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WillisAuthor
May '19

What is a Writing Style?

It is the most important and precious thing a writer or author owns. This is what helps us illustrate, immerse, and communicate beyond the normal means of writing. The style each of us has textures us as unique in the ocean of authors out there in the world. It is the flavor we experience when we read between Neil Gaiman, Nora Roberts, J.K. Rowling, JRR Tolkien, Stephanie Meyers, Anne Rice, Stephen King, and so on. Not one of their writing styles feel like the others.

Granted I can’t tell you how to write your story, but I can give you the tools to develop your writing into something stronger. Make you aware of issues and elements that make up a writing style as a whole. I cannot express the importance in developing your own unique voice for storytelling or even conveying information. As a reminder, this is only my own personal advice and thoughts. My goal is simply to share my methods in hopes that it proves useful to other writers and dreamers.

Also, I am so sorry for the length and heaviness of this particular Writing Tips segment. I wanted to break things out so it would be easier to chew, but I can’t imagine not including all of these puzzle pieces that I believe help someone develop their writing style and strengthen their ability to share their story.

Showing versus Telling

Scouring the internet for writing advice and you are going to see the phrase “Show, not tell” a billion times. If you are lucky they give you a great example of what they mean by this phrase. When you are “Telling” in a sentence, paragraph, or even with in dialogue, it can feel detached to a reader. It also can feel like grade school writing or reading as well, where there’s a lack of emotion or sense of being there in the story with the characters or world. When a writer has a well-developed writing style, they pull the reader in by “Showing” us what’s going on in the world and especially their characters. Let’s dive a little deeper and give you some examples of “Telling” and ideas of how you can change it into “Showing”. In short, showing should take advantage of the senses so the reader can relate and interact with the scene or moment.

Example One – Telling:
I sat on the boulder in silence and it was winter time.

Example One – Showing:
Deafened by my thoughts, I sat there on an old boulder, its stone cold and wet with ice where I touched it.

Notice how instead of writing “silence” that its shown by the sensation of the main character being “…deafened by [his] thoughts.” Again, a similar shift happens with the word “winter” where it is expressed with “…cold and wet with ice.” Take a moment and in your mind compare the pictures and sensations created by each version. As a reader, which one put you into the story better? Notice how telling a scene has a bland and disconnected feel as a reader versus showing. When you show in a sentence, you allow the reader to explore the story with their senses: touch, smell, taste, ears and eyes.

Example Two – Telling:
“Aren’t you cold?” The young child asked, interrupting my thoughts. “Are you lost?”

Example Two – Showing:
“Aren’t you cold?” A small voice took me from my thoughts as I failed to break my glare from the dagger. “Are you lost?”

Here I has expressed how telling versus showing in dialogue can make a huge difference. Once more, the depth of immersion and pull on the reader is drastically different. As the writer, should be focused on showing the reader what’s going on, not leave the details vague or worse void of imagery. You can hear a tiny voice, and often we assume someone small or a child. In the telling version, we know his thoughts were interrupted but nothing more. In the showing, the voice “took” the character from his thoughts, but he was still staring at an object of interest. This paints a completely different tone and story. Showing was able to use the reader’s sense of hearing, sight, and touch.

Consistency

I cannot express the importance of being consistent within your writing piece and story. Nothing irks a reader more than when some part of a story gets changed. This is anywhere from the way a character is described to recalling an event or element incorrectly. Do not be afraid to double check, and don’t assume you remember what you put in Chapter One is what really is in Chapter One.

Another way to be inconsistent is how a name or something is spelled. This covers both fictional or self-made words to actual words. For example, colour versus color. They are both correct, but be sure to pick one, and stick to only that one throughout the entire written piece! Shifting how you spell something will break a reader out of the story or cause the reading to jolt or be clunky.

Lastly, be consistent on how you represent numbers within your written piece. It doesn’t matter if you use “32” or “thirty-two”, as long as all the numerics are represented in the same manner. My recommendation is to always write them out in their word form. Being a very visual person, I find the intrusion of 123 disrupting to my reading flow and breaks me out of my story as if someone threw ice water on me. I know that seems weird, but if you scan over all these paragraphs, you will notice the numbers contained within this one look misplaced and awkward. Another issue in consistency can be formatting. If all the thoughts your character are italicized then DO NOT deviate from that, just like with the issue involving your numbers.

NEXT WEEK PART 2: POV or Perspective including First, third and so forth...

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bjwebb
May '19

With all respect to @WillisAuthor, I'm going to offer a different viewpoint in the showing vs telling debate.

Like most writing advice, there are no absolute answers and it's complicated. "Show don't tell" if often a necessary lesson as we're first learning to be storytellers. The trouble is, it can (and often is) taken too far. Too much telling will absolutely create a flat, bland, story. But too much showing can cause other problems.

Let's talk about the boulder in winter. Yes, the second example gives tactile, sensory images for the reader. Yes, it will ground the reader in the scene. But if the information you actually wanted to communicate is that it's winter, this example doesn't do that. We know the boulder is cold, wet, and icy, but I've sat on cold, wet, icy boulders in spring and in fall. And on one notable trip to Norway, I've done so in summer.

The thing about showing is that it depends on the reader and the writer sharing a context. The cues you give when you show have to be understood by the reader. Some cues are more universal than others. Different cultures, for example, express emotions in very different ways. If I want to "show" a character being angry, if I rely entirely on physical expressions seen by my PoV character, I risk readers not necessarily understanding if they aren't conversant in those particular physical cues.

Showing also usually requires more words, and some details are important enough to mention, but not important enough to bear the weight of a roundabout description. Sometimes brevity will give you more of a punch.

Finally--and this applies mostly to speculative fiction--sometimes it's just easier to tell something. I've seen writers tie themselves in knots trying to "show" some detail of worldbuilding or a fantastical element of the setting that it would have been easier to just give a brief narrative description, in and out, and move on.

Novels are a narrative art. In a sense, every word we write is telling, because that's what we're doing. We're telling a story! Don't be afraid of your narrative voice.

So that's my entirely uninvited counterpoint. :wink:

GesuGesu
May '19

I love starting in media res, and skip trying to introduce from the beginning to get to the meat of the story faster. The beginning can be revisited in the form of flashbacks.

This saves me time and allows me to build characters a bit easier.

WillisAuthor
May '19
bjwebb

Exactly! It's how we balance and filter "show vs tell" that's the real magic. I know first time writers need to take the time to explore how to show a scene then, like you've covered in your response, learn when the need to tell in order to move the story and reader along.

Learning how your writing looks in show format versus the default telling is something that needs to be established for many. It's when we revise and edit our work that we may need to make the choice to flip areas of the story as "tell" and tighten it back into a neat package or see that we've glossed over some great action and need to flip from telling to "show" what is unfolding.

And it's not uninvited. I start these as a manner or let's discuss it and explore advice from several viewpoints.