Ask any writer to define literary style, and you’ll find that the answer is as distinct as, well, that writer’s style. I noodled around on the Net and found that Gore Vidal defined style as “knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”

Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, on the other hand, called it “craftsmanship”: “What’s really important for a creator isn’t what we vaguely define as inspiration or even what it is we want to say, recall, regret, or rebel against. No, what’s important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It’s not what we say but how we say it that matters.”

Poet Robert Frost remarked that “style is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.”

Are you dizzy yet?

I took a crack myself at defining style in an essay in the Sin and Syntax Salon: I suggest that literary stylists use wonderful words, smart syntax, literary devices, and maybe even structure to echo or underscore the idea of their story.

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But, mucking  around a bit more, I asked some of my favorite writers—including Po Bronson and Susan Orlean—how they define style, and whether they have favorite “stylists.” Here’s what they said:

Po Bronson:

I don’t have singular favorite stylists, I just keep a mental catalog of style tricks I’ve seen over the years, which are available to draw upon (if, theoretically, I could remember them at the right moment). But I do think about it. On my website I have this page where I have an example of a variety of fiction and nonfiction, implementing stronger styles of various sorts. One’s a story through FAQ style narrative. One’s nonfiction meant to read with the immersion of fiction. One’s about split alternative narrative futures. One’s an early short story in maximalist voice, my reaction to the popularity of minimalism in the early 90s.

Susan Orlean:

Style is so hard to describe… I guess I’d say it’s as ineffable and indescribable as someone’s personality, and in fact, I think a writer’s style is linked exactly to personality. It’s the voice of the storyteller, the distinct tone and tenor of how a writer “talks.” I think of it as a genuine and organic expression of the writer’s way of looking at the world.  My favorite stylist? Hmm. Non-fiction? Or fiction?

Tommy Tomlinson:

I usually think of style as something that strikes me AFTER I’ve read the story—if the story is really good, I’m a lot more concerned about what happens next than how the author is presenting it. When the style outshines the substance, I usually just put the book down. It’s a delicate trick, I think, to write in a style that sounds like a narrator (or a character) speaking, and not like the author speaking. I love a narrative voice that sounds more like somebody telling me a story than an author writing down words. When the style is right it’s intellectually absorbing AND emotionally rewarding.

Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated has a distinctive style—he talks directly to readers, guiding them through the story, peppering them with questions. Every time I read a new Gary piece, it’s a jolt to read that style, and I’m always thinking this is the time it won’t work. Then 100 words later I’ve forgotten all about it and I’m neck-deep in the story. This is one of my favorites. And here’s a story I did a few years ago as a Gary Smith homage.

Katy Butler:

The “literary style” I worship is compelling and transparent. If style is the window through which I see the story, I don’t want the window drawing attention to itself, covered with filigree or etching. I want to see the characters in the scene, and be absorbed in the writer’s thoughts. So I don’t like unnecessarily fancy words or over-clever thoughts. On the other hand, I work for hours on the opening of a piece to get it right. I don’t want any dirt or lumps on that window. I scan the sentences, as if they were poetry, because what trips the tongue will trip the eye, and beautiful rhythm will please and reassure the reader without her knowing it. You want the reader to know she’s in good hands. I omit unnecessary words and details. I trust my irrational mind or heart when it insists on including a detail whose significance I don’t understand.

In the opening of “My Father’s Broken Heart” [written for the New York Times Magazine], I HAD to include the mention of two cardinals in my mother’s birdbath, her Japanese iron teapot, the weak October sunlight in which we discuss turning off my aged father’s pacemaker.  I don’t want the reader to linger over those details, but I want them to subtly suggest the fidelity of a long marriage, my immigrant mother’s foreignness and interest in Zen, the weakening of the end of life.

So I like style that is pared-down, and yet beautiful. Metaphors and similes exist, but are sparely used. More is implied than stated. There’s rhythm, alliteration, choice of “kitchen table” Anglo-Saxon words rather than multisyllabic Latinate language.

On the other hand, I love Virginia Woolf, and her language is often complex.. But the language never overwhelms the images. I am carried on a stream.

Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz” is another example of the style I like.

Good prose writers are secret poets. We use all of the craft skills of poetry: telling detail, synecdoche, repeating elements at the opening and the end, rhythm, scansion, etc. But we pretend we aren’t doing it.

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My colleague Audrey Dolar Tejada, a journalist and poet who experiments with nonlinear storytelling at www.strangetango.com, added these thoughts:

Literary style is ultimate self-expression and exploration. In an era in which books are largely marketed to leverage on multiple platforms, in digital forms, as movies and screenplays, and as brands, I eschew the temporal for the eternal. Stylists like Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges wrote novellas—a literary form now rarely published in which concept and form, not necessarily plot, are part of the intellectual and sensory enjoyment of literary works. Judged against today’s best sellers, Borges’ “The Library” and Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” are unmatched in their innovation, spare beauty, and ambition.

How do you define style? ? Add your comments, below. And if you’d like to play around a bit with style, there are some suggestions in Week Twelve section of Online Writing Classes.

