Luke Morris
4/27/2004
Creating a Style
“Craft your style carefully,” the voice in my head tells me. “Be wary of the words you use. Plot your structure with rhythm and syntax; vary your sentence length; use paragraphing to convey content; are you sure you want that clause there?” It gets annoying at times. How am I supposed to answer? Do I merely say, “Yes, Master,” and carry out its bidding? There I am, then, a slave to my conscience, a marionette puppet for my internal editor’s amusement. My work is correct and precise, my imagination is tightly reigned in, my aesthetic creativity is null. How drab.
The devil on my shoulder lashes back. “Don’t listen to that,” it cries. “Tell your own story, your own way, let your mind roam free, pour your soul out on the paper in all its agony. Then submit it for publication.” It’s a fierce temptation. To throw proper usage and syntax to the gulls, to say what I want in whatever words I like, to mix my metaphors with abandon, to forget variety in structure, to pull out the easiest descriptions and clichés available to carry the story forth, to dance upon the grave of the old grammarians and scream, “to hell with the English language!” God, that would feel good. For a moment, anyway. Then I would reread what I had just written. Then I’d open up a bottle of Scotch, drain it, and start over.
There must be a middle ground, a fine line, a dividing set of tracks to walk on, where I can find freedom of invention within the constraints of clarity. How do I find it? I’m not sure where to start. When does conscientious designing turn into obsessive-compulsive neatness? On the reverse side, at what point does creativity become crap? This I must discover. Oh, the number of times I sit down to write, only to let my imaginative angst run like spilled wine over the paper. Or those times when I sit down and allow my internal naysayer to beat me into such abject submission that not a word flows from my pen, for fear of the error it might become. I love writing, but I hate to write.
But I have to write. It’s a craving, a need, a grouchy linguistic tiger that digs a hole in my insides when I forget to feed it. So I will be a writer. And a thinker. A new literary philosopher-king, leading the people of today into a glorious aesthetic reawakening tomorrow. Or maybe I’ll just write for fun. Fun can be a profession, after all. If I am to make a life of it, though, I will need a style of my own, my own voice with which to speak. Anyone can follow the rules, anyone can break the rules. Anyone isn’t a good writer. I need to find a way to use the rules to my advantage, to create good prose in an original form. That is my mission.
It won’t be easy. I want to write short stories, essays, novels, and plays. That’s a lot of ground to cover – a single style won’t do it. I need to develop a distinctive voice that will carry through all the mediums in which I work, with which I can tell an infinite variety of stories - both truth and fiction – in any number of styles, while expressing certain coherent themes. Good luck to me. How do I do that?
The first thing to do, I think, is to look at the greats. I’m not the first to try to cross genres while keeping my personality intact, as much as my ego wants to believe that. Anton Chekhov wrote more short stories than he did plays. Mark Twain wrote an autobiography that is as interesting and enjoyable as Huck Finn. Ernest Hemingway wrote bullfighting articles here and A Farewell to Arms there, and he did it from inside a bottle. And C.S. Lewis wrote science fiction, children’s fantasy, and a number of those “Apologetic” thingies, all with a similar Christian theme. Granted, these are bright stars in the literary firmament; yet though I might not be so brilliant, what better way have I to become so than by modeling the masters? It makes sense to me. If I want to develop my own voice to carry me through a plethora of situations, I have to figure out how these guys did it, and do the same thing.
The problem is, I don’t know how they did it. How does Chekhov write dramatic dialogue in a real and elevated form, and then write prose that reads with the ease of speech? How does Lewis write something as hilariously serious as The Screwtape Letters? Authors like Hemingway and Stephen Crane use a journalistic style of writing to tell enthralling fiction stories. Fiction writer Thornton Wilder writes prize-winning plays, while playwright Arthur Miller writes critical essays. The one common string I can grasp is that all of them are willing to experiment, to try new ways of saying things, to use different sentence structures or figures of speech when it suits their purposes – they match their style to their medium, in accordance with the content they wish to convey.
The content, then, determines the uniqueness of each writer’s voice. While different writers may work in the same medium, portraying similar themes in similar styles, the great ones are those who set themselves apart by having something unique to convey. If you are saying something that no one has said before, then of course no one would have said it the way you do. So all I have to do is to find an original something to say, and I’m all set.
Of course, that’s crap. I certainly do have some original things to say, but not everything I write can be unique, or I would have to write gibberish. Even the great Bill Wigglestick (that’s William Shakespeare to the unfamiliar masses) didn’t invent much of his material. He merely found interesting things that had been said before, and re-said them in a different and better way. So even when the theme of my work does not originate with me, I should still be able to state it in an original form.
The key, then, must involve making peace with the obedient angel and the artistic devil in my soul. In any medium in which I happen to write, I must create a style that functions with that form, that suits my theme, and that says things the way I want it to, without violating that vague aesthetic standard that makes a work of art good. This is the secret, this is my search: to find my own voice. To adhere to the rules when possible, to break them when necessary, to always demonstrate my tastes truthfully, so that others may appreciate them if they choose. When I can do this consistently, I will be a good writer.