed. We feel relieved, not of his speech, but to know him as he really is; Iago is not a human agent, and by his silence shows this is so.

Iago's silence illuminates the character of Othello as a product of primordial darkness and ignorance. Recognising the aboriginal depth of Othello in ourselves, we are humbled. How can we be sure we are just and wise? We can't, unless we become intimate with that darkness which we foolishly disown as evil in ourselves. Othello signifies that intimacy with our blackness, and the terrible cost of becoming estranged from our soul.

Augustine's Four Rules of Reading A Book

Today I learnt how Augustine read.

His style of reading reminds me of Dante's letter to his patron Can Grande - no doubt Dante learnt to read through Augustine. But what I was unprepared for was how very wide the gap between Augustine's view of reading and the modern view.

Augustine's rules for reading are (to me at least) still relevant. They are four, and I state them as principles rather than practices because of their general usefulness:

1. PURITY - reading that subserves cravings and appetites distorts the mind's ability to read the text. Maybe a text serves the lower appetites; nevertheless, the meaning of it can only be got at with a mind free of bias and a pure appetite to understand.

2. FAITH - You must suspend disbelief, but you must not suspend belief, in reading. That is to say, faith must be present in reading, and cynicism must be suspending in reading, for comprehension to occur.

I would add that faith can be conditional on historical context or limited to the space of the reading of the text, but it must be present according to Augustine in order to read well.

Faith in the text is primary in making sense of it. Why? Because reading is an inclination of the will and appetite towards clarity and freedom, therefore right from the start the will must be freed from doubt, the enemy of good faith.

These two rules for reading, purity and faith, pertain to the appetites and the will. Purity of appetites and a faithful will are the ends of their application.

3. LOVE - I read Harold Bloom's criticism from love of his mind. Why do I love Bloom's work? Because he has taught me that only by love can I win access through the text to another person's consciousness. For me, as for Bloom, Augustine and Dante, love is the only entree into the mind of greatness. A strong love will take you to the heart of any text.

Simply put, love makes reading and writing worth while. Since reading involves the love of that which reads - in other words, reading is intellectual vanity - the most literate books win the greatest love, since they most intimately put us in contact with that quality of intellectual vanity which does reading. Even more deeply, the love that creates a text and the love that reads the text are the one substance, and the love that carefully appreciates a text arises from the same kind of love as that which created the text. Love is the common human factor in reading and writing.

Criticism without love is worthless. A critic without love, even in the form of courtesy, respect, or polite restraint from abuse, is not worth a hearing. Any misreading (in the sense of Harold Bloom's map of misreadings) that adds love to the text is good or at least harmless.

4. MULTIPLICITY - Simple, clear passages of a text offer a meaning which is unarguably revealed by purity, faith and love. The consensus of informed opinions around a great text is fairly fixed, and there is little freedom in it. But Augustine offers a view of free interpretation of the text in the case of ambiguous passages.

Multiple readings, imagined, invented and supposed, are good and useful when the text is ambiguous and poetic, and when they do not violate the good faith of the text. Obscure passages provide freedom to play and explore the text more fully.

These are Augustine's four rules for reading a book, then. Let's put them in their historical and intellectual context now!

Augustine came to value the pagan tradition negatively, as an example of ignorance and error in human thinking. So much of his rules for reading concern the Christian and Jewish religious writings of his time, many of which came to be our present day bible. Augustine's reading was informed by a deep seriousness or purpose, and a moral and devotional aim.

Perhaps the primary challenge to we moderns is Augustine's stark vision of the human good to be got from reading. But Augustine differs not greatly in this from Samuel Johnson, who read voraciously and judged by very high standards of moral purity.

I suppose the biggest difference from we moderns is the more broad sense of what is proper in books - we are less offended and less corrupted, I suppose, by impure and appetite-stimulating images or words. Perhaps it is because we are so constantly overfull with stimuli, that we end up becoming accustomed or unaffected to the tides of vicious and sex-loaded content or screens and pages wash up. Certainly we seem to inhabit an alien and noisy world compared to the agrarian north African environment of Augustine.

Take these rules, then, as you will... a stimulus to your reading more spiritedly, or a window on a kind of reading past and long gone.

What Do You Think of These Four Dante English Translations?

