While in my essays I generally engage the subjects of worldview and faith as they relate to literature and writing, I hope that you will indulge with me in a brief consideration of craft, or what I might facetiously call crossing our eyes and dotting our tees.
Let us consider Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), a brilliant author whose early death stopped short the great wealth of insight that we might have profited from. While he lived, Stevenson devoted himself to the craft of writing and to instructing young writers. Those who aspire to write, and yet have no clue where to begin in the development of their own style, would do well to study the personal essays of successful writers of the past. Those who venture on the exhilarating yet demanding journey of writing fiction will find the road longer and more taxing without the guidance of those who have come before. Like any art form, writing requires commitment to learning, practicing, and perfecting patterns, as well as acknowledging that no one reaches the height of absolute perfection. It is a task that cannot be accomplished in either a spirit of carelessness or of pride – for if in carelessness, one will not realize the need to learn and to grow in one’s craft; if in pride, any growth will be stifled by some misconceived notion that art operates on a spectrum. The personal essays of Stevenson offer a look into the mechanics, the strings and pulleys, that are essential considerations for the literary artist.
Because of the direct, didactic nature of his approach and the quotable dictums spread throughout, I have found Stevenson’s personal essays especially captivating. My discovery of his nonfiction awakened an interest in how a young writer could learn from someone of his experience. I was intrigued to know what the author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped, who had so captured my imagination as a child, had to say about his own approach to writing. Subsequently his work impressed upon me a greater conscientiousness with my prose, and an awareness of intrinsic errors and inconsistencies. I have taken pains to compartmentalize much of the practical stuff that can be gleaned from the essays and many letters into five major categories: (1) that the art of writing involves the arrangement of language blocks; (2) that written prose must follow a logical progression; (3) that it must also make a pattern; (4) that well-written prose is alike to music; and (5) that it necessitates exactness of words. Through synthesis of these five components of creative writing we might come to some viable understanding of his stylistic approach.
The first thing to realize with Stevenson is his preoccupation with style, marking it as that which makes the artist. He begins “A Note on Realism” by stating, “Style is the invariable mark of any master.”1 He then proceeds to describe the process and mentality of an artist at the beginning stages of writing a text: after the initial conceptions are made, “the artist must now step down, don his working clothes, and become the artisan. […] he must decide, almost in a breath, the scale, the style, the spirit, and the particularity of execution of his whole design.”2 There is an inevitable link in Stevenson’s view between style and the artist’s mind: art is “conceived from within outwards, and generously nourished from the author’s mind.”3 We come to understand, after reading and studying the essays of Stevenson, that he weighs the import of all artistic text upon the question of style: “The engendering idea of some works is stylistic; a technical preoccupation stands them instead of some robuster principle of life.”4 With all its variables and applications, style in literature is not easy to define. Is there a system to follow in order to produce good writing? Stevenson would suggest there is, and he was not alone in claiming so. He was merely the poster-boy of a long tradition that stressed the importance of selection. Style is about choices a writer makes, in what to include and what to omit. Writers have always been concerned with the idea of word choice in composing text, as when Jonathan Swift identified a style as “proper words in proper places.”5 And it is upon this precept that our finger should rest when we consider the thrust of Stevenson’s understanding of style.
One obvious method a creative writer can learn from Stevenson is to study and attempt to imitate the style of established authors. Stevenson devoted himself to the study of his craft, adopting bits and pieces of his style from some of the greats. He confesses In “A College Magazine” to having “played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.”6 Whenever he read a passage that pleased him, he would set himself to “ape” that distinctive quality of style, which is to say he would record it and thereafter practice it with his own writing. This idea of imitation, of “aping” the style of others, is the first thing to learn from Stevenson, as it is a legitimate and respectful strategy. The argument can be made that no one is entirely original in the way they write, for everyone is limited by the devices of one’s language in formulating the structure and design of their prose.
