'There’s a fear of great writing, of reaching for it, of calling it that': Eleanor Anstruther on prose style
Guest post from Auraist
What were the first books you read where you realised you were enjoying the quality of the prose?
Henry James, Doris Lessing, Graham Green, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf; the list goes on, but these are the ones which spring to mind, so I guess they were the advance party, come to get me.
Please quote a favourite sentence or passage from one of these and describe what you admire about the writing.
You’ve caught me on holiday in a house full of books ancient and falling apart, so I’ll quote the latest I’ve read and loved, it is from The Cut Glass Bowl by F. Scott Fitzgerald:
“If Evelyn’s beauty had hesitated in her early thirties it came to an abrupt decision just afterward and completely left her.”
Short, complete and straight to the point, within this perfect description, language is working triple time to create image, story, meaning. A sleight of hand that is the mark of a master.
Without being prompted to copy the style, could AI ever write as well as this?
Not a chance. The collective soul, which is where writing like this comes from, can’t be copied.
What stylistic issues were most important to the writing of A Memoir in 65 Postcards?
Immediacy was important, making the distance between thought and page as short as possible. Conversational. No shilly-shallying. I needed it to feel direct and have pace so that the reader stayed with me.
How important is style to the reader’s immersion in your writing?
Crucial. Reading is a friendship, and writing style is character. To be immersed is to get past the getting know and the having judgements that are implicit in the experience of meeting someone new. Once that’s done, and agreement is reached that we like each other, the reader can concentrate, forget everything but the experience of being with me and my words.
Did your editor suggest anything that improved the style of A Memoir in 65 Postcards?
No. She was clear that the existing stylistic quirks, beginning a sentence with ‘and’, letting sentences run and run, playing fast and loose with person and tense, were a vital part of the telling, and needed no edit.
You clearly believe that the quality of your prose matters, but could you explain why this is so?
It takes time to read a book. It’s literally giving me your time. Why would I waste that privilege? No part of me is able to churn out any old shit and not care. It’s not within me. More to the point, the words themselves matter to me. The ideas have chosen me to translate them onto the page, and not caring about their quality would be akin to not caring about my children.
What do you understand by ‘voice’ in writing, and how much does this matter to your own?
Voice, style, these are all character traits of a writer, and fundamental in building identity. My process was pretty typical, I’m sure, of most writers; I noticed the same when learning to record audios, how initially, an overlay of performance arrived to shade what was my normal speaking voice, a knee-jerk habit of performance and copying. My early writing sounded like the poor relation to a multitude of masters, from Woolf to James. It’s forgivable, we all do it, and I learnt a great deal, but until I broke out of their orbit, I couldn’t know what my voice sounded like, or, by extension, what I had to say. However weak, a writer’s voice will always be stronger than that which they impersonate, and you cannot say what you want to say without it. Readers can feel voice. It’s an instinct, like knowing when someone is lying and when they’re telling the truth.
Books not picked for Auraist tend to lack appealing rhythms, and musicality more generally. Can musicality be taught?
The technical aspects can be explained, but I think, like singing in tune, you need a natural ear for it.
Do you have to work on this in your own sentences or does it come naturally?
Understanding that there’s a rhythm to sentences, and my ear for that rhythm, came naturally. I do have to listen very closely, and I have to be exacting about it. I can hear a bum note but it might take me ages to find the right one to replace it.
Do you read your work out loud, and if so, how important is this to your style?
I’m reading this out loud as I edit. It’s an exacting technique, and laborious, but if I want to know what works, I have to hear it. It’s not about personal style. All writing has rhythm. I helped a friend with their blurb the other day, and read their work out loud too, so as to identify what was and wasn’t working.
Have you ever read your work out loud with someone waking up in bed beside you? If so, please describe their facial expression at the time and this event’s long-term impact on your relationship.
Never. Although my ManPerson Andy would be unfazed if it happened. He’s used to my obsessive, focused behaviour around my work. Nothing surprises him.
Do you have any stylistic tips that Auraist readers might not have heard before?
Learn the rules then throw them out. That’s the difference between aping your hero’s voices and finding your own. You have to do your ten thousand hours1, and then you’ve earned the right to build your own house. After that amount of time, the technical know-how will have entered your bones and you’ll be stylistically safe to throw caution to the wind and go wild. Do what you’ve always wanted to do, experiment, play, see what happens.
Any tips specific to writing a memoir?
Get on with it. There’s nothing so troubling as a writer who doesn’t start. In terms of form, try things out, give yourself the freedom to muck about. Commit to a thousand words a day, or two hours daily in your seat, whichever works for you, they both support getting that first draft done. After years of wrangling with the material, my memoir emerged as postcards run live on Substack in daily publications, not a standard form at all, but such was my overwhelm, that it felt as if the memoir itself took the reins and said, “Okay, this is how we’re doing it.” Sometimes that happens. The work knows best. Remember that.
As for the sticky issue of story, and who owns what, I’ve talked at length about this with Mary Tabor in our collaborative Writing Life project. For detail, have a look at my answers to Joshua Doležal and David Roberts where I get into the ethics and pitfalls of telling personal stories. Memory is unreliable, your truth will not be the truth of the person standing next to you, and motive for writing a memoir is everything in terms of the choices you make. All memoirists experience a backlash of one kind or another, even those who set out pure of heart. In many ways, the memoirist can’t win, and you can read about an instance of this which happened during the writing of The Recovery Diaries in a chapter called The God In Me. As Anne Lamott puts it, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” On the other hand, you’re going to have to stand by those choices, so examine your heart and be clear on your reasons why this is the story you need to tell and this is how you need to tell it.
