Matt Bell

As a reader, I’m interested in style as much as in content, in the way a story is narrated as much as what’s actually said. I think the best writers have a very distinctive signature that expresses itself in their style, in their way of putting sentences together. As a writer, I’d like to think that what I’m created has a certain authority and expresses a distinctive voice, that I’m offering something up to the reader that he or she isn’t likely to encounter elsewhere, and that this something is not simply the content but a way of handling that content. Beckett has an extraordinary signature—you can feel his presence in everything he writes despite the spareness of his prose. Nabokov, whose prose is much more deliberately fussy, has a similar extraordinary signature. The reason we use modifiers like Beckettian and Nabokovian to describe the writing of others is that they use a particular style in such a way that it seems like it has come to belong only to them. Achieving such a style is, I think, is a worthy goal for any writer.

Brian Evenson

Source: bookslut.com