STYLE AND NARRATIVE

You make cogent observations about Appel's style. Your entry is right on target in what I was hoping to get from you, even though I was left wanting much more of your observations about his narrative technique. I appreciate your noticing Appel's similarities with Hemingway and Salter. It might be more convincing if you had offered some examples. I believe that critics have observed that Hemingway tried to be careful and sparse in the use of adjectives.

If you are writing continuously, it's hard to stay the same. Maybe style evolves as you develop more command over narrative. 

Narrative is about "what happens"...and Hemingway moves slowly and deeply in allowing each of his narratives to find its own voice. If you've read The Old Man and The Sea, you encountered a deep narrative style that focused on minute tribulations of action unfolding, whether it be the sea, the old man's thoughts, his struggles with the elements, his boat, the giant marlin lashed to the side of his boat.

The Old Man and the Sea is his ninth novel. His first novel was The Sun Also Rises in 1926, ten years before I was born. The Old Man and the Sea was published in 1952, when I was a sophomore in high school. I include my chronology to note that Hemingway served as a teacher for me in the way that I appropriated his work to understand my own writing process. 

Some observe that Hemingway prefers verbs over adjectives, but that may be an oversimplification.

I really appreciate how much you have improved your writing with regard to this Blog. But I have asked that you acknowledge the content I wrote specifically for you because it frames a foundation for some ground rules for our mutual inquiry. None of your entries acknowledge anything I've written and addressed specifically to you. All of my entries in this Blog are addressed specifically to you. And when you have submitted your writing, I have referred to the content of your entry.

A dialogue begins when you respond to someone who presents an idea or asks a question.

Please write a more or less diligent entry in response to the several points raised for you by me in the initial entry of this Blog.

Thanks for using a title, and I'm glad you used caps so our Blog starts to take on a certain consistency in style. 

Using Verdana set as a medium-sized font also provides a standard for style.

Currently I am engaged with Walt Whitman and following him on his journey walking the streets of lower Manhattan as he did every day, writing and publishing newspapers and journals and gradually establishing a new literary style. Those days were stormy days in the history of the republic, and Whitman, I think, was the Hemingway of his day because of his prolific prose and poetry was shaping a new style for a new world.