By John Oyewale

Nothing Trumps Style and Voice

It is that simple.

You will rise or fall in the main by your style and voice. It is not so much because of theme as style and voice that you will or will not fade into darkness in a profession that sees roughly three million books being published per year in the US alone. You could write about no sensational theme, about moments mundane in themselves, about characters anything but picaros, but if your style and voice are original, your writing will find a worthy home.

Think of theme as the ‘what’ of your story and of style and voice as the ‘how’.

When I was much younger, I used to draw a lot in the sand. I came up with one rule, or rather, the rule was laid upon me—and that by no one in particular, but (in retrospect) by the inborn quest for my work to be distinct from those of my peers, fellow child artists working with twig and sand: I had to draw whatever I wanted to draw such that, were the picture to be breathed upon till it became a living soul and I to awake in the dead of night to find it right beside me, I would not have any reason to leap out of bed yowling for help—in the very dead of night. This rule perforce made me a slow artist, taught me to agonise over even an inch of a line or curve or, say, the slightest slant of an eye while my peers hurried on—but it made me a satisfied artist. And it has never failed me. 

How writers string words together, the kinds of words that they choose to string together, and how writers evoke mood and tone by doing this: that is style. In (what some might regard as) Joycean grandiloquence as in Chekhovian sparseness—in the deceptively simple, masterful iciness of J. M. Coetzee as in the bursting bright audacity of Chigozie Obioma—from the coruscating ambulatory prose of Teju Cole’s Open City to the disconcertingly brilliant poetry of Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go—from Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’ to Mo Yan’s ‘Frogs’ and beyond: style struts its many stripes.  Voice, wrote David DeGusta, is often ‘the hardest thing to define’ despite being ‘the easiest thing to pick up on’. But DeGusta’s shot is in fact remarkably accurate: ‘Voice is the way in which word choice and syntax suggest to the reader something about the writer, something about the origin of the prose.’ Voice, you could say, then, is style in action. What you hear and what it does to you, the impression that it leaves on you: that is voice. Doris Lessing once described her experience of reading Dambudzo Marechera’s novel, The House of Hunger, as being ‘like overhearing a scream.’ ‘Hindenburg! The name itself is massive,’ opens Winston Churchill’s essay on Germany’s Paul von Hindenburg in Churchill’s biographical essay collection, Great Contemporaries. (Of course, Hindenburg is only a name, not a novel—but try to envision Churchill reading out that opening gambit, and perhaps you will see the point).

‘Something about the origin of the prose,’ wrote DeGusta. So, you can tell (if you are well read) who a writer’s literary forebears might be by experiencing their style and voice. And you can tell if an aspiring writer has no literary forebears of note or almost none at all, by the same traits: style and voice. For ‘by their fruits ye shall know them.’

So, someone could write about some issue of the day that has the largest megaphone and the most raucous bandwagon marching under the next ultra-processed catchphrase, but if the style is at times ungainly and the voice unoriginal and howlers sashay—not slip—in (think ‘pension’ for ‘penchant’—a true example), they should neither surprised nor sulky if the writing earns them a standard rejection. Now, some efforts could slip their way through to publication if their style and voice are at least middling while their themes are straight out of the fodder of the day: but paradoxically they therefore might have become published to their own peril, the peril of eventual oblivion. They risk becoming the one thing any piece of creative writing would not wish to be, had it a mouth to say a prayer: a statistic.

John Oyewale is an editor for Dominique Literary Magazine.