avoiding the flat style with 'tilt'

Raymond Chandler wrote “American is an ill at ease language, without manner or self control. It has too great a fondness for the faux naïf, by which I mean the use of a style such as might be spoken by a very limited sort of mind. In the hands of a genius like Hemingway this may be effective…When not used by a genius it is as flat as a Rotarian speech.”

I know exactly what he means. English as it used to be written- the Mandarin variant or its modern version mandarin flexibly meshed with precise use of the vernacular- Isherwood and Kingsley Amis both very good at that- has now through exposure to the American way become in danger of achieving Rotarian qualities. Chandler’s way out was the sprightly use of crazy metaphors, you have to do something to jazz up flat footed prose, prose without any sense of inner spring. 

Another way is to infuse the flat style with humour and a healthy dose of irony, another method, used by Will Self is the self- conscious use of difficult words- good one that.

Thinking about style and 'voice' often leads nowhere good though. Better to concentrate on subject matter, which, as John Fante rightly observed, "called all the shots". Once you have your subject matter you then need some sort of angle of attack or emotion or focusing image. Writer Lloyd Evans, who is the Spectator's hilarious theatre critic, calls it giving the piece 'tilt'. It's very very easy to lose sight of the need for tilt, for something that will give a unifying emotion or feel to the piece. It is somewhat mysterious too. Whilst it is not so difficult to maintain one emotional slant or window for a poem or short story, its much harder for a novel or a longer narrative. One way is for the narrative view to be infused with an unresolvable contradiction, something that will also generate plot. "When Gregor Samsa awoke he found he had changed into a beetle." Plenty of tilt in that. Tilt then could be called narrative necessity. Ask yourself WHY am I telling this story. "It just has to be told" is a very good reason and usually means it's a story with plenty of narrative necessity, that is, once you start people want to hear the whole thing.

Tilt is a strange mix of an emotion running through something and a way of looking at the subject matter. A new or novel POV creates more tilt- without the Indian narrator one flew over the cuckoo's nest would have been much less interesting. Perhaps it is the emotional feel of a piece generated by the way it is viewed. By skewing the viewpoint one increases focus on the subject and therefore interest and excitement. 

Just as many people only become eloquent when angry, so tilt creates a viewpoint that generates enough emotion to make the writer eloquent.