Susan Sontag on Style: 5 Ideas From her Notebooks

"Form is...a springboard to get height from, not a table to which you’re strapped"

I can’t stop thinking about Susan Sontag’s hands.

The hand that wrote the words in her journals; the hands that hovered over the pages I held in the archive; and, finally, the hand that drew this sketch floating on a notebook page:

Sontag’s journal from 1948-1949, UCLA, Box 123, Folder 3

My breath caught when I saw this image. It struck me as precisely the kind of picture that would have fascinated Sontag.

This hand curled in on itself recalls the fragmentation of body parts Sontag noticed in photographs. Because she sketched her own left hand, I cannot help but think of that hand as it is now—entombed in Père Lachaise Cemetery. As Sontag wrote,

Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction.¹

Can we say the same of sketches, I wonder?

Maybe if given enough time I could approximate a Sontag-style reading of this particular notebook page, but I could never write exactly like her. In fact, I don’t want to. Why would I write in imitation of a great stylist for any other reason than as a kind of exercise?

All of this made me wonder about style. What is it? How do we recognize it? Where do we locate style in a piece of writing? Sontag wondered about these things too and wrote about them throughout her career.

Much like Sontag, I love a list. Prompted in part by her fabulous accretions of information, as I read through her notes, I collected her reflections on style.

Sontag wrote about style as an aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical issue. If this sounds abstract, it also has practical implications. After all, we can see Sontag refining her personal style in her notebooks.

Moreover, Sontag’s reflections have helped me think about my own writing style, both in terms of the overall form of my essays, the subjects I choose to write about, and the rhythms of my sentences. It has helped me think about how to support students as they develop their own styles.

I hope this list also helps you think through your own style—writerly or otherwise.

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