Having Trouble Coming Up with Your Own Writing Style?

Style Separates You. It Let's Your Readers Know Who's Writing. A Great Style Differentiates You.

Voice is key. Word choice. Dialogue. Scene. Everything we study while learning the craft of writing, while figuring out what we do best as writers, the story we want to tell, all of it is wrapped up in our style. We all know when someone overwrites, or at least what “overwriting” is to us, in terms of how we define a work that’s overwritten. Usually, when we’re in an MFA program in creative writing or working with other writers in workshops, or even if we’re just experienced, we know when we’re overwriting. And that’s okay—it’s part of the process. We’ll edit that all out later. But style, for me, is what makes or breaks a book for me, even when the story is an interesting one. If I can’t get into the style (or write in a style that’s going to allow me to go on for three hundred pages), I stop reading, and, often, I stop writing. Normally, I stop reading because I’m bored of the author’s writing style or voice; when it comes to my own writing, it’s likely that I’ve chosen a style that is going to be extraordinarily tough for me to keep up for any more than twenty pages. Style is in my top two must-haves.

When I wrote my first novel, I copied the style directly from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. As most writers (I’m guessing) do, I didn’t realize that you couldn’t do that. That the style of the novel was Kerouac’s and that I couldn’t just pilfer it for my own novel. Here’s an excerpt from On the Road:

In the bar I told Dean, “Hell, man I know very well you didn’t come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except you got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.” And he said, “Yes, of course, I know exactly what you mean and in fact all those problems have occurred to me, but the thing that I want is the realization of those factors that should one depend on Schopenhauer’s dichotomy for any inwardly realized . . .” and so on in that way, things I understood not a bit and he himself didn’t.

There's a musicality to the prose, a clear, distinct voice, a spontaneous style, a stream-of-consciousness, rapid-fire, punch-by-punch conversation between Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise that complements the prose around it. I read it. I loved it. I copied its style for a novel I called Two Down Beats. Horrible title. A novel without a plot. But a nice little journey and intro to my writing career—a career I didn’t know was going to consume my life from then on out. But Beats was a complete copy, and I knew it and if I’d had the balls to share it with anyone outside my close circle of friends, none of whom ever read (and didn’t read more than a few pages of my novel and only to humor me), I’d be dismissed by real writers as a hack. Which would have been fine; writers need to have tough skin as they’re beginning, for without it we’d just quit and that would be that. (We have to have tough skin period, but especially during our early years).

Back to style. The way I see it there’s a lot of different styles of writing out there, but at this point in the history of fiction, I believe many of them are pretty easily identifiable in terms of the writer’s influences and what writers’ styles they’re derived from. For me, Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy have similar styles. Hemingway has the short, declarative sentences, where much of the meaning is unspoken and beneath the surface. McCarthy’s language and style are more lyrical, but for me there’s again something beneath the surface that says to me, McCarthy was a fan. The masculine themes and styles they both utilize is the obvious connection, but there’s something else I can’t quite put my finger on and that, for me, is the magic of two of my favorite writers. Other writers with similar styles to those two titans are James Salter and Raymond Carver. Through their styles they create worlds we want to live in, mostly as spectators, but participants all the same. Here’s an excerpt from Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime:

Soon we are rushing along an alley of departure, the houses of the suburbs flashing by, ordinary streets, apartments, gardens, walls. The secret life of France, into which one cannot penetrate, the life of photograph albums, uncles, names of dogs that have died. And in ten minutes, Paris is gone. The horizon, dense with buildings, vanishes. Already I feel free.

Anton Chekov's Style was Characterized by Realism, a Focus on Ordinary Lives, and Indirect Action.

Again, we get yanked by our collars, pulled by the prose as if we’re being dragged by the narrator wherever that narrator wants us to go. Sometimes the commas and conjunctions in the various works make for that speed; other times it’s the dialogue, back and forth between our heroes that seem to shoot the words out of cannons in some sort of antipodal word battle. Either way, the styles of these writers create for quick reading and less breathing, which, in the hands of lesser writers, might not work. I’ve found Russian writers and their elaborate prose and philosophical exploration not so much derivative of other but more how their communication style creeps (overtakes?) their prose, in a good way. We enjoy the depth of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov; the subtle emotional complexity of Chekov’s melancholy accompanying his focusing on the ordinary lives of his characters; the musicality of Boris Pasternak’s alliteration and his interest in the human condition. This is not to say that these things are not shared by writers from around the world; they are. I find commonalities in the styles of Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, even if others might not. And I think that’s okay; whatever I pull from the styles of these writers, if it helps me, I’ll keep seeing what’s there, whether or not it is or isn’t.

And then there’s the vanilla style common in so many novels, which Wikipedia defines as “a writing style that is plain, straightforward, and lacks ornamentation or complexity.” I’m not a big fan of that style of writing when reading fiction, but like many lovers of literary fiction, I’m in the minority. Vanilla sells, as far as I can tell. A lot of the novels I’ve perused that I consider vanilla tend to be genre novels. Romance beach reads. Crime novels (not all of them, as I consider Dennis Lehane, John le Carré, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Elmore Leonard, Walter Mosley and others to have distinct styles). Legal thrillers. It’s a blanket statement—I know. But whenever I pick up a John Grisham book or a Dean Koontz novel or a Dan Brown whatever, I tune out. They may be quick reads, but they lack something . . . let’s call it flavor, that I need in order to want to read a work, and those writers don’t have it for me (no offense to them or you, if you like them). But again, vanilla sells, if done right.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is Easily Identifiable by Doyle's Use of Suspense and Intrigue.

I guess my point is that there are plenty of styles out there, and you should steal a few to see what best suits you as you develop your own. I stole Kerouac’s style until I developed my own. I know, of course, that my style is derived from the writers whose works I admire. I take a little from here, a little from there, and my final novel will be a success to me style-wise when I can’t instantly identify any of my influences. That doesn’t mean the novel will work, only that stylistically I’m good in terms of creating my own style. If you don’t already know how to figure out your distinct style, just keep at it. Read widely. Study. Learn how your favorite authors differentiate themselves. I wrote my novel, The Losses, after having read Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. In fact, I kept the story cycle on my writing desk as I wrote the six interconnected novellas that make up the book. I can see the style similarities when I read the book but not once has anyone ever mentioned it to me, which tells me I pushed her influence aside just enough to escape the large umbrella she held over my head as I wrote. If you’re having trouble coming up with your own writing style, maybe try stealing someone else’s and then making it your own. Take a passage from ten different writers. Then rewrite them to see what you come up with. Remove adjectives. Adverbs. Put some synonyms in there to change how the sentences sound. Make a woman sound masculine, a man sound effeminate. Take short sentences and make them longer. Just play around with the style and see what you come up with. You never know, you may just start writing and end up not only with your own style at the end of it but a novel to boot.

Cully Perlman is a novelist, blogger, and substantive editor. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com