Somewhere on LiveJournal—or maybe it was over on the Asimov’s board—there was a recent thread about style versus substance, which contained the usual long debate about which of the two was more important. I can no longer find where that conversation was going on, so I’ll just post here what I’ve always though of as the final word on the subject, from Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic 1973 essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”:

Many readers, many critics, and most editors speak of style as if it were an ingredient of a book, like sugar in a cake, or something added onto the book, like the frosting on the cake. The style, of course, is the book. If you remove the cake, all you have left is the recipe. If you remove the style, all you have left is the synopsis of the plot.