I’ve yet to read any novels by George Sanders, but after  reading the following passage in an interview between Ben Marcus and Saunders, taken from meaty Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers, I think it’s about time I did:

So, when I’m writing, I am trying to move myself, or impress myself, or prevent myself from getting bored and walking away – in the faith that, if I succeed in this the writing will have som ecquivalent effect on the reader. On every reader? No. On every reader, to some extent? I think so. I hope so. Anyway, that’s what I assume. That, to me, is the really magical thing about writing: if I write toward my own best nature, I am also writing toward the best nature of others. I sort of doesn’t make sense, and even feels a little fascist, but I think it’s true

Here I have to confess that I aslo believe that certain effects have more power in prose than others, and that this tendency is, at least in part, universal. I believe in efficiency, action, clarity, velocity. I think these qualities are responsible for the feeling of being ‘drawn into’ a piece of prose. Also, maybe paradoxically, I think  that constructing the hierarchy of preferred effects is what style is all about. If one writer prefers some other suite of effects and energetically tries to construct a prose world based on the pre-eminence of those effects, style will result