What should we make of style?

 I’m thinking about writing because a young fellow I know is working on his first big story. It’s a story about a couple of kids who have to grow up in rough circumstances. I got interested in the characters as the writer was talking.

He’s at the point where he’s thinking of style. Does the story work better in first person or third? How do you know?

I had a professor in college who loved Erasmus and made us read him. Erasmus published a textbook called Copia: Foundations of an Abundant Style. One of the chapters is a demonstration: He wrote the same simple sentence 195 ways, each variation subtly different.

Raymond Queneau wrote the same short story 99 times in Exercises in Style. Each telling is different.

I’ll admit that I’ve written a story in first person and then rewritten it in third to see what it would look like. And I like to tinker, which is all trial and error.

But this focus on style is foreign to me. I invariably get interested in a story and forget about style or I fail to get interested in the story and abandon it.

I want to know the story, and so I appreciate a writer whose sense of style relies on clarity and brevity.