Didja catch two fascinating articles in last Sunday’s New York Times? In the Op-Ed pages, Farrar, Straus & Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi writes about the heroic—and hidden—work behind great literature, and about the myopia of those infatuated with the idea of e-books.

David Carr, in “Why Twitter Will Endure,” confesses his own infatuation with Twitter, and defies conventional notions about that brand of social media. He sees the possibility of narrative in “short-burst communication” and applauds the economy and precision forced by text messages. But he concedes that “the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice.”

In Talking Story, Shelly Runyon writes about the Twitter feed of Susan Orlean, and what it tells us about Orlean’s particular brand of short-burst communication. For you doubters who snicker at the Morse-Code-like rhythms of Twitter and insist that Tweet feeds are fluff, Orlean may change your mind. The author of The Orchid Thief proves two things about micro-narrative: first, that it is possible to tell stories in 140 characters; second, that it takes a damn good writer to do it.

Susan Orlean, Twitter, and the new-media pecking order

susanorlean BTW, my animal sitter at home reports that Laura has become a total raging maniac rooster madman, complete with rooster rage. Oy. – November 11, 2009

In a grassy upstate-New York yard fit for farming, Susan Orlean gives a camera crew for The New Yorker a tour of her utility shed. Half of the shed is occupied by seven chickens. Outside the shed is a fenced-in area, resembling a petting zoo. Chickens zoom past the cameras as Orlean squats down just inside the yard. Three birds rush over to snack on the tomato half in their dutiful owner’s hands.

Orlean points to a black-feathered bird with white specks and a scarlet crest. “This chicken was a sweet little chicken,” she says. “The guy I bought her from had named her Laura, after the character in The Glass Menagerie, and she’s turned out to be a rooster. A big shock to everybody.”

Almost every day, Orlean writes one-liners just like that about her chickens on Twitter. It started with her just tweeting her life, discussing her family and career. Then something clicked. Her fans fixated on the birds. They followed her chicken tweets, re-tweeted them to friends, and tweeted her back. It became a chicken-tweet movement, inquiries about chickens flying fast at Orlean. All the while her following proliferated, growing to six thousand by last June:

susanorlean Do I get a toaster or something when I hit 6000 followers? – June 19, 2009

susanorlean Whoa! Send toaster immediately! –June 21, 2009

Eight thousand in July:

susanorlean Hey, thank you all for pushing me into the toaster-and-a-blender category (8000 followers—but I know you just love me for my chickens). – July 10, 2009

And double that today (and growing).

With all of this notice, the natural next step for a staff writer at The New Yorker was to pitch a piece to her editor.

susanorlean Got a thumbs-up on my chicken story, so I’ll let you all know when it’s running. My editor’s comment? “Buk buk”. – September 8, 2009

On September 28, 2009, The New Yorker published the anticipated Orlean chicken tale, “The It Bird: The return of the back-yard chicken.” The story chronicles her impulse to purchase egg-laying hens and her discovery that she is a part of growing trend. The article is characteristically provocative, a survey on the suburban life of the egg-laying fowl intermixed with the dry wit of Orlean’s Twitter feed.

“Chickens seem to be the perfect convergence of the economic, environmental, gastronomic, and emotional matters of the moment,” Orlean writes. “I do detect a little overripening on the edges—I’ve noticed some late-stage phenomena such as chicken diapers, for people who want their chickens as house pets.”

Orlean argues that chickens will endure, and have endured, through all manner of fads, whether as farm animals, pets, as food producers in hard times, or as designer-bred show-chickens. Today, they are poster chicks for the organic and local-food movements. But it is Orlean’s sentiments as a pet-chicken owner that brought thousands to her feed. These readers engage with Orlean in a way impossible even five years ago. Orlean involves them in her creative process through tweets, which in turn motivates her audience to read her print stories.

The effect of the pre-publication Tweets is impossible to quantify, but there is a sixth-sense among those involved that the build up to the story increased popularity for “The It Bird.”  Jamie Leifer, a public relations representative for The New Yorker, explained that metrics on print stories aren’t tracked, but the Orlean video was the most streamed video the week “The It Bird” ran and number three the following week.

“I had an enormous reaction to this piece,” Orlean explained over email in January 2010, adding that she did six radio and two television interviews after the story went to print. “It was clearly talked about, passed around, noticed, commented upon, and I have no doubt that talking about it in advance on Twitter primed the pump. That may not be hard evidence but it’s certainly real in terms of the sensation of a writer experiencing an audience.”

Consider “The It Bird” as a case study in contemporary media, an example of literary and social media fostering a new engagement with narrative. Carefully cultivating her audience, Orlean pushes them to appreciate her prose. Her openness, her chickens, and her enigmatic twit-wit keeps Orlean’s feed at the top of her reader’s pecking order.

susanorlean One benefit of writing a story about chickens: Every time you write the word “chicken,” it’s amusing.  – August 17, 2009

—Shelly Runyon

{Shelly Runyon lives and writes in Boston Massachusetts. She is currently enrolled as a MLA Journalism degree candidate at Harvard University Extension School.}