Personal Style, or Set in Our Ways: The Importance of Change and Holding On–#AuthorToolboxBlogHop

This week’s post is part of the monthly Author Toolbox Blog Hop. Check out other participants’ posts here. The #AuthorToolboxBlogHop is a great way to connect with other writers and build our own repertoire of craft knowledge alongside. Check it out!

A wonderful professor of mine, Deborah Appleman, once told me that life is a slow but persistent push to widen the circle of “me” things, adopting them in from the sea of “not-me.” I remember puzzling at the time over just what this meant, and perhaps because it took me some time to figure out, because it sent my mental machinery rearranging itself, I have remembered.

My “me” circle has always felt quite different from that of the world around me. I was raised in a non-religious family among a sea of at least incidental Christians. I was gay in a world that felt overwhelmingly straight. I listening to country music and not pop. I still have a lot of trouble with sarcasm. I felt different for so long, that somewhere along the line I stopped wanting to be the same (this wasn’t always the case, and still isn’t always to be sure; how many tears I cried as a child–why couldn’t I be like them? Why could I not be normal?). Today, even when I like to think I’ve settled down into a comfortable Jimmy-ness that picks and chooses what it likes of what is normal and what’s not, I feel protective sometimes of my individuality. As a writer, I’ve recognized my slowly-growing style.

What is “style”?

The accretion of all of our technical and thematic choices in a text (or across texts) is our style. Including everything from vocabulary choice to tones to patterns of punctuation to methods of characterization to subject matter, our style arises from the choices we make in our writing again and again.

When we read multiple texts by the same writer, we can begin to get a sense of their style–the convoluted sentences and dark imagery of Poe, Atwood’s quotidian diction and gradually-building feminist rebuttals–style differs from a writer’s voice in its focus on the technical, conscious choices writers repeat; voice is the soul of us that comes through that style, although the two certainly overlap.

Our own styles can feel a bit trickier to pin down, and sometimes when someone else does try to define our style, we might feel anywhere from pigeonholed to proud. Our style might be most evident when we sit down to write something–what feels right or wrong? What feels me?

Style’s dangers

In the high school creative writing club I used to lead in Minnesota, students were indeed developing their own styles. Some students wrote with vivid description; others favored the bare-bones dialogue; in a blind test, I’ve no doubt the whole group could have identified whose werewolves were whose (and there were a lot of werewolves).

The trouble started, however, when a student wedded to her or his style received constructive criticism. I wanted it that way. That’s not how I write. The style became a wall for them and closed them to the learning. I didn’t blame them, for I understood the desire for affirmation, and sometimes for affirmation alone. For many of the students, I sensed the group became a refuge. I backed off. I’d been there too.

Even so, there was a loss. Because where style becomes inflexible, a mark of individuality to which we cling, a hard barrier between the me and the not-me, then we lose the chance to grow. I’ve seen this in myself.

Broadening our style

The other day, I read Olivia Parkes’s short story “Appointment” on American Short Fiction. The writing had such character to it. This protagonist conjured herself boldly out of a few paragraphs, and I had to know: what is making this story tick? What can I learn here?

I picked up on two elements that seemed to be doing much of the lifting. The first was the similes. “The crumpled clothes looked shabby in the gleaming, mirrored room, like something you’d find under a bridge,” Parkes writes. I loved the specificity of the place–found under a bridge–and yet the stubbornly opaque “something.” The final result aptly suggests our simultaneous curiosity and disgust for what we might find there, and it stages brilliantly the clothes’ contrast to the comparatively ritzy salon.

The figurative language continues through the story, in ways that surprised me, because they differed from my normal style. Ah, I found myself saying, you can use a metaphor too like this.

The second element, I felt resistance. Parkes makes use of a character type I see often in contemporary fiction: the slightly-crazy narrator. Parkes’s narrator holds a not incomprehensible but definitely non-standard worldview; she reacts bizarrely; she clearly arrives at this moment from a traumatic past.

What bothers me about many such stories (and to some extent this one too) is the seeming invitation to laugh at these narrators. It is voyeuristic, a kind of circus freak-show, that certainly engages but smacks to me of the unethical. I’ll never write one these crazy narrators, I have said. At least not in a way that begs a laugh.

Yet I recognized too, that I was closing myself off. I had set out to learn from this piece of writing, and when I got the hint of the disreputable, I insisted that was never me. I would have to engage readers differently. A narrator like this could never work in a story I was writing.

I don’t think Parkes’s story ultimately is a freak-show, at least not by the end. I appreciate the tenderness and hope with which, as I interpret the story, it ends. And it makes me consider how my original judgement might have been too rash. I think it must be possible to write a narrator who falls outside of “normal” and yet is portrayed with dignity. Of course that must be possible (after all, I just finished the marvelous YA novel Challenger Deep, whose narrator has schizophrenia. It is a book written with dignity if ever I have seen one.). And if such a narrator can prove engaging in an otherwise lumbering story, why not try. I might expand my circle of the “me.” I might find a new technique that can work.

I’m trying it now. I’m a few days into a rewrite of a story I started years ago and abandoned. I’ve changed the narrator, and I do feel a growing life in the story, and as I work I am considering this idea of voyeurism and how to give this narrator the same respect and dignity I would give another, to work in humor that is not at her expense but at her own realization too. I’ll see if I can get us laughing with her and not at.

The ever-broadening circle

I have learned again this week that “style” must be a semi-permeable membrane at its best. It is good to have a style. It is good to circle back to things that work, that identify us to readers’ ears and form a backbone as we draft. But style must evolve and branch, expand and shift, leave behind, adopt, grow dynamic, self-aware.

I wrote some months ago about plotting and pantsing. I ended by declaring myself a mostly-plotter. Months on, I am pantsing more, with good results. Funny how things change.

What do you think? What defines your style? How has your style changed with time? What techniques are you working to develop, hone, or leave behind?

Be well. Be kind to yourself and others. Be safe and thoughtful. Until next week,
Jimmy