Styles

I find it fascinating at times to think about the comparisons between art and writing. Most people consider writing to be an art form, after all, and yet it is so vividly different from a visual medium. One of the few things that they share is that in each, people have their own unique styles in which they do their work - however, I would argue that in writing that is a much more limited and structured thing than it is in art. It is much easier to emulate a writer's style than an artist's, because you can see and replicate the patterns and decisions they make much more consistently.

Style is how we do the things that we do, but it is also the end result of what we do. They're inseparable from each other, though most people will only see half of that. This is much easier to notice in art than writing - even when emulating another artist's style, your own style will distinctively remain within the art, because of the way in which you create. Even if your goal is to replicate something, if you are not following the manner in which it was created, the texture and life of your product won't match up.

This is still true of writing, but it is much easier to fudge the creation process. After all, it's not a matter of pencils versus crayons versus watercolor versus oil paint. It's all words - whether they are written or typed is irrelevant in the end. The process for a writer has more to do with the order in which things are written, what happens during the editing process, and how you think about your characters and their actions and thoughts. But chances are that the more you write, the more you will start to retread old ground, and the more the patterns of your writing will become evident, which is the part of it that is emulated. You can see the kinds of words a writer uses, the kinds of characters they write, what they prioritize in each scene. Those are things that can be copied much more easily than the shine and soul in a drawing's body - there is much less technique to it.

Which always makes it interesting to me when people talk about a writer's style, because in my mind it doesn't mean as much as an artist's does. There are absolutely writers with their own unique style, that's not what I'm arguing - read a single sentence of a Stephen King novel and you know exactly who wrote it. But to say that you can see a person's style in their writing, especially when they are new to writing and are still getting the hang of things - that is fascinating. I don't entirely understand how it happens. And I'm not saying it doesn't - I'm just saying that it is an utterly fascinating phenomenon.