A seminar came up at my local writers’ centre on style. Writing style, obviously - I think at this stage of my life it’s too late to do anything about my sense of fashion.
My gut reaction was, Well I already have a fairly distinct writing voice, is it worth my while? Followed by an immediate mental rebuke saying Are you crazy, you mean to say you know everything there is to know about style?
Style is an incredibly complex issue which melds the building blocks of writing into a whole. It says something more than the content and appeals to a targeted audience; not that dissimilar to couture, I suppose. Diction, tone, sentence structure, voice: all of these go into the pot. If one element jars with another the outcome is unbalanced, at best resulting in comedy, at worst in complete confusion.
Fair enough, so as writers we’re to decide where to pigeonhole ourselves, hone our voice and style and market and brand our little hearts out. But why do so many writers have more than one voice? Surely that’s an exercise in overcapitalizing. A crime writer wanting to branch out into children’s writing will most likely come up with a fresh pen name, a new image, new website, new following and clientele, new everything to go with the new voice needed for such a switch. Not only that, but readers are partisan. They’ll buy a book from an author they know but will think very hard before they fork out for work by a name they’ve never heard of. Perfect point in question would be J.K. Rowling’s publication of The Cuckoo’s Calling under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, which sold somewhere between 500 and 1500 copies before the connection was leaked, after which sales jumped 4000% within days. Wouldn’t it be easier and more economical to stick with the initial investment?
Of course it would. The problem is we get bored. Sticking solely to one voice or style is a bit like the ‘impossible and ridiculous’ questions my kids pose to me sometimes. ‘If you had to eat one meal for the rest of your life, what would it be?’ Substitute ‘play one sport’, ‘wear one colour’, ‘go to one beach’ or (more strangely) ‘be one fruit’. They chide me when I remonstrate: I’m not going to do that, why would you even contemplate it? No, but if you had to choose! They insist. This is the choice we’re so often supposed to make as writers. Now, I like pasta with a good sauce but I’ll be jiggered if I eat it every day of my life. Call me uncommitted, but I’ll keep wriggling out of that pigeonhole. And I’ll definitely try to get to that seminar.
(First published on Writers Abroad blog, March 2015)