if omens are a godsend, like men breezing in

[meikuree]

prelude 0.1.2.1a to a highly self-indulgent Thoughts on Writing and Style post, perpetually deferred to the land of post-graduation life:

recently queenlua brought up in a tumblr ask a good point, imo, that people's common ways of describing writing strengths focus on technical and granular aspects, like "descriptive imagery" or "dialogue". these aren't wrong or inappropriate, but they do seem to miss the bigger picture of what contributes to each person's individual strengths or brand or 'competitive advantages' (sorry, abhorrent phrase, but). not to mention that they gloss over vast amounts of internal nuance within writing strengths like "description" or "metaphors" or "plotting" and such. you'd be correct to say that both Angela Carter and Cormac McCarthy are great at vivid descriptions, but that would tell you little about, uh, the 'spirit' of their writing, and the higher-order characteristics that they deploy their descriptions towards. hell, even Angela Carter and Vladimir Nabokov, whose styles and dictions are closer cousins, are not remotely the same either. let’s disambiguate these strengths.

I thought it was a useful point for thinking more deeply about style, not just mine but others'. like many others I have style-blindness -- an inability to synthesise or conclude anything about how I write, good or bad, because I'm too close to it and the extrusions of my yucky mind swamp are just my everyday life and routine. but I do sort of know what "themes" or """motifs""" recur in my writing, and while I always suspect that the entirety of my neuroses and quirks are transparent to anyone who glances at my writing for 0.5s, with help from the many, many generous comments and feedback I've gotten over the years on my writing, I've begun to weave a higher-order image of what my writing actually does on a deeper level...

or so in theory.

the most frequent comments I hear about my writing are "beautiful", "poetic", "polished" next to "precise", "incisive", and so on. I've also gotten "you have a knack for imagery and metaphors" or similar lines. to be honest my immediate response is usually this is kind, thank you, I'm embarrassed and then surprise -- what does not having a knack for imagery and metaphors look like? what makes readers decide that something is beautiful -- what does the control for beauty / not beautiful look like, in other words? does it exist? (probably not.) without navel-gazing too much, I rarely think of myself as having a knack for anything; my style is mostly normal and functional to me. it exists, it has a rhythm and meter, it does its job. if I had the time, wherewithal, and boredom, I'd code a word cloud tool that could map frequent words on ao3 users' fic to specific tags/fandoms to figure out elements which contribute to people's perceptions of my style like so, and more.

this, btw, is not a criticism of anyone's comments anywhere -- I've just been trying to look beyond technical strengths into understanding the motors of my style.

that's the extent of any articulate thoughts I have, so I'll end with a rough list of how my style has evolved for better or worse over the years:

• I have a better instinct for when description can/should be functional vs. evaluative (or blur the lines)
• better word economy and willingness to simplify my diction
• cadence and rhythm: an instinct for when to stop or not, which I've been told makes my writing easy to read
• better at "gathering" folds of trite description up into higher-order descriptions

and here's what I want to work on or wish I was better at:

1. being a style chameleon: the ability to adapt my writing style to the tone of whatever book/show/canon I'm writing for, or to write somewhat-decent pastiches
2. character voices: settling a reader into a character's viewpoint well, without having fic come off as "this is obviously meikuree ventriloquising Character X" as opposed to just "this is Character X"
3. the ability to make almost every other line/paragraph provoke a response of "this is a well-crafted and observed character or canon detail" or to spark an undeniable jolt of recognition and resonance
4. writing funnier shit

I've thought about 1 on the back of watching We are Lady Parts and brainstorming how, if I ever wrote WALP fic, I'd want to work in the show's genre-bending characteristics and borrow tones and registers from Western novels to crime thrillers to Broadway musicals to represent that. and then, of course, we cross into the territory of what a Saira-voice or Ayesha-voice in fic would look like, and if their referents would revolve more around butcher shops, Uber driving regulations, satirical workplace sitcoms, underground punk scenes, and so on...

4 mostly comes from me musing that I'm probably a much more irreverent and unserious person IRL than the impression my writing gives (serious, moody, melancholic). maybe one of these days I'll finally be able to get into one of those funny American sitcom fandoms.

at the risk of immodesty, I also just want to share that I still think this is my favourite summary I've written to date, from my fic for Exordia by Seth Dickinson:

But that was how she grew up: Arîn, daughter of everyone, favourite of nobody, a communal product. The first patriot of democratic confederalism. She hadn’t been taught to abandon Tawakul in times of trouble.

Comments

[meikuree]

aw, I'm glad if it was fascinating &/ thought-provoking! I think I'm a shaky judge of how I'm doing with writing at any time, as anyone always is, but writing it all out (lol) helps.