Style, Cadence, and Influence -- NWJC Discussion #47

Some of you might have seen this article when I posted it on my blog, but that is no excuse for not joining in the discussion -- we want to hear what you have to say about your own style, how you create the specific cadence that is your style (are style and cadence the same?), and who influenced you.

This artice was written by Ken Coffman, an author who -- inexplicably -- is not a member of No Whine, Just Champagne, otherwise I would have had him post it himself. Ken writes:

Recently, my friend Lisa said this to me: "You tend to like more baroque-type authors, gravitate towards writers with that style, and write in that style.  Ironically, I really do like Hemingway, in that when I read him way back when, I immediately liked and related to the prose style . . . "

It's true. We're diverse, and different things float our metaphorical schooners. See, there I go. I could have simply said boat and your eye would have slid smoothly over the cliché. But, I didn't want to.

Anyway, back to the point I'm laboring to make.

          Nick looked on at the moon, coming up over the hills.
          "It isn't fun any more."
          He was afraid to look at Marjorie. Then he looked at her. She sat there with her back toward him. He looked at her back. "It isn't fun any more. Not any of it."
          She didn't say anything. He went on. "I feel as though everything was gone to hell inside of me. I don't know, Marge. I don't know what to say."
          He looked on at her back.
          "Isn't love any fun?" Marjorie said.
          "No," Nick said. Marjorie stood up. Nick sat there, his head in his hands.
                - Ernest Hemingway, The End of Something

Of course, I can appreciate Hemingway's sparse mastery. In feeble imitation, sometimes I report things in a flat tone to emphasize a point or work against the reader's mental picture. But, generally, my ambitions lie elsewhere. I like prose that is more playful and convoluted.

Tom Robbins, who I like to call my neighbor, writes like this:

          A few months later, everyone of the bride's relatives, including even distant cousins, decided that life was meaningless without that most talented, most delightful girl, not to mention her pious and generous family, and so the relatives, as well, set off for the hills and Fan Nan Nan. Their departure tore a hole in the fabric of the community; there was an abiding emptiness there.
               -- Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito

The difference in style could hardly be more obvious. Tom's zany prose dances.

          Then I looked at Dale, my sergeant, wringing out his shirt in a metal water drum. His back was brown, ridged with vertebrae, his ribs like sticks against his skin, the points of his black hair shiny with sweat. Then his lean Czechoslovakian face smiled at me, with more tenderness and affection in his eyes than I had yet seen in a woman's.
          He was killed eight days later when a Huey tipped the treetops in an LZ and suddenly dipped sideways into the clearing.
                -  James Lee Burke, Heaven's Prisoners

Burke has a huge vocabulary and is unafraid to take a risk. He sits on a limb and with careful, deliberate, thoughtful strokes, works his saw.

To my taste, the master of mixing the eloquent with the absurd is Nabokov.

          I thought I had crossed the frontier when a bare-headed Red Army soldier with a Mongol face who was picking whortleberries near the trail challenged me: "And whither," he asked picking up his cap from a stump, "may you be rolling (kotishsya), little apple (yablochko)? Pokazyvay-ka dokumentiki (Let me see your papers)."
          I groped in my pockets, fished out what I needed, and shot him dead, as he lunged at me; then he fell on his face, as if sunstruck on the parade ground, at the feet of his king. None of the serried tree trunks looked his way, and I fled, still clutching Dagmara's lovely little revolver. Only half an hour later, when I reached at last another part of the forest in a more or less conventional republic, only then did my calves cease to quake.
              - Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!

So, how am I doing? You judge.

          "I'm bored," Nort said.
          "That's because you're not doing anything."
          "And you can't make me."
          "Right," Jake said. "Exactly."
          "I'm not staying here. I'll beg on the street."
          Jake looked up.
          "It used to be that a man would rather die than be a beggar or take charity," he said.
          "Things are different now."
          "I can see that. Good luck out there."
          "What's wrong with you? You don't care about me at all."
          Jake licked the tip of his pencil.
          "When I was in Da Nang, I was stabbed in the gut with a sharp stick by a starving 11-year-old who wanted the three dollars in my wallet." He lifted his shirt to show a twisted scar. "After I killed him with a brick, I realized either God either didn't exist or was the biggest asshole of us all. I care about you, but out in the world you'll die of AIDS or get stabbed in an alley by a cracked-out whore. It doesn't pay to get emotionally attached to the doomed."
               - Ken Coffman, Fairhaven 

You plant your butt in your chair and you face the demons that live in that blank screen. You spend hours and hours wringing words, situations, and plots from too-thin air.

Who are your influences? And, what are your ambitions?

So, who are your influences? If not style-wise, then generally -- what authors have you read who helped form your writing goals? What authors do you particularly like? What is your style, and how do you create your specific cadence? Feel free to post examples of your own work (and yes, you can mention the titles). Oh, and don't forget to tell us your ambitions. (Besides the obvious one of becoming a bestselling author.) Since this is our first discussion after the long hiatus for those pesky holidays, I want you to have fun.

The group No Whine, Just Champagne will exchange ideas about style, cadence, and influences during our live discussion on January 8, 2009 at 9:00pm ET.