Sidewise Advice On How To Develop Style, Part III

[marycatelli]

Part I here.  Part II here.

Reading widely helps with words.  It helps somewhat with grammar.  What it is needed for, really, is --

No, the warning comes first.

This is a proposed writing exercise.  DO NOT SEND TO EDITORS!   If you send to editors, I will pretend I never heard of you!

But, to develop your style, one thing that really helps is to write pastiches of writers you admire.   It helps a lot if they are great stylists, but the real point is to master the art of making words jump through flaming hoops rather than sit around on the page.  Trying to sound like any writer is aiming for precision in writing.

In some respects, this is not really advice, because many people just fall into it.  Many (most?) young writers tend to fall in love with writers' styles and try to imitate them.  It is not for nothing that Ursula K. LeGuin dubbed Lord Dunsany "First Terrible Fate that Awaiteth Unwary Beginners in Fantasy."  It's hard to imagine how many writers have churned out how many reams of Lord Dunsany imitations -- eighth rate imitations of Lord Dunsany -- as no one can write better imitations of his "crystalline, singing prose" than eight rate.

On the other hand, even eighth rate Lord Dunsany imitations teach you a lot about how words fit together to produce style.

And once you get through fits of Lord Dunsay, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. LeGuin, and many other writers (good or bad stylists), you have learned lots of effects you can produce by putting together words in all sorts of grammatical structures.

Lots of writers is an important point.  It's one thing if people can tell that a writer is an important influence on you.  It's another to write only pastiches.  (That warning up there is not kidding.)  And for another matter -- writers are good at various things.  Imitiating many different writers teaches you many different things to do with your box of tools.

Comments

[scbutler.livejournal.com]

Was just talking about this last night with some aspiring writers. The key is to read widely. Across genres, across cultures, across centuries, across languages (if possible). As many as you can.

[marycatelli]

Reading is passively observing style. Pastiche is actively seeing how it works.

Just like reading helps your vocabulary, but only your writing if you manage to move it from your reading vocabulary to your writing one.

Not that too many writers need the advice --

Say, did all you writers find yourself writing in styles you admired when you started out?

[persephone-kore.livejournal.com]

Well, I do write fanfic, myself, so sometimes I try to make the style fit. (Sometimes I don't.) I cowrite, and apparently I usually blend with the other author almost invisibly. The rest of the time, I don't know. There are certain authors whose writing styles take over my internal monologue -- I can't read The Good Earth without afterward starting every sentence in my head with "Well, and" for a while -- but they're more likely to mess with my IMs and emails than my stories.

[marycatelli]

Interesting.

[scbutler.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I copied anyone's style; mostly I was just bad. I have some widely diverse influences: Austen, Trollope, Coover, Vonnegut, Niven, Heinlein, Burroughs, Tolkien, Van Vogt. I think I might have tried to write like Coover and Vonnegut on occasion, but the results were so far from the mark as to be in no way actionable.

[marycatelli]

It's good practice even when the results don't hit the mark. . . .

I know it's common because I was once describing it on a panel at a convention, and the editor on the panel -- reacted strongly.

[scbutler.livejournal.com]

I was never deliberate about it. But even today I'm influenced by what I'm reading - it just all comes out in the final draft.

[marycatelli]

I've found with time that I got set in my own ways and able to shrug off what I'm reading.

It was a long time, though.