Style

Style is an elusive topic, mostly because there isn’t really a good way to define it, or good ways to develop it. Put simply, a writer’s style is just the way she writes. But that doesn’t really tell us much. In fact, I think style can be broken down a little more, into two broad categories.

The first category is content. Some authors are just famous or well known because of what they write about. In this category I would place authors such as Kurt Vonnegut and J.R.R Tolkien. I mention this first because often it is underappreciated. However, many authors are known more for what they write about that how the write, and this isn’t something which can be tossed by the way side. I will be covering this side of style in more detail as I continue discussing different genres of writing.

The second category is voice. There are many writers who are famous for their voice, and two that come to mind right now are James Joyce and Ernest Hemmingway, though their voices, in some ways, couldn’t be more different. This is often the category which most people think of when they think of style, and for the most part, this is what I will discuss when I talk about style.

There is no easy way to find a voice. That said, there are two tools that can help refine a voice, and improve it. The first is to practice literary devices. Often, famous voices are famous because of how they use imagery, foreshadowing, magical realism, and the like, and so understanding how those devices work is crucial for developing a voice of your own.

The second tool is the pastiche, a literary exercise which I believe is incredibly helpful, but which few writers use. The essential objective is to take an excerpt written by an author whose voice you enjoy, and try to mimic it as best you can. This often takes three steps. First, you must select a passage and do a close reading of it, identifying what aspects make the author’s voice notable. Second, try to recreate the writer’s style in a story of your own. Finally, go back and compare the two, figure out what you liked about that style and what you didn’t, and then try to incorporate the things you enjoyed into your own writing.

 

Exercise: Every once in a while, I will give my opinion on a famous style in a post, and provide a passage for a pastiche exercise. For now, try writing a pastiche in the style of your favorite author, following the process I outlined above.

Setting

This is another post that will be mostly review, but I want to cover it anyway. The setting is the time and place that a story takes place in. Setting is often regarded as one of the least important aspects of a story, being upstaged by plot, character, and theme. It is seen as the backdrop, not really important. It is assumed that a great character can perform in limbo, and still create a marvelous story.

Most of this is true, but that does not mean that setting can’t be an excellent tool for writers. In fact, I would say that setting is growing in importance at about the same speed as genre fiction is gaining in popularity, because genre relies heavily on setting to establish the world the writer is crafting. However, don’t confuse world building with setting—the two are certainly related but still quite different things for reasons which I will touch on here, and most likely develop further later.

Literature–Mainstream vs. Genre

This is going to be another continuing topic, although I don’t know how frequent it will be. The focus here is not “literature” in general, but “Literature”. It may not seem like a large difference, but in academic circles especially, trying to decide what books possess a certain kind of quality which makes them deserve that capital “L” is a fairly hot topic. In these posts, I will look at attempts I have seen people have made to separate out Literature from other writing, and I want to start with one of the more widespread divisions, the distinction between mainstream literature and genre literature.

Some people might disagree with me on this, but I think that this distinction is based on content and setting more than anything else. Mainstream works are those which take place in the real world that we inhabit. They contain characters that we could conceivably meet, and who abide by the same basic rules of existence that we do. Genre fiction, in many of its forms, breaks this rule by creating characters and worlds which do not abide by the rules of our world. This content might break physical or technological laws (like magic, advanced artificial intelligence and faster than light travel) as well as social rules, (like the sexual stereotypes in romance novels). Not all genres break all of these rules, but they do break some rule. The result is characters that could not exist in our world, by the very nature of their existence.