Although tips and strategies are the objective focus of Stevenson’s instruction to young writers, a teacher is never isolated from the historical and ideological contexts of his time. He was apparently well-learned in classical rhetoric, for we see his approach to style stemming from concepts originally introduced by Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars Poetica. His ideas of how parts in a story serve the whole and some basics of musical rhythm and sound owe their foundations to both Aristotle and Horace. It follows that Stevenson’s theories were not entirely original, but that he expounded upon ancient ideas on poetic craft. In fact, he was not the only one to emphasize the importance of selection. Ben Jonson in 1623 proposed the maintaining of a “true order” by utilizing choice and grace, and omitting much that is not fitting;7 and William Wordsworth in 1800 reminded poets of a composition’s main purpose, that of giving pleasure, and that abiding by this purpose requires the principle of selection.8 Stevenson spent a considerable amount of time in France, in which he also familiarized himself with the likes of Dumas, Baudelaire, Thackeray, George Sand, and Hugo.9 The French held their own tradition in the development of stylistic study, which in many respects was more advanced than the English literary scene. For it is generally known that the French “inhabit an orderly, clearly regulated, well-policed language.”10 Stevenson much admired the orderly in language, and in many respects he owed his systematized approach of style to the French. He has taken some of the best of classical poetics and French stylistics and presented them in his own personal manner to the public.
The rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century was a period in which novels were accepted without any attention upon or discussion around the mechanisms of the art. Taking novels for what they were and lauding their authors without much regard for the process of composition drew on into the nineteenth century and Victorian period. On the whole, writers were of a mind to keep the workings of their craft relatively private. A general spirit of concealment can be summed up in Edgar Allan Poe’s insightful remark: “Most writers—poets in especial—prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition—and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.”11 Perhaps this abstract ideological approach to discourse about the novel was due at least in part to the lack of a comprehensive repertoire of stylistic terms that could be applied to any structured theory. Only during the last decades of the nineteenth century did discussions start to brew among writers which expressed a renewed interest in the methods of composition. The spirit of complacency and ignorance was dying out. This was especially evident in a debate on art and the novel between Walter Besant and Henry James in 1884. James admits:
Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel was not what the French call discutable. It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it — of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison […] there was a comfortable, good-humored feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that was the end of it.12
This James wrote in “The Art of Fiction,” an essay in response to a lecture of the same name that Besant delivered earlier that year at the Royal Institution. Besant, who argued for fiction to be regarded as equal to all the other arts of painting, sculpture, music and poetry, maintained that the art of writing cannot be taught; he claims “fiction is so far removed from the mere mechanical arts, that no laws or rules whatever can teach it to those who have not already been endowed with the natural and necessary gifts.”13 And yet there are certain basic principles that he proceeds to describe, especially as it has to do with the proper selection of details. Henry James, in response, expressed the view that there is a certain liberty inherent in novels when all that is necessary is to make it interesting; and there are innumerable ways in which authors succeed in interesting the reader: “They are as various as the temperament of man, and they are successful in proportion as they reveal a particular mind, different from others.”14 Such liberty suffers when these methods are “marked out, or hemmed in, by prescription.” So even while curiosity and interest in the methods of style drove these writers to explore its boundaries, significant barriers remained in place that seemed impossible to overcome.
Just as these discussions were taking shape, Robert Louis Stevenson contributed with his own personal essays which would attempt to push the boundaries even further. He joined in the very same debate between Besant and James by penning his own essay in response to some of James’s ideas, which he called “A Humble Remonstrance.” Stevenson was not satisfied in letting the novel simply be, for he was too interested in sharing his knowledge of the craft.
There was a certain irony to Stevenson’s approach. He expressed a purposeful preoccupation in the mechanics, or selective details, in writing, which he believed to be more help to the beginner. He was not so interested in the finished picture, as was James, and did not believe the young writer would benefit from considering “pictures of what an art may aspire to at its highest;” instead, he was more concerned that young artists focus upon “a true idea of what [art] must be on the lowest terms.”15 Yet at the same time he approached his explanations with caution, for he also knew that no art could be wholly diagnosed. His essay “On Technical Elements,” begins in this way:
There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanisms of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys.16
The irony is that Stevenson himself could not help but pry below the surface of literature; he was too aware of style’s importance to leave it untouched, or to deprive aspiring writers of any help in that regard. He admitted that his particular approach stood in contrast to that of James: “[Mr. James] spoke of the finished picture and its worth when done; I, of the brushes, the palette, and the north light. He uttered his views in the tone and for the ear of good society; I, with the emphasis and technicalities of the obtrusive student.”17 He was concerned about the means, which bring about, which inform and formulate, the end.