George Saunders proposed on his Substack that it’s in the editing process that literary voice emerges -- the more a writer edits the more they’ll make choices different to other writers, resulting in a voice and style unique to them. Do you agree with this?
Yes, absolutely, he’s right. It’s in the editing process that pretty much everything happens. That’s why getting your first draft down is so important. Finish the damn book 2, and then start editing. Everything emerges from that, including your voice and style. The postcards that I published each morning were edited. Each one took between one and two hours to produce, even though they take only one minute to read.
How close have you come to headbutting your keyboard in frustration at the miniscule nature of the prose issues you were working on, and what were those issues?
Even putting this together, I’ve had to give myself a number of strict talking-to’s. Writing’s easy. All you have to do is stare at the page until your head bleeds. And the issues? Getting it right, getting it right, getting it right; beginning, middle and end. It makes me cry as much as it thrills me. It makes me rage and happier than I have words for. I owe it to the reader not to piss about with their time, and the same to the characters and stories which have chosen me. Who am I, in the face of such an honour, to send them out half-cocked? Never and not a chance. My head bleeds every day.
Is this headbutting business why so few writers obsessively polish their writing?
Yes, probably. You’ve got to have a stomach for it. You’ve got to care, and I mean really care, as if your life depended on it. Bad writing is easy. Good writing takes determination, grit, talent, perseverance, faith. Notice I haven’t mentioned perfection. It’s not about that. I’ve never published anything when I haven’t looked back and thought, Shit, I could have done that better, but not publishing because I know it’s imperfect is a perfect way to publish nothing at all. I care and I cry and I fail and I will do it all again tomorrow because there’s no greater satisfaction than getting it right.
Do you see published prose adapting to the writing people read online, much of it written in the characterless bloggy style established twenty years ago? Has published prose adapted to the reduced attention spans that apparently result from heavy internet use?
I see marketing departments in publishing houses, with disastrous effect, adapting to the writing people read online, but that hasn’t prevented us who write literary fiction from continuing to do what we do best. We might not be getting the deals anymore, we absolutely have been forced to come up with other solutions, but it hasn’t changed the way we write, and nor has it dimmed the hunger for what we do. If anything, it’s enlivened it. People are exhausted by scrolling. They want good books, and we’re here to provide them.
Writers from the patrician class long enjoyed the advantage of their voice and style being the standard in publishing. AI can now churn out this style thousands of times faster than any patrician, so how might this class adapt to re-establish its advantage, and how deeply do you sympathise with their plight?
I’ve a feeling this is a wind-up question designed specifically for me, but to hell with it, I’ll take the bait. I don’t sympathise with their plight, and I am one, so I feel on pretty solid ground. I do take issue with “AI can now churn out…” as if that’s all we were doing. As for “re-establish its advantage”, art is not a competitive sport. The moment that premise is bought, the art suffers. I’m interested in the best art getting out there, I fight the good fight alongside my equals because that’s how it should be. What needs to change is not the system to suit me, a white and wealthy literary fiction writer, but the system to suit us, artists of every stripe contributing our voices to a world that needs us to remind it of its humanity.
Mark Fisher railed for years about the demise of what he called ‘popular modernism’. Adele Bertei and Rob Doyle have spoken in Auraist of the increased conservatism across our century’s mainstream arts, while the corollary in contemporary prose is, we believe, the Replicant Voice. Does mainstream published prose now tend towards insipid conservatism and even automatism?
I think there’s a fear of great writing, of reaching for it, of calling it that, and explicitly differentiating between good and bad. Anyone can string a sentence together, and there’s no shame in the learning curve, but not everyone puts in the time and effort to learn how to do it, to make that sentence a place where form and function meet. Not everyone has the gift and the grit to stand in that place and not move till they’ve nailed it. The tendency of marketing flattery has diluted what it means to write well. Not everything is amazing. Not everything can be, and literary fiction is a standard, not a genre. Look at Stephen King. It drives me mad that he’s shelved as “Horror”, when what he is, is genius, his subject incidental. Yet here we are, an agreed plane where everything not included in the categories “Genre, Commercial and YA” is “Literary fiction”, while all those other categories are allowed, somehow, to be sub-standard when in truth, the standard of literary fiction should be applicable across the board, from children’s books to the most high-falutin attempts at rerouting the universe. “Literary Fiction” does not mean complicated, it means the author cares, and how else are we to develop the art other than by setting the bar that high? Reaching for the sun is how we grow. When someone asks me what I write, I always want to answer “books.”
Name some contemporary writers you admire for the quality and originality of their sentences and describe what’s accomplished and original about them.
I recently read The Requisitions by Samuél Lopez Barrantes, and the relief of finding a contemporary writing the good stuff was immense. He cares. There’s no dead wood. It has speed and density. He’s unafraid of the simple sentence. It is a complete piece of art, and I’ve been raving about it ever since.
Which publishers put out the most stylish writing?
That’s easy. Fitzcarraldo. Every time. From cover to content, they are my style heroes.
1 “of crying” as my friend and fellow writer, Fiona Melrose puts it.
2 I’m quoting Julie Cohen
