Style

LJH · January 22, 2011

Excercise - STYLE

Make a list of your favo authors and complete this questionnaire for each.

What are the titles of their books? (mention only three)

Male or female?

Are the protagonists' male or female?

How long are their books?

Is there a recurring plot or theme that runs thru all of them?

What genre do they write?

Where are their novels set?

Which era are they set in?

Are their books written in 1, 2 or 3rd person?

Is character or action more prominent in their novels?

Do they use more dialogue or more description?

...It would be endless to mention the defects of style among us. I shall therefore say nothing of the mean and paltry, much less of the slovenly and indecent. Two things I will warn you against, the first is the frequency of flat, unnessary epithets; and the other is, the folly of using old, threadbare phrases which...are neaseous to rational hearers, and will seldom express your meaning as well as your own natural words...

Jonathan Swift

Style

Okay, be sure to use brevity and kick out verbosity. Nouns and verbs are the workhorses, the Clydesdales of writing...most other words are inferior. Denounce modifiers, these are leeches that suck at the pond of prose. Defend every adverb used. You may accuse me of being an adverb Nazi, but really I'm worse...

This is from Nancy Kress, a columnist, and she explains that relying on modifiers was like attending a function donning a tiara, 16 pairs of earrings, four necklaces, eight rings, a bangle of bracelets and an assortment of toe rings. But times have changed haven't they? and with the streets swarming with bejewelled navels, face jewellery and head to toe tattoos, these examples about over accessorizing might not have the impact it once had.

Voice is another key to style. Voice is the sound of our personality on the opage. Now add layers of music to your writing, those grace notes such as metaphor, repetition and alliteration that make the words linger and resonate.

When you self edit, circle all those places that tell instead of show.

In the end, understand that writing always comes back to story. A survey by the University of Wisconsin revealed that newspaper readers prefer narrative journalism. Narrative, or story, is what writing boils down to. No matter if you're writing an essay, memoir, poem, short story or article. People want to read about people. They're looking for a what next or once there was structure.

We are descended from ancestors who huddled around a fire to keep the night sounds, the cold and the beasts away. And when they gathered through the centuries, they told stories to take their mind off the cold, to understand how the stars decorated the night sky or how the rivers formed. They wanted answers for why people are sometimes cruel, why innocents suffer. Stories. The stuff of life.

So look hard at your writing. Search for the story in your work, for the why, the what next. Don't write to emote orlecture. Draw nearer. feel the flame. Introduce a mystery you can unravel, or subject a real person or character to jeopardy and resolve it. introduce a problem and its solutions. Show how life works by using examples we recognise and the people living them. Make us care, or better yet, worry. Wrap it up, not with a bow but with an ending that casts a final look backwards, or with someone talking or thinking or weeping, so we the readers, cannot forget.

STYLE ERRORS OCCUR WHEN:

The writing is forced and protracted.

Spelling and grammar doesn't feel right, the reader has to wade through adverbs, adjectives, qualifiers, fancy words and unorthodox spelling.

The writing is archaic, arty or minimalist.

The author preaches

There is less about the story and more about the construction.

Repetitive sentence structure occurs.

The reader feels as if he's being used as a sounding board for the author's pretensions to literary greatness

The reader feels that the author is judging the characters. Your reader is not doing jury duty. he is at best the lawyer for the defence or the prosecution.

:wacko: