Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk, the most accessible body of information for what this whole Literary Minimalism thing even is.
Experimental author and editor Gordon Lish consolidated Literary Minimalism in the late 20th century. Literary Minimalism "crafts stories through sentence-level dynamics while eschewing the traditional hallmarks of literary realism such as character development and setting." Addington, Wells. "Gordon Lish and the Development of Literary Minimalism". CEA Critic, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Vol. 78, No. 1 (March 2016), pages 1-23. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26574794What’s important is that imitation is a natural way to learn. In the golden years of Gordon Lish, when he taught at Columbia, edited for Knopf, and ran the literary magazine The Quarterly, he was known as Captain Fiction. His best students were the most promising young writers in America. And those writers wrote according to his demands and dedicated their work, publically, “To Q,” meaning to Lish, and it was a juggernaut. Lish’s unstoppable army. Unstoppable until it was stopped. The critic Sven Birkerts, writing for The New Republic, called attention to how similar all the great, young Minimalists sounded. They wrote in the first person, in the constantly unspooling present moment, in “byte-sized” perceptions. And Birkerts was correct, and the shining edifice of Minimalism no longer looked like the future. Just as Chick Lit fell out of fashion…Once a style or genre becomes too copied, reader fatigue kills it. So no, the idea isn’t to follow every rule of Gordon’s and Tom’s and mine, not forever. But it’s better to start with some rules. Learn some compulsory skills. After that you can free-style, and if you’re lucky and if you’re successful a new generation of aspiring writers will copy your style and drive your hard-won, well-crafted voice right into the ground. "Direct quote taken from: Palahniuk, Chuck. Consider This. Grand Central Publishing, New York & Boston: 2020.
This school of literature is characterizedhttps://litreactor.com/essays/chuck-palahniuk/nuts-and-bolts-“thought”-verbshttps://www.laweekly.com/2002-09-26/art-books/she-breaks-your-heart/ by the following literary devices:
Unpacking: an abstract or ungrounded word such as "knew" or "thought" gets deconstructed into specific sensory details.
Burnt Tongue: related to the above, but to avoid received text or a too-commonly used string of words, the text that would otherwise suit a common phrase would be put in a different way and the more agonizingly reconstructed the better.
Paring: This is not officially one of the tenets of Literary Minimalism anywhere that I could find, but Palahniuk wrote of not favoring the Victoria-era literary convention of "putting a porch on" the story—another reason to challenge Chuck Palahniuk to a sword duel to first blood, a couple other reasons being to defend the honor of fictional character Nick Carraway whom Palahniuk has callously besmirched, and also what autistic person bit you and why is mansplaining such a fun word? I forgot to define this section: eschewing thesis statements preceding the description of an action or scene, so that the effect on the reader is of more immediate action and more immersion into the story.
Recording Angel: a tone of narration that does not engage directly in emotive persuasion, rather presenting only the "facts" of the story and purposely misdirecting the reader within that constraint.
Chorus: a repetition of a phrase or sentence that gets newly contextualized with each repetition while displaying thematic unity with previous uses of that phrase.
Dangerous Writing: a splinter of Literary Minimalism that observed subject matter more readily covered in this same style, by some refuge of formality in the above tenets.
This literary device appears in the following works: