Borrow, Steal, Invent: How a Personal Prose Style Can Become a Literary Movement

The time is ripe for change.

We’re at a crisis point. It seems we’ve been here for a while. In the thick of things. And normally that’s an excuse to talk about what’s changing, but the challenge now is to look at our times and what’s lacking in our ability to talk about who we are. Discovering a renewed articulation of our present, partnered with drastic and historic changes beyond our control, that’s what makes for a literary movement—and I believe we’re due.

What such a literary movement would look like isn’t the point. What should concern us is how we get there, and we have a few principles to guide us. First, we can’t control where or when the kindling of concern combusts into a literary movement, but we can intentionally focus on the issues that might ignite a spark. Second, we don’t have to be unified or singular; the modernists weren’t, as we’ve seen in the differences between Hemingway and Faulkner. Change will be multifaceted.

If the time is truly right, we won’t have to manufacture a movement, we need only prepare ourselves through individual, intentional choice. Such choices will be broader in scope than style, but style is what I’ve chosen to cover. Style needs to be addressed. Too often, everything is written around style and dares not tamper with it, as if how we write in sacrosanct and must never be challenged or our boundaries broadened. We can choose to do better. We can choose our style instead of blindly blundering into it.

Many of us have experienced periods of driving we can’t remember, but it can become extreme. One woman found she had accidentally driven to the local school. She turned around and drove off, only to twice more unintentionally return. For many, this is how we arrive at style. Our minds are elsewhere, and wherever we blindly arrive stylistically, we assume that’s how it’s meant to be.

There are benefits—and certainly artistic benefits—from learning to engage with the unconscious, but to surrender our choices to the unconscious, unwittingly, is to play the part of the zombie or the NPC. We only have free will if we choose to use it, and we need to remember that style is a choice. We’ll naturally have our strengths, but only by an act of will can we highlight those strengths and transform our personal style into something special.

In doing so, we transform ourselves as individuals, but some aspects of style we’ll hold in common as people formed by the same world at the same time. Those choices will be different than they were in the 1970’s. They’ll be different than they were a hundred years ago. The choices we make together now will define us, and I can’t say what those choices will be, but making them will only be possible if we know the options available and embrace or reject them with purpose.

But, you say, we have no power. What does it matter what we do?

Power is shifting, and publishing is ripe for change.

We have a new community within a new platform, and I hear the rumbling within. This could upend publishing, we say, if the people in charge would do this or that. That or this. Perhaps it’s true, and we can hope those in power will want the same things we want. We can hope they’ll take action.

Or we can use the tools given us to declare a change that begins with us.

The old walls are cracking. We see each new crack highlighted in articles written with alarm and an uncertainty about our the future of the novel.

For a century or more, we’ve existed in a publisher-constructed division of genres and literary fiction, and those categories and the subcategories within them have been defined for us—but what separates one book from another has already begun to blur. Upmarket fiction combines a literary style with high-concept ideas. The genres themselves have seen ongoing literary experimentation, something Ursula K. Le Guin championed as early as the 70’s. The old rules need not apply:

Now, you can say, All right, so Tolstoy can break the rules, so Dickens can break the rules, but they’re geniuses; rules are made for geniuses to break, but for ordinary, talented, not-yet-professional writers to follow, as guidelines.

And I would accept this, but very very grudgingly, and with so many reservations that it amounts in the end to nonacceptance. Put it this way: if you feel you need rules and want rules, and you find a rule that appeals to you, or that works for you, then follow it. Use it. But if it doesn’t appeal to you or doesn’t work for you, then ignore it; in fact, if you want to and are able to, kick it in the teeth, break it, fold staple mutilate and destroy it.

The Language of the Night by Ursula K. Le Guin in an excerpt reprinted by Lit Hub.¹

This is ultimately how this series seeks to challenge us. I’ve focused heavily on the modernist writers, but my intent isn’t for you to write like a modernist. I want you to borrow, steal, and invent until your style is uniquely your own, born from your soul out of this moment in time. A shared time means that unique styles will share common traits, as is true for James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, very different writers with much in common.

“Amateurs borrow. Professionals steal.”

John Lennon, adapted from T.S. Elliot

I remember someone once taking issue with that statement. “Professionals don’t steal,” she said. Oh, but they do. They must.

An amateur borrows, because they might use a technique, but the technique still belongs to whoever they took it from. They apply the technique the same way, trying to achieve a similar result. The professional steals because he takes the technique and makes it his own. It serves the new author’s purposes and creates previously unseen results.

Virginia Woolf didn’t like Joyce’s Ulysses, but she stole from it. As Joyce did with Leopold Bloom, so Mrs. Dalloway traces a character across one day. To the Lighthouse, according to professor and historian Nick Mount, plays upon the conventions of the Homeric epic, specifically The Iliad, much like Ulysses did with The Odyssey, but Woolf didn’t use those aspects of Joyce’s work with his ownership still marked upon them. She made them her own.

Moreover, the modernists looked at classics like Charles Dickens and knew a 19th century style couldn’t capture their place and time. Today, many genre writers look at the modernists, postmodernists, and metamodernists and say that isn’t how to capture our time—but they’ll take it no further, stylistically, as if to reject modernism is to reject style.

But this isn’t true.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

Ursula K Le Guin²

We don’t have to be modernists to care about style. We don’t have to be literary writers, and maybe the day is coming where the distinctions between literary and balanced fiction lose their significance. I don’t know. Whether or not a literary movement will be born out of this time of political and technological upheaval and what that movement will look like isn’t up to me. It’s beyond any of us, individually, but if we desire such a change, if we long to be a part of it, we begin by ceding as few of our choices to chance and commerce as possible.

