Making Stylistic Changes

It worked for AC/DC

ldlago said:

Have you ever listened to a band and said, I love their music, but all their songs sound the same? If I have one self-criticism, it's that sometimes my writing seems locked in a stylistic rut. You know, ba bah, ba bah, ba bah, ba bah. Ba bah, ba bah, ba bah, ba bah, and so on. I feel like I can't break away. Maybe it's a matter of going back to basics, back to what I learned in elementary school, trying to relearn what I thought I already knew. Maybe it's that simple. Any thoughts?

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Do you mean on a book level, or a sentence level?

ldlago said:

Have you ever listened to a band and said, I love their music, but all their songs sound the same? If I have one self-criticism, it's that sometimes my writing seems locked in a stylistic rut. You know, ba bah, ba bah, ba bah, ba bah. Ba bah, ba bah, ba bah, ba bah, and so on. I feel like I can't break away. Maybe it's a matter of going back to basics, back to what I learned in elementary school, trying to relearn what I thought I already knew. Maybe it's that simple. Any thoughts?

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Well, on the one hand, songs that sound too much the same can be dull...but on the other hand, songs-that-have-a-similar-sound is the entire reason a person connects with a certain band in the first place, right? If I name a band that you recognize, you instantly know what kind of music that is. It's not a mystery that a Taylor Swift song will sound like a Taylor Swift song, or a Muse song will sound like a Muse song, or a Queen song will sound like a Queen song, or a Gogol Bordello song will sound like a Gogol Bordello song, and that's a big reason why people seek out *more* songs by Taylor Swift or Muse or Queen or Gogol Bordello or whoever, because they liked what they heard before and expect something else like it.

That said, yes, I...perhaps get what you mean? I suppose it depends on whether you mean you're using repetitive sentence structures, and all you need is to mix them up somewhat (I've heard reading aloud can sometimes help get a feel for this, if you want to try?)--or if you mean you feel stuck by your voice, your themes, your stories themselves, your characters, how you use language. Personally I feel stuck by how I sound, by what I think about, by how I construct things (or don't), by themes and characters that I can't seem to not put in. Sometimes I think, well, just embrace it. So what if this story has glaringly obvious samenesses with the last one. Now you've got a series. A thematic and stylistic common thread. A brand. Very nice. Perfect. Awesome.

Except *I'm* bored. I don't know if readers will be bored, but I am boring myself, and that, to me, is a problem. And yet, I don't know how to sound different, except this:

Read someone else's voice. Read a lot of other voices. Get absorbed in a narrative style different to yours, just for a bit. This is not to say Imitate Other People, so much as just... Remind yourself how people can and do use language, the ways that are open. (Personally, I do start to sound like someone else briefly, but I can't sustain it, even if I really tried .)

As far as relearning goes--I think we're always in a state of relearning, or we can be. Nothing is ever really settled. Every time we learn something about ourselves or the world, it's subject to change, because our understanding of everything is always imperfect. I mean, at some point you can just decide you're done relearning and stay fixed, because it's exhausting to constantly revise your reality and processes for dealing with it, but that's just a choice. You can always walk down another path. All of which is to say...just be open to things, I suppose.

If you're looking to instill movement—rhythm, and imagery—into your writing to create your own distinctive voice, I recommend checking out this book Sin & Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose by Constance Hale. I think so highly of the book that I reviewed it for the Absolute Write blog.

You might want to shift the balance between narrative, action, and dialog a bit. Go a bit more dialog heavy in some sections, and bit narrative heavy in others, and so on. That might be a simple fix to break up some of the ba-bah, ba-bah, ba-bah, ba-bahs.

For me, anyway, the cadence is different by using different ratios of these three things.

It's not an exclusive fix either--you can do it with any of the other things you try.

I notice my style is heavily influenced by what I read, watch, and listen to while I write. If I want to write with a Dickens style, I need to read it and intentionally practice writing within the text before launching on a lengthy story of my own. I read a tip that advised writing a paragraph out long hand and repeat it until that part of the brain internalizes it more. It worked at the time.

