A Guide to Writing Style

Writing Style - The Bottom Line

“Words are like sunbeams.  The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.”       - Robert Southey

“Prose is architecture, not interior decorating.”       - Ernest Hemingway

Writing style is made up of two things: cadence and variation.

Good style is clear, readable, and invisible.  Its purpose is not to attract attention to itself but to transport readers into the world of your story.  If your readers notice your style without purposefully intending to study it, your style needs to be improved and refined.  Good style, however, is transparent so that your readers simply see the characters and world of your story rather than the words you use to portray them.

To write with cadence simply means that your writing should sound natural.  If it sounds right to you, it probably is--but if it doesn’t sound right, play with it and change the wording until it does.  Your writing should flow without wordiness, unneeded interjects that exist solely to please the writer, and be as condensed as possible.  Less is more.  

Refinement is vibrant and impacting--fresh, clear, and it entices the reader to continue, thus propelling your story forward.  Excess, on the other hand, is messy and requires your reader to exert effort in order to understand what’s happening in your story world.  Essentially, this causes readers to feel like they’re driving down a dead end road, ditch your story, and move on to something else.

As a wise writer once said, good writing is hard on the writer and easy on the reader.  Style exists as a structure in which to tell your story and to give it form, not to decorate it and draw attention to itself.  You might hesitate to cut that phrase you think is witty or beautiful, but if it causes your story to linger rather than to move forward, do your readers a favor and trash it.  Bottom line: style exists for your readers’ benefit, not yours.

Moving on to the magical land of variation.  Variation basically means this: mix it up.  If you use the same sentence structure or wording over and over, your prose is dull, boring, and rather painful to read.  Switch from simple sentences to complex ones, action tags to dialogue tags, short sentences and paragraphs to longer ones, prepositions to subject-verb sentence structures.  The trick is to use variety in a way that enhances your story and becomes a part of it rather than jumbling the action and flow of what’s happening in your story world.

For example, sentence length can either slow your story down or speed it up.  If you’re writing a fast-paced action scene, don’t use long, rambling sentences--short ones add to the drama.  The opposite is true of descriptions or quiet scenes.

Essentially then, a key to good style is making it work with your story so that it becomes almost its own character that propels your story forward.

Anther key aspect of writing style is the way you use verbs.  Verbs are action, and action is the meat of story.  Adjectives and adverbs are fluff, and they clog your writing instead of boosting it forward.

Strong writing, then, is exhibited in strong verbs.  Verbs ending with the suffix “ing” are inherently weaker than those without a suffix or verbs ending in “ed” or “s.”  If you find yourself using adverbs to add punch or description to a too-common verb, stop and pull out a thesaurus.  It’s always better, for example, to say “he sprinted” than it is to say “he ran swiftly.”  

If you must use an adjective or adverb, pick the most essential and interesting one you can find and use it.  Avoid listing adjectives as much as possible.  Also avoid the overuse of similes and metaphors.  Comparisons take your readers' thought process away from the story at hand in order to visualize the mental picture portrayed in the metaphor, and this throws your story progression in reverse.  If you must use an analogy, try not to use one you’ve heard before.

Even the most cliché story can sound fresh and exciting if the writer employs strong verbs.  Likewise, the most fresh and exciting story can sound cliché if it’s riddled with common and tired verbs and adjectives.

The bottom line on style is this: Stories are dynamic, and they should be told in a dynamic way.  Stylistic fluff is static and turns your story into a stagnant pool of words that no one wants to read.  So cut the fluff and get on with the story!