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?
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.