It is this daring approach to the style behind literature, the exposition of the mechanics of the art, that sets Stevenson apart from his contemporaries and from all before him who wrote about the craft. So what, then, are the details of Stevenson’s artistic approach? The following five strategies taken from several of his essays are an attempt to categorize that which he understood to be key for writing learners:
1 – The Arrangement of Language Blocks
Stevenson was very particular in how a fictional text should be constructed. His attention upon the technicalities of syntax, down to the choice of every word, was meticulous. In his essay on technical elements he deals with many aspects of the writing process, including the arrangement or pattern of prose, how it must show a logical progression, and much on the exactitude and fittingness of words. The writer holds the task of “choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words.”18 Thus the first of Stevenson’s pieces of advice intimates the limitations of language as the writer’s material. He encouraged young writers to imagine that they played with an inventory of “blocks” containing words, phrases, sentences, and so on, limited only by the language used.
It is with blocks of just such arbitrary size and figure that the literary architect is condemned to design the palace of his art […] It is, indeed, a strange art to take these blocks, rudely conceived for the purpose of the market or the bar, and by tact of application touch them to the finest meanings and distinctions, restore to them their primal energy, wittily shift them to another issue, or make of them a drum to rouse the passions.19
Stevenson’s approach to style is probably best explained in reference to a small toy theater that he would play with as a boy called Skelt’s Juvenile Drama. This little stage was made of paper cutouts which he purchased from a local stationer’s shop and which was the source of much boyhood imagination and entertainment. He retained this delight in imagination throughout his entire life and writing career, even coining the term skeltery in reference to “the old fashioned, melodramatic staginess” to which his mind often returned.20 This “staginess” would later manifest itself in his composition.
If the writer can imagine constructing a text like he would a palace, so that its foundation and walls were strong and secure, and every portion added to the beauty of the whole, then he would come to understand the painstaking work of fitting the pieces in just right. That style is most perfect, he clarifies, “which attains the highest degree of elegant and pregnant implication unobtrusively.”21 The “blocks” at a writer’s disposal can be found in everyday conversation, in the market or the bar – the words that comprise “the acknowledged currency of our daily affairs.”22 It is as if Stevenson would have the novice writer not only learn language from grammar school or the dictionary, but also from everyday life, listening to conversation and mimicking what is heard. It is the writer’s job to arrange the language so as to produce a particular effect. The effect of words is unique to each author’s style, so that Stevenson compares Shakespeare’s “singular justice, significance, and poetic charm” to the styles of Addison or Fielding. All were playwrights to some degree, yet each held a singularity of effect. Fielding for instance also used humor, wit and charm, yet not in such a succinct or lyrical way as Shakespeare.
The strategy of conceiving one’s writing as working with “blocks” was one point of disagreement between Walter Besant and Henry James. Yet theirs was not so much the use of language devices as it was about incidents in life. Besant, a proponent of the concept, argued, “It is the work of the artist to select the figures, to suppress, to copy, to group, and to work up the incidents which each one offers.” James, without discounting the importance of exactness, disapproved of the concept, stating “I cannot imagine composition existing in a series of blocks […] A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like every other organism.”23 However, this was a key concept for Stevenson, for without it, the other strategies of style would not work; they all depend on how the writer arranges his words. One apparent benefit of Stevenson’s approach may be that viewing one’s writing as consisting of “blocks,” as opposed to some ambiguous, organic outflowing of the mind, forces the writer to pay closer attention to his use of language.
2 – Prose Must Follow a Logical Progression
Not only must the blocks of the artist’s palace rightly fit together, but each serves a purpose. Stevenson expressed that there were two major attributes of a text that needed to be treated with all care and precision. One was the argument that is to be made, or the idea that the artist wishes to develop, which must by all respects be logical and sequential. The other is that it must keep to a pattern. If the author wishes for his readers to grasp an idea, or to be moved by emotional impact, it is with utmost diligence that the artist weed out anything superfluous to that effect. In “Technical Elements” he asserts, “Every word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move in a logical progression, and convey a definite conventional import.”24 The “argument,” then, is the “import” or main idea that is communicated through a text; elsewhere Stevenson refers to this as the “philosophy”25 or “general design”26 of the text. We find the term also in “A Humble Remonstrance,” in which he encourages the young writer to:
…suffer not his style to flag below the level of the argument; […] and allow neither himself in the narrative nor any character in the course of the dialogue, to utter one sentence that is not part and parcel of the business of the story or the discussion of the problem involved. Let him not regret if this shortens his book; it will be better so; for to add irrelevant matter is not to lengthen but to bury. Let him not mind if he miss a thousand qualities, so that he keeps unflaggingly in pursuit of the one he has chosen.27
