Sam Lipsyte on the What and the How of Writing

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Content and style are not separate things. They are different aspects—the what and the how—of the same thing. By the how I mean the way certain syntactical arrangements of words set off chains of thought and emotion and even physical sensation in the reader, create a kind of energy field within which one experiences the text. By the what I just mean whatever somebody is writing about: love, work, art, war, school, politics, sex, faith, family, death. Life, basically, life with others and life alone, the end of life. This is the content. Style is your filter on all of this, the way you see it and feel it— tragically, tragicomically—and how it summons language in you, how life comes to be alive on the page.

Let’s look at the beginning of a well-known story from the legendary American writer Barry Hannah, “Even Greenland”:

I was sitting radar. Actually doing nothing.

We had been up to seventy-five thousand to give the afternoon some jazz. I guess we were still in Mexico, coming into Mirimar eventually in the F-14. It doesn’t much matter after you’ve seen the curvature of the earth. For a while, nothing much matters at all. We’d had three sunsets already. I guess it’s what you’d call really living the day.

But then, “John,” said I, “this plane’s on fire.”

“I know it,” he said.

John was sort of short and angry about it.

“You thought of last-minute things any?” said I.

“Yeah. I ran out of a couple of things already. But they were cold, like. They didn’t catch the moment. Bad writing,” said John.

“You had the advantage. You’ve been knowing,” said I.

“Yeah. I was going to get a leap on you. I was going to smoke you. Everything you said, it wasn’t going to be good enough,” said he.

“But it’s not like that,” said I. “Is it?”

The wings were turning red. I guess you’d call it red. It was a shade against dark blue that was mystical flamingo, very spaceylike, like living blood. Was the plane bleeding?

I won’t tell you what happens next except to say that before the climax there are more wonderful exchanges about who is going to say the best last thing. Most of us who write can probably relate. There are also a lot of fascinating stylistic things going in this opening gambit, beginning with the way certain acoustical resonances anchor the first long paragraph. “Jazz” just jumps off the z-sounding “s” in thousand. Also, the narrator guesses they are still in Mexico, coming into Miramar “eventually in the F-14.” Is that “eventually” necessary? A teacher might tell Mr. Hannah it’s a little awkward but that fact that it’s slightly off gives it a weird charge—that right wrongness—and it glances off the v-sounds in “give” and “seventy-five.”

This stuff matters. It’s ligature. In the next sentence, “curvature,” anchored by the prior v-sounds, rolls its first syllable smoothly into “earth.” Plus, I didn’t mention the sound dance of “afternoon” and “F-14.” These sonic properties, so essential to poetry, can also gird prose. Attending to them, cultivating them, makes your writing flow and jump.  It’s one of those things that generally happens unconsciously, after you’ve trained your ear a little. But it’s really finessed in revision. No real pyrotechnics in these sentences—just style’s summoning of music.

But there is something else going on besides acoustical play in Hannah’s passage. My teacher Gordon Lish, who edited Hannah, used to call it the swerve. This swerving, which can also be an amplification, or a reframing, or a negation, creates the strangeness, the newness that cuts against our habits of feeling and perception. It also cuts to the chase. What is sitting radar? Well, it’s actually doing nothing. Then the narrator confesses to not being sure whether they were still in Mexico or not.

Another writer might want to talk about how it’s not so easy to tell, or how the instruments might inform you, or maybe there are marks in the terrain to let you know, but Hannah just makes a cut, a turn, and avoids all that, negates it, and says it doesn’t matter much once you’ve seen the curvature of the earth. And then he negates this. Not only does it not matter whether you are in Mexico or not, but nothing matters. Not when you’ve had three sunsets already. And then in a sort of laid-back, wiseass but ultimately awed tone he guesses that’s what you’d call “really living the day.”

Now comes a weird register shift. “But then, John, said I, this plane’s on fire.” That switch into a formal, almost archaic mode—“John, said I”—alerts us to a dire situation, but not without humor. We hear about the emergency, and we are suddenly into some jocular (they are fighter jocks, after all) wistful dialogue about writing. We don’t, as we might in some stories, receive an immediate onslaught of details about an aircraft in crisis, and when we do get back to the burning jet, it’s not quite the curt technical inventory of pending disaster—“Engine two gone, losing altitude!”—we imagine. The wings were turning red, the narrator says.

But then he swerves again: “I guess you’d call it red.” And really it’s a “shade against dark blue that’s mystical flamingo, very spaceylike, like living blood.” We’ve really torqued now, in just a few lines, from a burning airplane to wading birds and spiritual color fields and outer space and blood. How did we get there, and why is the question “Was the plane bleeding?” so silly and heartbreakingly vulnerable at once? Maybe it’s because this narrator’s voice is, as Hannah once said he was as a writer, “greedy for lives and language.”

What moves us and delights us is not some immediate shift into pinched action prose, or an explication of flying technique, but this pilot’s detached yet fascinated stance with regard to his looming demise, his courageous fidelity to the how, to style, to what in this case I want to call and so will call a groovy lyricism, achieved by these little shifts, as though he’s holding a gem and turning it slowly, showing us all the marvelous facets, even as he plummets. And we are all plummeting.

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No One Left to Come Looking for You by Sam Lipsyte is available now via Simon & Schuster.