It's customary to comment on parallel translations. Instead I will invite you to read and judge for yourself which is superior. I will say just that the great translations here seem to me a foregone conclusion.

Dante and Virgil are in the middle of the circle of the lustful, and Dante has just seen the damned and is describing them, so it's Canto V of Inferno, lines 40 to 51.

James Finn Cotter

And as the starlings are lifted on their wings
In icy weather to wide and serried flocks,
So does the gale lift up the wicked spirits,

Flinging them here and there and down and up:
No hope whatever can ever comfort them,
Neither of rest nor of less punishment.

And as the cranes fly over, chanting lays,
Forming one long line across the sky,
So I saw come, uttering their cries,

Shades wafted onward by these winds of strife,
To make me ask him, "Master, who are those
People whom the blackened air so punishes?"

XXXX XXXX XXXX

Longfellow:

And as the wings of starlings bear them on
In the cold season in large band and full,
So doth that blast the spirits maledict;

It hither, thither, downward, upward, drives them;
No hope doth comfort them for evermore,
Not of repose, but even of lesser pain.

And as the cranes go chanting forth their lays,
Making in air a long line of themselves,
So saw I coming, uttering lamentations,

Shadows borne onward by the aforesaid stress.
Whereupon said I: Master, who are those
People, whom the black air so castigates?

XXXX XXXX XXXX

Cary:

...As in large troops
And multitudinous, when winter reigns,
The starlings on their wings are borne abroad;

So bears the tyrannous gust those evil souls.
On this side and on that, above, below,
It drives them: hope of rest to solace them

Is none, nor e'en of milder pang. As cranes,
Chanting their dol'rous notes, traverse the sky,
Stretch'd out in long array: so I beheld

Spirits, who came loud wailing, hurried on
By their dire doom. Then I: Instructor! who
Are these, by the black air so scourg'd?

XXXXX XXXX XXXX

Mandelbaum:

And as, in the cold season, starlings' wings
bear them along in broad and crowded ranks
so does that blast bear on the guilty spirits:

now here, now there, now down, now up, it drives them.
There is no hope that ever comforts them
no hope for rest and none for lesser pain.

And just as cranes in flight will chant their lays,
arraying their long file across the air,
so did the shades I saw approaching, borne

by that assailing wind, lament and moan;
so that I asked him: Master, who are those
who suffer punishment in this dark air?

XXXX

What do you think?

The Great Writer as Adolescent: Re-reading Andre Gide's Journals

Re-reading Gide's journals tonight, I am struck by how he obsessed over his image, over how others saw him. It is a little jejune for Gide to fret over what impressions his ideas and books make on others AFTER he has won public notoriety with his sex life. And how could it have been otherwise - I admit he was in a sore spot with Corydon and his autobiography - but still the overall impression of the journals is of adolescent angst.

Gide's introduction to Montaigne is a case in point. Andre Gide thinks he adds sharpness to Michel de Montaigne when all he is adding to Montaigne is Gide. Gide's Montaigne is 'risky' and 'impudent' because Gide has failed to discern his good taste from his ego.

Then there are Gide's assays into fields he is ignorant of. Three specific great writers he mentions in his journals he has signally failed to come to grips with.

First there is Marx. Gide's flirtation with communism is embarrassing because it reveals his adolescent-level political consciousness, limited (as politics should be with adolescents) to a passing enthusiasm.

Then William James. He thinks James' 'Psychology' is boring after a few pages, because he cannot understand the way James has reinvented the human soul along scientific lines without any loss of humanity or grandeur.

Finally in Freud he can see only the value of Freud as a de-mystifyer of sexual matters. About Freud's compulsive prose and striking insight into inner realities, not a word. He likes Freud because he is 'impudent'.

Gide consistently gets these great writers in a nutshell but misses the nut. And it's not simply a failure of his time or place, but a failure of imagination. Gide is too busy being 'impudent' to read these serious writers for adults.

I love Gide's work and personality, but the truth is he is basically an adolescent playing at being an adult much of the time. And it is a bitter pleasure to have outgrown his tutelage, and seen his limitations for what they are. Andre Gide is no less a great writer for the truth about him being less than complimentary. In fact, the pleasure of seeing the truth about him has inspired me to read his novels again.

