This post will not be the end-all and be-all on this subject, but instead it should be seen as an introductory post.
For one thing, I believe in let mot juste which is Flaubert’s theory of the perfect word or the perfect sentence. Supposedly he would rework a single sentence over and over until it sounded just right. You might think that’s a waste of time, but then again, he did leave us with Bouvard and Pécuchet and Salome, as fresh today as they were two centuries ago.
Back when gas was cheap and I had a car with great mileage (A Volkswagen hatchback – God I would kill for that car again), I could spend $20 and fill up a whole tank and drive for a day. I would fill up my tank, take off and drive all over Southern California, usually to places I had never been before. I would come home when it was dark.
Often I would spent much of the time, when not checking out new scenery and towns, reworking some of my fiction (a couple sentences of which were recently published here). By the end of the day, I might have a few paragraphs. Now you might say that is stupid, but my friends read that stuff and couldn’t believe I wrote it. One of them said it sounded like Shakespeare or James Joyce. Now I am not sure if that is true, but I doubt if he would have said that if it was lousy.
The point is I would rework maybe 30 sentences over and over until I felt that I got them just right.
There is more to a sentence than you might think. First of all, the sentence has to interact with the sentences that came before and after it. It has to play well with others. It needs needs to be in the right place in the paragraph, beginning, middle or end. Any two sentences might sound better or worse if one preceded or followed the other. Further, any given sentence can probably be written in many different ways. So I try different ways of writing the same sentence, but a lot of them are rejected because they just don’t have the same “mouth feel” and musicality about them. Some are a bit too long, others a bit too short and in many others, the words in the sentence do not have the right musical feel that you are looking for.
Personally, I believe that the best writing sounds like music. It’s long been said that poetry is music without tones or instruments, but prose can be too. The proper rhythm, beat, cadence, all of the things you need to keep track of when you compose music – you need to deal with all of that when you write great prose too.
There are other problems. In a given paragraph, the musicality should be of the same type or beat. If you change the musical tones of your prose too much, it is going to sound funny if they are not widely spaced far enough apart. After a while, a writer has a tone about him. Thomas Pynchon is a great writer with a great tone and style that honestly has never really changed since his first published work. If your work changes tone a lot, there is something funny about it. Any writer who has begun to develop their own unique style or tone has conquered at least one of the problems of writing.
About influences, I read the prose of others all the time. I also read classic stuff, often just a bit at a time. Sometimes I will read just a paragraph or page at a time. Recently I have read little bits of Zola, Dickens, Pound, Thomas Wolfe, Mann, Samuel Johnson, Rilke, Conrad, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, William Dean Howells, and Gide.
Obviously I am not trying to get any real story out of any of this; instead I am just gleaning a bit of great style.
I also read all over the net and a lot in magazines and even newspapers. I honestly read anything I can get my hands on.
As far as influences go, all of the stuff I read becomes an influence. I simply open up my mind as wide as it can go and let everything I read pour into it, even the junk. My mind knows what is great writing, and what it good, average or crap. The crap more or less gets tossed out right away. I am not sure about the rest. The rest all goes into this gigantic, completely open void called “The Influences File.”
This endeavor is completely unconscious. I just let all this stuff flow into my head and let my mind make sense of it on its own without interfering with the process. And then I allow the sum total of everything that I am reading at the time, combined with everything I have ever written, become an ongoing influence. So in that sense, I hate to say it, but my writing tends to sound somewhat like whatever or whoever I am reading at the moment.
I do not think that consciously trying to cultivate influences is going to work, at least not for me. The process should be completely unconscious; you should think no more of it than you think of tossing a paper into a trash can. I believe if you think about it, you are going to screw it up.
Simply give the task over to your brain and let your brain figure it out. Let the combination of influences, whatever they are at this given time, become your utterly unconscious style at this moment in time. I do not believe that style should be consciously altered unless you are parodying or imitating someone, which by the way, is very hard to do.
Most of these posts written here are simply banged out. I do not bother with drafts. On more substantial publications of course, there ends up being a rewrite, or often quite a few rewrites. One problem with rewrites is every time you go over your piece, you are going to find new stuff that needs changing. At some point, you need to say enough is enough and just leave it to the readers to appreciate or not.