To refrain from putting to page everything that the writer imagines is not an easy task, and nor does Stevenson create the delusion that it is. Accuracy in the development of the main idea or “controlling thought”28 behind a text must avoid adulteration by the rude realism of the everyday. The writer must not include every piece of imagery that implants itself in his mind as he considers a scene; he must refrain from babbling on with a surplus of descriptions of scenery or commonplace things or the way people talk. “The difficulty of literature,” he writes in “The Lantern Bearers,” “is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.”29 There is a whole aesthetic that the artist must keep in mind, a vision that he must not lose sight of. Any variation from this vision is disastrous. This is obviously not an original thought, since the concept was introduced in antiquity and furthered by the poets, as when William Wordsworth wrote about “modifying only the language which is thus suggested to him by a consideration that he describes for a particular purpose.”30 It is in this same tone that Edgar Allan Poe has suggested always to keep an eye on the dénouement when constructing the whole piece: “It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.”31
When it comes down to the very choices an author must make, the matter of details that should be included or omitted, this cannot be taught. Stevenson only makes the point that it must be considered, and yet it takes a “dramatic sense,” as Besant describes,32 as the faculty of the true writer who can go about this well. As a case in point, Stevenson praised the poetry of François Villon, who at the end of the Middle Ages led a violent life as a criminal, and said of his style, “With so free a design, no thought that occurred to him would need to be dismissed without expression; and he could draw at full length the portrait of his own bedevilled soul, and of the bleak and blackguardly world which was the theatre of his exploits and sufferings.”33 Villon’s dramatic sense was the lifeforce behind his poetry, but it is not a gift that is available to everyone. It is in light of this barrier that teaching the art of writing can only go so far.
3 – Prose Must Make a Pattern
The third aspect to consider is to utilize a specific pattern in order to achieve this logical progression. The blocks of a play palace always adhere to a mold, carefully and accurately configured. Even music, painting, and sculpture adhere to a pattern; this is the “motive and end of any art.”34 With the meaning of the text in mind, the writer must order and arrange what resources he has at hand in order to illustrate that meaning. Stevenson does not leave us to figure out the methods to find that pattern, but in fact explains the most expedient method in this manner: “The true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself.”35 But then what are those seemingly arbitrary meanings behind a text? They are exactly that which the writer would wish to affect in a reader, for “the one rule is to be infinitely various; to interest, to disappoint, to surprise, and yet still to gratify; to be ever changing, as it were, the stitch, and yet still to give the effect of an ingenious neatness.”36 In his explanations Stevenson enjoyed employing such tactile craftwork as stitching. Toward the end of this essay he concludes with the remarks, “We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it.”37 “A Note on Realism” was penned in reaction to the general tendency in his time to admit a good amount of detail in narrative; in the essay he insists that any added detail must belong to the greater design. It is the artist’s business to determine “what to put in and what to leave out; whether some particular fact be organically necessary or purely ornamental; whether, if it be purely ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure the general design.”38 In Stevenson’s evaluation, it is not so much the detail a writer includes which makes for a good passage, but what he leaves out. “He must, that is, suppress much and omit more. He must omit what is tedious or irrelevant, and suppress what is tedious and necessary. But such facts as, in regard to the main design, subserve a variety of purposes, he will perforce and eagerly retain.”39 So we see that the design of a work must be weaved into a consistent pattern, with only the most necessary details included. Another term Stevenson associates with this pattern is the “web,” and like a spider’s web whose vibrations awaken the sensual ear of the predator, so the pattern of the prose must become “a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture.”40
These two attributes, the logic and the pattern, must work together if the work is to be pure and refined. This was critical to Stevenson’s assessment of style. “The best that can be offered by the best writer of prose is to show us the development of the idea and the stylistic pattern proceed hand in hand.”41 What begins is the idea and a sense of the logical progression of that idea, and the pattern then accords with that progression:
His pattern, which is to please the supersensual ear, is yet addressed, throughout and first of all, to the demands of logic. […] No form of words must be selected, no knot must be tied among the phrases, unless knot and word be precisely what is wanted to forward and illuminate the argument; for to fail in this is to swindle in the game […] Pattern and argument live in each other; and it is by the brevity, clearness, charm, or emphasis of the second, that we judge the strength and fitness of the first.42
The coalescence of these two factors constitutes Stevenson’s idea of style, and acts as the foundation for the art of literature.
