Style Vs Substance

[che2000]

What is more important, substance or style?

Discuss with reference to your favourite (or, indeed, least favourite) authors.

[John M. Whalen]

I'll go with style every time. It's the turn of a phrase, the unusal use of a word, a wild simile, a striking metaphor that interests me. Raymond Chandler said it somewhere: The most valuable asset a writer can develop is a style of his own. And he should know. His writing is forever readable because of his style. I'm not saying substance is not important. I'm assuming that a writer who has worked hard to develop a style, has done so because he has something of substance to say to the world. But a writer can write the most substantial book ever written, but if it lacks style, the message will never get across. The reader will either fall asleep or toss the book in the garbage can. It's late and I've been busy dodging the Black Friday police all day. Signing off.

[che2000]

I have to say that I fall very firmly into the style camp myself - particularly given that (if you subscribe to the notion, that is) that there are a finite number of plots anyway - somewhere between 3 and 36 depending on who you listen to.

There are certain writers, however, who still manage to blow me away with the force of their ideas alone. Michael Moorcock, as Jaq, pointed out - his early novels were fairly brimming with invention, although sometimes his prose style tended towards the 'and then, wielding Stormbringer, Elric killed the entire army' kind of description. Philip K Dick, as well, was one of those writers who's word by word prose was never the most sparkling, but who more than compensated for that by three dimensional characters and some simply breathtaking concepts.

Then again, there are those writers - like Jack Vance - who make me fall in love with the English language all over again.

[Jaqhama]

I think David Gemmel had his characterisation down pat. His heroes and villians were often varying shades of grey, rather than just black and white.
He had a particular writing style also, which tended to make his stories and charcters too similar as his writing progressed.
His King Beyond the Gate was probably the height of his writing style. IMHO Tanaka Khan and Annais were arguably his two best creations.

Here's an intersting aside about Gemmel's influences:

David Gemmell is so committed to his work that he's offered to leap naked out of an airplane if it would appeal to readers. We haven't taken him up on the offer. However, David has also acknowledged that three of his major influences were Louis Lamour, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Stan Lee. Tolkien wrote back, Lamour passed away before David had any opportunity to contact him, and Stan Lee lived thousands of miles away from David's British home. One out of three wasn't bad, but it could be improved upon.

We were at the San Diego ComicCon, rustling up new readers, and David had just finished a two-hour continuous signing. A friend of mine spotted a familiar face, so I excused myself and darted away, returning a few moments later to say, "David Gemmell, I'd like you to meet Stan Lee." A tall, ruddy, and normally poised individual, David was struck speechless. Here was the man who, through his Marvel Comics stories, had reinvented the relationship between heroes and villains, forever blurring the barriers between good and evil. Before long the two fantasists were chatting away happily. Stan's wife, Joan, being British, was especially gracious to the London-born Gemmell. And Stan quickly demanded an autographed copy of LEGEND.

David's a dynamic storyteller. His lands live and breathe. His heroes are mighty swordsmen, ax-wielders, and post-apocalyptic adventurers. In their prime they were the best in the business, but in David's tales, they've often passed their prime, so all they really want is peace and quiet. But life (and the author) aren't that kind, and these heroes are forced out of retirement, forced to face bloody hordes of the undead, armies from Hell. Worse, his heroes are generally saddled with young, green heroes. (Nothing drives you crazy more than a cocky kid.) But they overcome, and the cocky kids become heroes, too. This is great reading.
--Steve Saffel, Senior Editor

Yes, you can see what I mean by the same types of characters and storylines, even the article above makes mention of it at the end, there.

Louis Lamour's name comes up again. And I wonder how many modern novels have been inspired by Stan Lee and Marvel comics.
I always liked the off beat ones myself. The Inhumans. Deathlok the Demolisher. Warlock. Starlord. Little did I know that my favourite X-Man, Logan, would become so popular as the years went by.

[John M. Whalen]

Gemmel has a lot of imitators among younger writers.

[che2000]

I've been a fan of David Gemmell since I first read Legend nearly twenty years ago and still make frequent returns to his books - particularly the afformentioned Legend, but also the Jon Shannow and Waylander novels and some of the single volumes with both Dark Moon and Echoes of the Great Song being firm favourites. The same themes and archetypes (or at least Gemmell's archetypes) appear again and again, but then it's not uncommon for writers to do that (Philip K Dick, for example, asked the same questions of what does it mean to be human and what exactly is reality, in many of his novels and the same run-down Californian future appears in the vast majority of his stories and novels) and David was so adept at creating believable characters with believable emotions and motives that it's easy to forgive the odd bit of repetition here and there.

In terms of sheer, breathtaking, style, I've recently discovered the work of Cordwainer Smith - particularly his Instrumentality of Mankind stories - and they have really rocked me off my feet. Like Jack Vance or Gene Wolfe or (dare one invoke him) Lord Dunsany, Smith was a writer very much in love with language and with the shape that words make upon the page - although this is not to say that he didn't deliver plots and characters too, but there's a beautiful, almost baroque, flavour to his work that many 'literary' novelists would (and possibly even should) envy.