For me, it seems to help when you ask someone to come up with a neat general basis for a story for you to build on. My brother did that--he always likes to come up with stories but isn't as big on actually writing them--and I now have material for a whole novel if I choose to go with it. His story is definitely a departure from what I am used to writing, so it gets me started in a different direction.

There are segments of the story I'm working on now where my protagonist is acting alone, and there are longer stretches of narrative. That's where I'm most likely to lapse into the ba bahs. I do think your advice is sound and works well when characters are interacting.

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I have two (early) chapters of solitude for my male protagonist. It was a slog to get those chapters into a shape I was happy with, for the reason you are implying. I even wondered at one point if writing a character in solitude is more technically challenging for a new writer, because the tool of dialog is not as accessible. There was fraught stuff happening (which, funnily enough, my readers still find a bit tedious)... but the absence of any other person in the scene made it all feel a bit flat to me. Adding more action wasn't working.

I played with a bunch of devices. Short flashbacks, him talking to himself or inanimate objects, and so on. Sentence length and structure (you can find blog posts about all the ways to vary your writing from the standard composition of Subject-Verb-Object, but you probably already know that--you allude to it in your OP.)

The most satisfying solution to me in the end (in addition to leaning on some of the above) was through using Maass's emotional craft of fiction--interspersing emotional beats in these chapters. So, there was already narrative and action (and no dialog) but what helped was interspersing his moments of emotional insight, his 'aha' moments, his recognition of all the events leading up to where he was. Not backstory, but insight. He looks at the texture of a rock and in it sees a reflection of his past, all granite and erosion, pressure and heat and time. He sees his upbringing as being like that.

That sort of thing. In the end, that helped more than anything else to improve the reading experience of an otherwise 'flat' chapter or two.

2 cents, YMMV.

ldlago said:

Hey Mccardy, Thanks for the comeback. I would say, on a sentence level. I'm talking mostly about metrics and rhythm. About repetitive sounds. Almost the way you would approach poetry. I believe there should be a certain poetry in prose, so that we're not only creating imagery through narrative, but providing some pleasure to the ear through our words.

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I wondered because I have that worry sometimes, as well. One thing I have found is that I worry more about it the more I read back to check; I get quite stuck on it. But usually, when I come back to re-read after a draft, there are other things to worry about and I end up forgetting the rhythm and just fly past it. And honestly, no-one else has ever mentioned it as a negative. Perhaps the problem is minimised because I use dialogue a lot, and characters never speak in the same voice? (That might be cheating. It works, though )

But really, I suspect other readers bring their own rhythms to reading - so maybe don't worry about it until the final edits.

Good luck!

ETA: And I agree with your linkage of poetry and prose. I do love me some poetry!

ldlago said:

Mccardey, Cute dog by the way. Yours? I have a Springer. He's pushing 12. I've had him since he's 5 1/2 weeks old.

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Thank you. That's Charlie. He broke a few hearts around here unexpectedly when he had a health crisis a while ago, so I think it's safer if I just say he's gone to live on a farm in the country with all the other puppies.

I hate making writers cry.

We all change our writing style over time, don't we? We learn, gain experience, live more and therefore have more/different things to say in new ways. It's evolution.

I have a couple of books I wrote back in the 1980's squirreled away on ZIP drives... I even have ZIP drive reader stashed away somewhere down stairs, but frankly, I really don't want to look at the abomination my writing was back then. I've changed and grown, and my writing has changed, hopefully for the better.

As I said, it's evolution. Change is inevitable.

buz said:

Personally I feel stuck by how I sound, by what I think about, by how I construct things (or don't), by themes and characters that I can't seem to not put in. Sometimes I think, well, just embrace it. So what if this story has glaringly obvious samenesses with the last one. Now you've got a series. A thematic and stylistic common thread. A brand. Very nice. Perfect. Awesome.

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+1.

Everything story I write, for instance, will have a cistern in it. Whether I want it to or not. I'm just writing along and the characters will wander past a random cistern and I think, "damn, there goes another one." I've accepted it at this point.