(Some posts deserve another airing. Thought I’d share this again from July, 2013)
Most of the authors that I have interviewed are avid readers like myself. We seem to all agree that is what makes us better writers. I was reading Caroline
Leavitt’s, ‘Is This Tomorrow’ and it struck me how very different our writing styles are. Caroline writes pages of beautiful, meaningful description with a few lines of dialogue. Much like Edna Ferber did.
My fiction has tons of dialogue (probably as a result of my being a playwright) and just enough description to set the time, location and who my characters are. I have to repeatedly check myself to make certain that I am giving my readers enough description.
Why am I telling you about this? I need to be sure that you realize that there is no WRONG way. If you tend to write in story telling form, a narrative, that’s great! If, like me, you write a lot of dialogue and let that method tell the reader what your characters are doing, what the weather is like, who just showed up at the house, who she/he is in love with, who died, (well, you get the idea). That’s okay too.
Aspire to write better every day….but don’t worry about your ‘style’, if it turns out that an author you really respect writes differently than you do. It’s a DIFFERENT style but that doesn’t mean that your writing style is wrong. Or that their writing is right. It’s just about style, and what we feel comfortable writing.
If you are more a descriptive writer be certain that you keep your paragraphs short. Don’t ramble on and on in one paragraph. The eye of the reader needs a rest.
And double, triple check your grammar!
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