Philosophy of Craft, Part 3 – Style
Abdulmajeed Al.mutawee || twitter.com/almutawee / Foter
In part three of my continuing series about writing, I’ll be talking about style—not belt-matching-shoes style (because God knows I’m no authority on that subject)—but style in the sense of the technical things in my writer’s toolkit. I promise not to get too technical.
POV
My tendency is to write in Third Person Omniscient point of view. This means that a disconnected narrator is telling the story. He (or she) has the singular ability to pop into and out of characters’ heads at will. There’s a reason this POV is the most commonly used one: It gives the writer the greatest power and control. The downside is that, for some readers, it also operates pretty far from the characters. When someone reads a book and peppers their critique with “too much telling, not enough showing” or “lots of infodumps”, chances are good the author has used Third Person Omniscient, and that has not settled well with the reader. I try to keep my voice very active, and when I feel I’m moving too far away from my characters, I’ll interject bits of internal monologue or even switch to a more limited point of view to draw them back in.
Voice
A writer’s voice is something unique to the author. It’s the way they construct sentences, the vocabulary they use, the cadence of their narrative. To me, writing is a form of poetry. It should feel good, and it should sound good—talking came before writing, after all. I listen to everything I write at least four times, polishing with each pass. I listen for things like repetition, stuttering text, passive voice, typographical errors, and confusing point of view. I also cut out in-between text and listen very carefully to dialogue to make sure the speakers have their own voice, unique from mine and each other.
In the end, if it sounds right to my own ears, I’ll stick a fork in it.
Vocabulary
I have an extensive one that stems from my love of language. I revel in obscure words, and I like using language in surprising ways. In other words…. I don’t dumb it down. I do, however, use this sparingly—there’s a danger the reader will be yanked out of the story, and I don’t want that. I don’t put big words in to make me look smart—I’m not, by the way—but, there are occasions when I’ll choose an obscure, polysyllabic monstrosity specifically for cadence sake. It’s there because I like the way it sounds. As long as the meaning can be intuited from context, I figure readers are generally smart folks and won’t mind.
As style goes, these are the biggies for me. Whether I’m writing a whodunit, a thriller, an historical romance, my voice will always feature prominently. If it didn’t, it just wouldn’t be me.
Stay tuned for the next entry—It’s all about SEX!