4 – Prose Involves Rhythm, Like Music
Stevenson addresses two important foci in the discussion of style without which the pattern is of little use. There needs first of all be a harmony to the prose, as with music, that is pleasing to the reader’s ear. Second, each word must be fastidiously and artfully chosen so as to create that effect of the pattern. Every so often the author likes to compare literature to the other arts, and there are several instances in his essay on technical elements in which he equates prose writing to music. This is the fourth piece of advice that can be gleaned from Stevenson’s approach to style. The two temporal arts, music and literature, both contain a pattern of sounds, arranged in time.43 He expands on such an idea with remarks such as: “Each phrase of each sentence, like an air or a recitative in music, should be so artfully compounded out of long and short, out of accented and unaccented, as to gratify the sensual ear”44 and “Each phrase in literature is built of sounds, as each phrase in music consists of notes. One sound suggests, echoes, demands, and harmonises with another; and the art of rightly using these concordances is the final art in literature.”45 This can be achieved by the use of alliteration, the repetition of consonant sounds, and assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds. In this way, Stevenson advocates for a poetic approach. After all, apart from the eye, literature is written for a second sense: the internal ear that picks up “unheard melodies.”46 We know when music is melodious and pleasing and when it is not. In the same way we have the internal capacity to verify when a section of prose is poorly written. “Nothing more often disappoints the ear than a sentence solemnly and sonorously prepared, and hastily and weakly finished.”47 In a spirit that is meant to instruct and encourage young writers, he concludes the essay on technical elements with a summative assertion:
We have, particular to the prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical […] the task of artfully combining the prime elements of language into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth; the task of weaving their argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods.48
Without this attention upon treating prose like music, the result would only bring about strain or abrasion on the ear of the reader, who would find the writing dull and unrefined. Stevenson may well have had in mind the Aristotelian concept of the origin of poetry: “There is the instinct for ‘harmony’ and rhythm, metres being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry.”49 Stevenson’s view is in line with Aristotle’s assertion of the intuitive, the natural, ear that makes a musical pattern of the words. Like poetry, prose must also manifest a writer’s aptitude in rhythm and the beautiful arrangement of words.
5 – Prose Necessitates Exactness of Words
We can imagine Stevenson as the master pruner of trees, who among a train of apprentices teaches the care and precision necessary to cut the right branches so that the trees survive. He himself kept to a simplistic approach to his writing, spending much time in revision and editing. He once wrote in a letter a comparison between his writing and weeding his yard in Samoa – “making a book of it by the pruning knife … like a piece of bush, with axe and cutlass.”50 By all accounts, Stevenson was very particular with words; words that fit into the aesthetic pattern, words of such distinct meaning and import as to be both various and exact. The French term for this is the mot juste, or mot mis à sa place, meaning the exact right word or phrasing put in its proper place.51 Indeed, for Stevenson the only way in all narration to be clever is to be exact.52 His essay on technical elements not only outlines the union of logic and pattern, but in it he stresses the importance of choosing the most fitting words: “The first merit which attracts in the pages of a good writer […] is the apt choice and contrast of the words employed.”53 Stevenson implies by this that each word must be deliberately chosen to demonstrate precisely that which the author means to say, and so that each phrase and sentence wherein it is placed will reflect the logical progression of thought and belong to the corresponding pattern. Words must not be repeated or tastelessly selected merely because they are of a similar kind to previous words. The prose then becomes flat and in danger of the cheville, another French term: “The genius of prose rejects the cheville no less emphatically than the laws of verse; and the cheville […] is any meaningless or very watered phrase employed to strike a balance in the sound.”54 Therefore the young writer has the task, along with those aforementioned, of choosing “apt, explicit, and communicative words.”55 If he fails at this, he will not achieve the pattern that is appropriate to convey his meaning. This can be seen in a letter Stevenson once wrote to fellow Scottish writer William Archer, in a discussion on Fleeming Jenkin. Stevenson never saw Jenkin as a great writer, for in fact he was a professor of Engineering at Edinburgh, but remarked that he was an amateur for one specific reason: “I never, or almost never, saw two pages of his work that I could not have put in one without the smallest loss of material […] If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been as clearly and as engagingly and as forcibly said in one, then it’s amateur work.” He proceeds then to explain that the proper art of writing is “to water out by continual invention” and “to practice that same wit of conspicuous and declaratory condensation.”56 The story, in fact, must be long enough to be complete in itself, yet the details that are included must be carefully chosen, and words clean and precise. To succeed in this is the writer’s chief stylistic objective, and even Stevenson admits in his correspondence with William Archer that his own work often failed to accomplish it.