How We Begin

You don’t have to do any of this. You can be like The Beatles.

Every time music theory is discussed in terms of The Beatles, it’s always followed by “now, I doubt Lennon and McCartney knew any of this.” They just did it, feeling the theory in their hearts instead of their heads.

They don’t say this about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. If you don’t know this already, Brian Wilson is apparently a musical genius. Don’t ask me to explain it. When it comes to music, I don’t know much of anything, but I like hearing about these musical ideas that are beyond my grasp because it inspires my understanding of literature.

You can be a heart-felt literary genius like the Beatles. You can be head-filled literary genius like Brian Wilson, or you can be whoever it is we are trying our best to create the best stories we can. People who want to do that musically eventually put their words to something more than than three chords played in succession. They want their words to have the music they deserve. In fiction, it’s possible you’ve never even given the music of literature a thought—let alone the literary equivalent of music theory.

By my own testimony, I’ll tell you it’s not that I wasn’t interested, but this information is hard to find. It’s not taught. There are a million Youtube videos on the mistakes we make as beginners, but that’s not literary prose theory.

There, I gave it a name: literary prose theory.

This series isn’t about advice. I’m sharing the tools I’ve learned or uncovered with fresh research. We each choose which tools we want to use and which we don’t. What I hope you’ll do is identify the tools you use and love already, perfect them, and challenge yourself to consider why you use those and not others, and it may be that those were the only tools you were ever given.

It’s like being a guitarist who was only taught three chords. Most pop songs can be played with three chords, but there are other possibilities. The guitar can do more than that. Our stories can do more.

I hope you play and experiment with the new tools this series makes available to you, and if you have anything you hope I’ll cover or cover in more detail, I hope you’ll speak up.

I want to see us grow and mature as writers, and in an artistic community that doesn’t talk about style, doing so feels like an act of rebellion—and an act of rebellion can lead to revolution. That’s my dream. I don’t need to be remembered, and I don’t need to define the movement. That may be for a younger generation than mine, but I would like to be a part of it and see it ferment—not just to witness it from afar but to have played a role.

This series is what I have to offer those who hold the potential to define a new literary movement for the twenty-first century. Discover what works for you. As you do, you’ll find others doing the same, some who share similar tastes and ideas about how the music of language can better accompany our stories’ lyrics.

And somewhere in all that creative cosmic goo, a spark will create life, and a movement will be born.

If you’re not The Beatles, you’ll have to get there intentionally, through knowledgeable choices that challenge the traditions you’ve blindly inherited.³

I recall a story about a woman who always sliced off a section of roast before she cooked it—a tradition she’d learned from her mother. She didn’t know its purpose.

She asked.

I used to cut it off, her mother said, because my pan was too small.

— Thaddeus Thomas

See all the essays in the series. Prose Style: Table of Contents.⁴

1. https://lithub.com/ursula-k-le-guin-on-how-to-become-a-writer/

2. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-few-words-to-a-young-writer

3. One thing to watch for are mutually exclusive rules. Consider both and don’t simply reject one because you learned the other first. I hinted at one such example in the first essay, Aping the Styles of Classic Authors. Hemingway often uses a cumulative sentence built from a series of verb phrases, that flies in the face of modern usage instruction which tells us to avoid ugly -ing verbs.

The old man sat alone in the small boat, the sun beating down on his weathered face, the vast ocean stretching out before him, and he waited, the line taut in his hands.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

One has to make a choice. If you agree that -ing verbs are ugly, you can avoid them except in cumulative sentences. A second option is to avoid verb phrases in cumulative sentences. Instead of writing the sun beating down, you can write the sun furious upon his weathered face. Third, you can choose to avoid -ing verbs only where alternatives are better.

A writer isn’t both minimalist and maximalist, although each will contain examples of the other.

We can alternate techniques that cannot exist at the same moment in time, like steam of consciousness and objective narration. Realism and magical realism. Hyperbole and understatement. Pastiche or parody. But these are cases of choosing the right tool for the right job.

Where the rules repel one another, we get a sense for who we are.

Avoid all adverbs; juxtapose verbs with contradictory adverbs rather than with their compliments. I can do one or the other but not both.

Otherwise, the process of self discovery is, well, a process.

Most of us won’t invent a style from nothing. Preferences born in childhood and nurtured unconsciously or consciously along the way still play a large role, but we begin by acknowledging those tendencies and understanding how they impact what we write and how we can mold a fuller sense of style around them.

As I addressed in The Literal Foundation for Literary Style, the first tendency to recognize is whether you’re a minimalist or a maximalist. That shapes everything else.

Then, we consider the differences between literary and balanced fiction, as I discussed in The Secret of Literary Style. Few people will try to permanently change from minimalist to maximalist, or the other way around, but once we understand what makes something literary or what makes it balanced, we can choose one, the other, or a mixture of the two, bouncing back and forth as we choose.

Then we can explore the techniques, which we do in this series, but there are other resources that will cover their specific topics in greater detail. The only Christmas gift I asked for this year was The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth, and its twentieth chapter covers enallage. Did you know that enallage is the word for intentionally breaking a grammatical standard? I didn’t. Everything Le Guin talked about earlier carries with it a name and the legitimacy a name offers. We know the rules and break them. not by accident but for effect—that’s enallage.

4. See all the essays in the series. Prose Style: Table of Contents.