I am presently thinking of style. Over-consciousness of one's style stifles style. Did I prepare the grammar of that statement? I didn't. It flowed. Does that mean it's not susceptible to future revisions? No. Future revisions can take into account polishing style. Why concern oneself with style? One aspect might be vanity. You read your favorite authors and you have a desire to emulate the style that charmed you. You were charmed and you want others to feel a similar charm when they read you. Vanity can extend after the grave. You read accounts of people being charmed by your writing after you're dead. A more noble motivation might be concerns over clarity. Another might be concerns over widening the scope of your appeal. A robotic style might only attract a tiny contingent of academics. A winsome style widens your appeal. Of course, the variable of appeal is related to the subject being discussed. Taylor Swift's biography will have wider appeal than John Calvin's.
I do find it very interesting that you can discern whether a style is authentic and that when it is, the style is unique. Even in cases of influence, the influenced style is still different enough. Bertrand Russell admitted to being influenced by John Stuart Mill's style. If you read them both, you can notice who is Russell and who is Mill. Is style akin to personality? Personalities can be influenced. Influenced personalities are still sufficiently different from the personality that did the influencing. This epistemic element seems relatively uncontroversial. What might be more controversial whether we ought to adopt a style from an outside source, or even whether it's inevitable or necessary. If style is like a cultivated skill and that skill is aimed toward some end, then, if you care about the end, you ought adopt the style you judge to be suitable. Of course, nothing intrinsic has been established. Is there anything intrinsic about writers needing to adopt a style from an outside source? I'm not sure, but I'm also not not sure. Anomalous singularities aren't, in principle, impossible. But I can't conceive how such singularities wouldn't or couldn't be influenced by the books they read. Do they learn language in a vacuum? Imagine a man reared by wolves somewhere in the hinterlands. Grant Chomsky's idea of universal grammar. The savage manages to link grunts, growls, whimpers, shrieks, and howls with some rudimentary markings etched on stone with another rock. Do the wolf's sounds affect the grammar of the savage's etchings? I can't see how they wouldn't. If the savage had literary or poetic impulses, how couldn't it be that the wolf's sounds shaped the style of the poem or the literary work? How much more would such influences be present in the case of our fellow humans? So, it seems to be the case that style is inevitable because it's necessary. It can't be that someone writes a poem with a style that wasn't first adopted or cultivated by another. One wonders how Samuel Johnson's style of speaking influenced Boswell's writing, or whether the elenchus of Socrates influenced the style of Plato?
Decades ago now, I remember trying to be a literary critic and discern similarity and distinctness in style when my bibliophilia was burgeoning. I think my judgment wasn't good, but ignorant. It had more form than content. Or, it had too little content for the form to be sufficiently robust. I made the judgment that Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis all had similar styles. This is both demonstrably false and ludicrously reductionistic. But I see now what my incipient literary impulse was sensing. Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis all had a unique style, are were Christians, were all autobiographical, satirical, polemical, dialectical, apologetical, philosophical, theological, witty, prone to figures of speech, and humor. Moreover, these were the authors I read first, the local solar system from which I'd later launch to other galaxies.
It is all-important to accompany your style with content. Style is festooned form and contributes to the content of the content. If The Aeneid were written in lyric form rather than epic, its content would thereby be altered. A documentary of the D-day landings would have different content from Saving Private Ryan, though the media is the same. But regarding the content that's distinct from that contributed by the form, this is the part where writers relentlessly inform us that you have to have something to say, and to make say that and not something else the reader might get. Someone has set its like leading a herd of a sheep to a stall. If there are any distractions along the way, the sheep are sure to take to their leave.
It is also a constant temptation to want to string together long, meandering, ponderous sentences because of the way older writers wrote. There is a mystique about it. You discern that nothing violates the grammar, that perhaps the sentence's length is necessary to concretize the unfathomable depths of the thought attempting to be expressed. The language encircles the amorphousness of the thought and by virtue of such encircling, the sentence eventually gives birth to the idea in the mind of its reader. There is a romanticism about this. It evokes images of trekking great distances in hostile environments with the desire to attain some precious jewel at the end of a journey. I make it a point to only write long sentences if I see that it is absolutely necessary at the moment I'm writing it. Otherwise, the piquancy of a short sentence is as pleasurable and as final as a gunshot. They shoot out with the reliability and simplicity of a brick. All that's left is to organize them into some coherent whole. The various wholes are paragraphs, the sections, homes; the chapters, neighborhoods; the sections, towns; the book, a city.
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