Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

A quick one this week, on a thorny subject.

What, my friends, is style? Do cats have it with abundance?

In writing style seems to be both sought after, and discounted, if you listen to the wild warblings available on the once world wide web. It is both important to possess as a writer, and unimportant to story. You don’t (necessarily) need good style to write a good story goes the maxim. It seems to me more true that you don’t need to possess style in your writing to make money. Not sour grapes, my friends, I accept where I am in the writing universe at this time, and money is not my motivation. It just seems self-evident that any number of not exactly well written books have made stacks of cash – and bless them, one and all. Was the secret a slap-dash or broken style? A style of disjunction?

Who knows? I don’t. this is me spitballing again, after all. Right place right time is as good a reason as any I’ve seen.

From style we proceed to voice. A writer has a voice, it is said, and often that voice is expressed in a style that belongs all to that author, unmistakable. Our friend Hemingway, for instance. But voice and style are not interchangeable. Voice informs style, can shape or strengthen it. So what is it, this voice? I suspect it is a strongly expressed viewpoint, a way of viewing the world that when paired with words and writing is expressed in an arresting fashion, and amplified by adroit style choices in prose. Voice is a writer speaking to us, in their dialect, about their favorite things, the things they are driven to discuss, their obsessions. Because why spend months or years writing a thing if you are not driven to it?

And from voice to conviction. I do not think a writerly voice, even if complemented by the most perfect style for that voice, is going to amount to much without conviction. The writer has to have a viewpoint, and believe in it passionately for that voice to come alive, to fully inhabit the style ‘body’ given to it, to speak and jump from the writer’s mind to the reader’s. Debate team writing, playing with alternate viewpoints but never engaging or believing in what is being written, will not win the day here. The writer’s belief does not need to be correct in any universal or contemporary cultural sense, but it has to inform everything for the coherence of the whole to be so subtly compelling. A polemic or political diatribe can be heartfelt, can be believed in by the writer, but if it is a regurgitated rehash of ideas already powerfully expressed by others, in a style not the author’s own, it will be wooden. A personal hobby horse grafted into a story is just that, no matter how well the seams try to be hidden, and let’s face it, they often aren’t.

So how do we write with conviction in our own voice that inevitably possesses what readers describe as a ‘style of its own’?

Again, I don’t know. This wasn’t meant to be an advice column. Truth be told I’m asking myself that question, looking for my own answer, not pretending to offer one to you, my friends. Be that as it may, I have to come up with some answers for today. Please add pinches of salt as needed.

Practice. Write around your obsessions, through them, recast them over and over until you’ve mined them dry. Eventually you might find the writing key that aligns style, voice and conviction into one piece of writing, and once found, I suspect it will be natural to keep, at least for a while.

The other thing is to try your best to be honest. Don’t write all from the intellect, or all from the heart, with breathless urgency or carefully constructed artifice. A writer who wants to communicate their viewpoint to the world, to share their tiny temporary slice of humanity with others, needs to use all of themselves to write, not just parts. Why some writers succeed in youth is because they throw themselves headlong into their writing, why others succeed in age is because they’ve taken the time to meet themselves, and be comfortable with whatever it is they find. Either way they use all of themselves, and are as honest as they can be in that moment. Writing as catharsis for the writer, and if done right, can be shared with the reader. Leave perfect plotting, pacing, and construction to AI, it will be capable of all that soon enough. Be human all the way, and share that with your audience. That, I believe, will create a voice of conviction, delivered with style.

Where am I? Hopefully on the path to meeting myself, because young I am not! Even then I know this is only ever a process (writing, and life), never a destination. The Long Road, if you will.