Do You Commit This Style Sin?

Doesn't that sound deliciously Zen? I'm very proud of that headline. I should probably delete it.

Like "tone," "style" looms important and elusive in scriptwriting. Style can best be described as the judge said of obscenity: I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it. Many of the most successful screenwriters push style: you recognize their dialog the moment you hear it. David Mamet. Woody Allen. William Goldman. In some instances, if you take the time and trouble, you could even break their styles down to component parts. Use of profanity. Run-on introspective sentences. Scenes of competition pitching the best of the best against the best of the best of the best. How then to achieve the all-important and unique style that is your own?

Avoid it at all costs.

I can't speak officially for Messrs. Mamet, Allen, Goldman, or any other screenwriter but myself; however, I venture to venture that they never once think about the style of their writing. They just write the best stuff they can dream up. Their style, like a baby's eyes turning from blue to brown, emerges all on its own. That's how one knows it's authentic, out of the DNA. "Crafting" or "adopting" a style is like buying colored contact lenses for the kid.

But achieving style is more than just not trying to. You need to actively -- trendy idiots might even say proactively -- fight style. Here's one way. Write a scene as stylishly and stylistically as you can. Think panache! Sophistication! Or: edginess! Crudity! (Or crudites, if you're peckish.) Give it all you've got. Don't settle for ordinary writing, make it extraordinary. And don't stop until you're spent, every beautiful fillip of phrase you can muster glowing on the screen.

Then take all that stuff out. Re-read your prose and whenever your eyes feel like stopping, even for a nanosecond, consider it a blinking purple light signifying that something must be excised. A wonderful turn of phrase? Turn it away. Amazing alliteration? For illiterates only. Prodigious use of "fuck?" Fuck it.

When you're done slicing and dicing, look at what's left. If there's nothing left, then you haven't been writing, you've been Writing: stealing, borrowing and remaining entirely in your head, not stopping once at the heart. But if what's left seems, well, kind of simple, lean and ordinary, unable to be deconstructed any further, then you've got the seed of your style. Because your authentic style must come from your unconscious. If you can spot it, it's bogus. But if it's real, everyone else will spot it and embrace it.

And style is a living thing. It will grow and change as does your writing -- and so will your attempts to muster an artificial style. So be sure to push back your chair every six months or so (assuming you've been writing constantly) and squint at your body of work. Notice any patterns emerging? It's possible that you've been sneakily crafting yet another artificial style in an attempt to be a Writer.

Happens to me all the time. For a while, it was long lists separated by semicolons. I eschewed them, and found myself writing in long lists separated by commas (oh, that's much better, Roger). I've done the sentence fragment thing. The run-on sentence thing. And of course, I've had an ongoing love affair with the clsoing clause set off by a dash -- not that there's anything wrong with that.

They say writing is rewriting, and I want to add to that that writing is unwriting. I'm a believer in Bauhaus prose, because when you think your stuff is as plain as it can get, others will see just how individual it really is. It's not easy deciding which of your words are contrived and which are natural. That's why it takes a long time to become a good writer.

But every once in a while you'll look back at something you've done and see a living phrase you never noticed. You didn't quietly beam with pride when you crafted it; you didn't even know you made it. But now in reflection you see it, and know that it's a rare glimpse into your style.

I remember one of the first David Mamet plays I ever saw. Maybe it was American Buffalo; I'm not sure. But one character said something like, What do you wanna do? And the other said something like, I don't know. We could this. We could do something else.

We could this.

It wasn't dialog. It was someone alive, talking. It reminded me of so many people with whom I grew up in Brooklyn. And I hope, although I can't be sure, that Mr. Mamet didn't pause before he wrote it and ask himself, "What would be wicked real right here?" He just channeled it, and thereby added one more brick to the wall of his inimitable style.

Of course, he's gotten way over stylized since then. Lose the freakin' muffler, David. It's a hundred degrees in here.