Recognize Style as Repetition

Practice. Take three finished pages of your own, roughly eight hundred words, and look for recurring choices in six places: how sentences begin; whether you join clauses with “and” and “but” or subordinate them; the range of sentence lengths across twenty consecutive sentences (count the words); what kind of detail you reach for first, whether sight, sound, number, institution or gesture; how paragraphs end, by statement, image, turn or question; and which words come back. Choose five patterns. Beside each, write whether it is a choice, a habit or an accident, without judging yet. Then mark which you would keep as the Work’s grammar and which you would interrupt on purpose. After thirty minutes you will know how much of your style you chose and how much arrived on its own.

Ernest Hemingway is remembered for short sentences, but the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms (1929) has four, and by our count they run 26, 30, 20 and 50 words. The paragraph is 126 words long, and fifteen of them are “and.” In “Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees,” events that another writer would rank by importance are laid side by side at equal weight. “Leaves” appears four times, “the road” three, “the trees” twice, as though the paragraph were reluctant to leave the objects it has named. The last sentence ends on a subtraction: “afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.”

The reason seems to be learning. A reader tends to pick up a pattern within a paragraph or two and begin to read by it, so after the fourth “and” the reader may expect equal weight, and a sentence that finally subordinates registers as an event. Hemingway’s “and” is a style because the paragraph could have been written otherwise and wasn’t. A writer who never examines a real pattern may watch it harden into a tic, the sentence that begins with a participle every time, the paragraph that always ends on a one-line turn. It has become a tic once it stops being a choice, which you can test by trying to break it on purpose.

No single method of finding a style is correct. A discovery writer may find hers by drafting and then counting; a planner may choose a pattern for a Work in advance and hold to it. A writer may also shift pattern between Works, because a pattern that suits a retreating army may be wrong for a love scene.