Judging Proust's Book From An Aristotlean Point of View

Marcel Proust's failure to play well with others; his lack of prudential or practical wisdom; and his insistent cognitive games - these three factors eventually win a beautiful relationship with others through the massive confessional that is Proust's art. The Book of Proust is practical wisdom on a biblical scale, as revealed via Marcel's practical foolishness and refined via a practical skepticism on a par with Montaigne's.

And the prose? Virtuistic, supple, sinuous - instinct rebels against this new snake in the garden. Because Proust fails to shock, like so many of his French colleagues, he nevertheless does not fail to build a relationship (a single unitary friendship on a grand scale) with his readers which is shocking in the way it involves readers in his neurotic verbal-emotional-worldly games.

Does this reader want to bitchslap the author? Sometimes. But since Proust is basically innocent and silly (albeit in a shrewd and wise way) I would regret it.

Why Read Proust?

Why Read Proust?

There are many good reasons not to read Marcel Proust’s great novel A la Rechere du Temps Perdu.

It is uneventful. It can be boring. The narrator is a bitchy snob. It has too many outright lies in it to be autobiography, and too much tiresome bickering to be considered a novel. And it is too long.

It is cynical: all human relationships except close family are false, fake; naked unconscious self-interest and vanity drive all social interactions; childhood habits once broken can never be recovered; insomnia, poor health, jealousy, sadomasochistic urges, ungovernable impulses – all of these completely overrule and overdetermine the individual’s sense of reason.

It is capricious: a huge cast of mostly irrelevant characters caper about uttering strange irrelevancies, whose total sum is some kind of mysterious calculus of snobbery cloaking intense animalistic urges, which Proust seldom deigns to explain to readers living in a less uptight culture. Cruelty is commonplace between characters that are considered friends, and sexual compulsions bind everyone together invisibly and inseparably.

It is disorganised: the tone changes from page to page, from book to book, without warning, guidance, or apparent reason. The paragraph divisions are completely useless, presenting the book messily. The chapter headings are either hopelessly irrelevant or simply nonexistent; the reader is left to impose his own structure on the book if he is to make sense of it.

So why read Proust? If the good is the enemy of the great, surely Proust’s book is its own worst enemy? But if you read merely good books, then you are condemned to mediocrity. And since Marcel Proust’s book is both bad AND great, it provides the most uniquely vulgar amusements in the midst of the most sublime art. I don’t dispute its greatness; its goodness I sincerely doubt.

So why read it? I can tell you must read Marcel Proust. I can tell you it is great. But I cannot tell you why. Harold Bloom blathers on about identity and memory; I don’t know about that. I can only tell you that I do, you must, it’s worth it – that is all I can say.

Addendum: Okay, okay, so Proust is funny, charming, insightful, sweet. His language is beautiful, delicate, tough, and sinewy. His ideas on love are shocking and wise in equal measure. And the badness of Proust’s book makes the great qualities all the more astonishing. It is as if it were discovered that Thomas Aquinas has been, in addition to writing his Summa Theologica, the author of some pornography – I kid you not: Proust is THAT shocking.

On Authentic Aesthetic Pleasure

The sure sign of authentic aesthetic pleasure is that we forget where we are, lose awareness of what amount of time passed in the enjoyment of the pleasure, and for a blessed moment shuck off the isolated ego. This happened to me four nights ago while reading Chekhov's short story 'The Grasshopper'.

Chekhov set out to write a story about a secular saint. In a way, the hero of this story is the bastard child of Dostyevsky's Idiot of the enopymous novel.

I resisted buying the cheap edition of Chekhov's stories because they featured "short, humorous sketches". Instead, I brought the second of the attractive and unobtrusive three volume Penguin edition, which chronologically arranges his stories around stylistic periods, entitled 'Ward No. 6 & Other Stories'.

I began to read 'Grasshopper' in the vaulted Adelaide Railway Station as Mozart's Jupiter Symphony played over the loudspeakers - it was Saturday night and Mozart has been found to sooth the violence of the drunkards and drug-addicts passing through the turnstiles. It is profoundly reassuring to me that in Australia even the most vulgar can find some useful end satisfied by Mozart.

