Eventually you won’t be thinking about style
16 February 2013
Eventually you won’t be thinking about style very much at all. Style will be a word that other people use to describe words that have come to you, and words you have spent time seeking to make your characters live their visible and invisible lives.
John Casey
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Well said. Once you’ve been writing long enough, you don’t think about your voice, you just write it.
…I never thought about “voice.” Well, not mine, anyway. I try to think about the characters’ voices. That’s the important thing.
This!
Depends entirely on what you’re writing.
I think about style and voice all the time, because most of my fiction involves characters from invented cultures, and I have to put across to the reader the alien elements in those cultures whilst keeping things within easy comprehension, and I have to do this entirely by my use of language. What’s more, there are usually characters from multiple invented cultures, which clash with one another to varying degrees, and these clashes are irreducible elements in the plot; so I have to convey these multiple cultures and the differences between them by my use of language; and I have to make it plausible that the characters would misunderstand one another, or simply not get one another’s meaning at all, yet do it in a way that doesn’t cause the reader to miss out on what any one of them is saying. And none of these voices can be simply taken as equivalent to my own default prose style when writing in propria persona.
All this is simplicity itself compared to the tasks that some writers set themselves. If you want a really good example, try The Book of the New Sun, or indeed, anything by Gene Wolfe. There is a writer who has to attend to style every moment and in every word and phrase, because style, and the collision between styles, is how he builds his world — and also how he tips off the reader when the narrator is lying.