As a traveling man of great imagination, Stevenson incorporated in his instruction a robust aesthetic theory. He was adamant about the fact that the right words capture our imagination and our memory, for it is the vivid images of striking incidents that readers remember most in fiction. In 1878 Stevenson wrote an essay evaluating the poetry of Walt Whitman. He did not think Whitman held as much literary merit as Milton or Shakespeare; however, Stevenson grants Whitman credit for his ability to create images from the brilliant use of a few rightly-chosen words. We see the importance of the concept of portraying through words a memorable image expressed in the following:
Language is but a poor bull’s-eye lantern wherewith to show off the vast cathedral of the world; and yet a particular thing once said in words is so definite and memorable, that it makes us forget the absence of the many which remain unexpressed; like a bright window in a distant view, which dazzles and confuses our sight of its surroundings.57
For Stevenson’s imaginative mind, images were the lifeblood of Romance. A story well written, he remarks, will “repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.”58 He considered the impression of these images upon the mind’s eye to be that which is lasting and prominent, where words, conversation, and commentary may be forgotten. Examples of such incidents, he tells us, include “Crusoe recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shouting over against the Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian running with his fingers in his ears.”59 These are the enduring images that are remembered from these stories. Yet incidents like these are not achieved except by use of the right words.
These five collective strategies, though perhaps not exhaustive of his views, constitute the essential insights of a master stylist. Yet it remains for the reader to be convinced that we should take Stevenson at his word. Are these strategies really worth following, even incorporating in creative writing curriculums? Some have said that Stevenson was overly concerned with the pattern, and that the “web” that is fabricated leaves no room for emotional surprises. Prose can contain all the delicate precision, figures and tropes, that are called for, but when so much care is put into these things, it can betray the writer. When the pattern is detected, the text can become monotonous. The attention to form as an end in itself can cause the writer to lose the passion of the story, rather than allowing the plot and characters to carry the prose along.
A writer must certainly be a master of words, a manipulator of language, but one wonders if Stevenson put too much weight upon the importance of words. He was an avid reader and had developed an extensive vocabulary, enough to possess an inventory large enough to pull from and apply to any scene or situation. Yet this has caused others to criticize his style for being “over smart,”60 a “tedious virtuosity, a pretense, a conscious toy,”61 and of being “rather affected and decidedly laboured.”62 In fact, one of the most recurring critiques the author received, especially in the twentieth century, was that his style was overly conscious and an end in itself. The vocabulary that Stevenson would employ tended to be so focused, using words and phrases that were not heard in common speech, to reach the point of being unnatural. The right words ought to be employed to encapsulate the image one wishes to convey, but not at the expense of distancing the text from its audience. Furthermore, there are genres of fiction that call for the natural diction of common speech, and uncommon words can be more of a distraction than a source of delight.
Like with all art forms, writers need a starting point, and objects from which to draw. It starts by reading good works and adopting the best manners and patterns. Then after some time one becomes competent in his own skill. Stevenson’s own style developed throughout his career, from being the “sedulous ape” who practiced with the style of others, to becoming a master himself by the time he was writing his later novels. With The Ebb-Tide and two novels which were unfinished by the time of his death – Weir of Hermiston and St. Ives – we find Stevenson in the prime of his own developed and particular prose style. If he had not died so young, we would probably benefit from works of even greater stylistic excellence.
Those scholars who have tended to be on the side of Stevenson’s genius have regarded his uniqueness rather as an asset than a detriment. For a time Stevenson was given a prominent place in academia for studies on style and craft. His essays, particularly those in Virginibus Puerisque and Memories and Portraits, were quickly adopted into the classroom to be used as exemplars of writing by imitation. For his attention to development and pattern, selection and precision, Stevenson stands out as a worthy instructor for aspiring writers. These essays compel young writers and students to exercise critical judgment and imagination, to be conscientious of rudimental problems in creative writing, and to improve on development and revision. What I have proposed here to be the views of style fundamental to Stevenson’s teaching is only a starting point, and my treatment of the topics does not offer any real depth of analysis. Yet here I hope to have sparked some interest into further study and practice of these strategies. Here is an afterthought (or, better yet, a synthesis of all that we can learn from Stevenson): the goal of the writer is to harness the imagination. This means to describe what one imagines with words both accurate and beautiful, so that the reader might also imagine the same and experience the same pleasure in his reading. While artistry as a whole cannot be taught, it is important that young writers read and study other writers in order to hone their craft. At the very least, there is value in considering the mechanics of style.
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