Blog Alert! Lorna London Interviews Author Shelly Sanders on Her Blog, London Time

Continued from More on style (part two).

Morley said that what he wanted to achieve was No Style. He didn't want the reader to be aware of him as a writer writing. Others agreed that Morley certainly had no style; they said that he was bland, grey, toneless, and he was so because his language lacked metaphors, lacked similes. He had refused to turn his prose sentences on the language lathe. Was he, therefore, being perverse when he said that "words should be as transparent as glass, and every time a writer used a brilliant phrase to prove himself witty or clever he merely took the mind of the reader away from the object and directed it to himself; he became simply a performer." Was he flat-out wrong? Is metaphor necessary? Is simile necessary?