Friday, 7 February 2014

John Cheever wrote many short stories in what was referred to as the 'New Yorker style'. Why might a writer have a style?

It comes as no surprise that, Cheever only wrote about the things that were most important to him. Kuresishi, establishes that Cheever would only ever focus on what he called the ‘bitter mystery of marriage and the way marriage can make passion seem improbable, if not impossible.’ Cheever was by far and large a very confused and an unhappy man as shown by the fact that he was not comfortable in his own skin. He claimed: ‘I don’t work with plots. I work with intuition, apprehension, dreams and concepts. I don’t like to work with plot, plot implies a narrative and a lot of crap.’


His writing style has been described as uniquely authentic, powerful, rich and deep in voice and it is this which effectively allows him to communicate with his intended target audience - to express how unfair that it is for people to judge or to provide a passing comment on the fact that he was ‘different to the rest’. In Cheever’s eyes just because you were different to the rest didn’t mean you were any less of a person and he wanted to emphasise this fact. He did this by providing a voice through the use of highly effective, emotive language and imagery.


2 comments:

  1. I agree that our writing style can change and adapt with time and experience and i like that you have drawn the connection between our writing styles and our own personalities.

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  2. Cheever's ideas that fiction is "our most intimate and acute means of communication, at a profound level, about our deepest apprehension and intuitions on the meaning of life and death" is a fascinating one, especially when you think about his journals. Most say that his story stories and journal entries are so similar that the journals could be read as stories themselves. So it's an interesting idea to think that writing is so personal and so much from that person, there is no difference or shift in style when they are writing privately and about themselves. That the writing is a reflection and a part of the author, no matter the situation.

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