But in combination with Chekhov the music of Mozart produced a sort of exalted absent-mindedness, a condition which reminds me of nothing so much as the ecstatic fugue preceding an epileptic fit so amazingly evoked by Dostoyevsky in the Idiot - the clear mild euphoria that precedes the aesthetic experience, subtle and pure like life-giving water, the original mind of zen in which insight becomes if not possible then potential.

I don't remember getting on the train. As the train streamed express to Goodwood through the downpour and darkness I finished the story and closed the book and looked around.

Where I am? I wondered. Had the train stopped already? Had I passed my home station? For all I knew at that moment, the train had been moving forever in accordance with the fixed stars.

The next day I tracked down Chekhov's literary child and grand-child in the University library. I could not hold back my eagerness. I read Babel's 'Crossing Into Poland'. I read Cheever's 'Goodbye, My Brother'. A cloud of mozartian grandeur spilled over from divine zimzum, chilled me into reverent silence.That day I got two Cheever books secondhand. It was a day before I spoke about it.

Yesterday to Dan then I showed him Babel's 'Crossing Into Poland'. I asked him to read it, then I explained the aesthetics of trauma - that is, how profound shock in literature will alienate the reader unless it is couched in a kind of ecstatic lyricism. Then we examined the words themselves of the opening two pars. I asked him to listen while I picked out the violent words from the apparently innocent description of the Polish landscape.

"Stop," he said. "It's positively morbid."

Dan's comment was a relief to me. Thank goodness somebody else could see it. I suppose I wanted to reality test the words to make sure the effect was in them and not simply in my imagination alone.

As we went out to dinner I popped into the secondhand bookstore and discovered the very rare Morison translation of Babel's Collected Stories, for only eight dollars. What a treasure!

I feel so blessed.

On Writing Style: the Realists Versus the Rest of Us.

In regards to questions on style in writing prose, one thing is certain: It depends.

French prose is the start and end of all matters of prose style. Why? Because not only is French as a language more amenable to supple and sinuous turns of style, but it is less hampered by the shackles of the demand for actual substance in writing by an indulgent and fickle French reading public. (One year it is novels as jigsaw puzzles, the next cannibalism as romance... crikey French readership what's wrong with youse??)

The basic dichotomy I perceive is the realistic prose stylists versus the Rest of Them.

The Realists...
Some writer called Flaubert used the concept of a "telling detail". He said you only need the detail that helps TELL THE STORY AND NO MORE. His realistic style proved the basis for French writers for a century.

Now I find Flaubert dull. I found his novel Madame Bovary so dull, you could hire the dvd and not finish watching it...so dull you could fall asleep using the pages as toilet paper...so dull that a recital by lesbian midget circus performers in midair juggling flaming sticks would... but you get the idea: boring boring boring man and writing and books. But this is the really cool thing about style - you might pick up Flaubert (play safe) and really enjoy his books.

So the instruction from Mister Flaubert - for those who don't speak French, Flaubert is pronounced 'Phallaeo-Bart' - the instructions for writing realistic telling details in prose, are as follows: for creating telling details is to ask yourself if each detail advances the story, and omit those that do not.

...And The Rest of us.
Style is complex and elusive, because it is related to your fundamental strengths as a writer and abilities as a human. To develop style, read the great stylists, reflect on your strengths and their strengths, and vigorously experiment with your writing.

Start with purchasing and reading every year or two a copy of Strunk and White's legendary book 'The Elements of Style'. Continue to George Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language' (found online with a quick google). Every single writer I know has read and admires both of these.

Then I suggest you push at the limits of modernity. Try the two great trans-realistic prose stylists of the last century, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolfe. Woolfe's prose is simply gorgeous, and Proust's is very very funny. But reading will not take you all the way.

Proust and Woolfe both wrote "pastiches" of other writers - that is, they rewrote their own essays or stories in the tone of another writer. They did this because that gave them freedom over and from the style of the other writer.

As a rule, then, you will see that style is learnt sequentially by imitation, by theft, by imitation and by transforming - the same way children get good at speaking and the way by which adolescents transform language.

Good writers began by recognising and imitating their betters; develop and expand their abilities by stealing from vital equals; learn by vigorously adapting the greats through pastiches; and then the rare great prose stylists become great by innovatively transforming their own merely good writing by infusing it with the vivid awareness of the greatness of the prose of other writers.