Writing: Bjarke Ingels on style · 1:30am Jan 4th, 2014
Most writers worry at some point about developing their own style. I don't want to have my own style. I think each story calls for a different style. Writers with distinctive styles, like Hemingway, tend to write stories that are as similar to each other as their style is.
In an NPR interview today, architect Bjarke Ingels said something similar about not having a style. Of other architects, he said, "Their style is the sum of their inhibitions." I can relate this to writing: Hemingway, afraid to look closely at thoughts and feelings, instead describes the wetness of a man's shirt and the texture and weight of the mud on his shoes. Borges, afraid of taking himself too seriously, skims over his stories, skimping more on detail the more serious the story is. Bradbury, afraid to admit that not all feelings are universal, won't develop characters distinct beyond "boy", "man", and "woman".
And me? I'm afraid of lingering and boring the reader, even though lingering over details is often the way to interest the reader. I learned that while writing "Mortality Report" (see my interview for details), and again during my exercises "Severus Spike" and "The Ones who Walk Away From Equestria", when I tried to rewrite someone else's story. Probably I still need to learn it several more times. Both "Severus Spike" and "The Ones who Walk Away From Equestria" came out one-third the length of the original that I copied from. JK Rowlings has the courage to keep on writing past the minimum needed to describe the scene and the action, a faith that her readers love her characters and want all the details.
I'm afraid of sentimentality and shallowness, so I write dark and sad stories. I'm afraid of commitment, so I write one-shots. What else am I afraid of? What are you afraid of?
The flip answer would be "I'm afraid readers will think my stuff is even worse than I think it is," but that's just a bit facile.
I do like that "sum of [one's] inhibitions" description: I've noticed that there's a very distinct brick wall at the far end -- at least, I think it's the far end -- of whatever subsection of the universe I'm working in, and I tend to get antsy, then neurotic, and finally pathological as I approach it. I'm sure this constrains me in all manner of ways, but I have no idea what to do about it without going full gonzo, and I never go full gonzo.
Hm.
I worry constantly when writing, but those worries don't seem to be directly related to my hang-ups. I guess I'm not organized enough with my insecurities.
Things that I worry about
- My action scenes being too confusing
- My chronic inability to write paragraphs longer than four lines
- Stale and repetitive sentences
- My writing getting too florid (contrasting oddly with the two above)
Odd hang-ups that are only occasionally related to the things I worry about
- I almost never write in anything but limited third-person perspective, or in past tense.
- Aside from my first few stories, I almost never use any sort of exposition. If I don't show something, it didn't happen.
- The damnable attraction of short sentences that are paragraphs unto themselves.
After having the dangers of "Lavender Unicorn Syndrome" beaten into my skull, I'm afraid to refer to a character as anything but their name or a pronoun, because I've been taught that you should only refer to them by other stuff if that other stuff is relevant to the context of the story at that moment, and I'm not really sure when that is. Thoughts?
1679792 when writing what parts of your stories are you worried about writing stale and repetitive sentences, and when, in contrast, do you worry that your writing is too florid?
I know that the scenes that make me the most nervous are the sentimental ones.
I do plenty of humor, of course, but I'm good at it because humor has been the shield in front of my own emotions for so long. Doing a good sentimental scene involves making yourself vulnerable. If there's authenticity in the feelings on the page, there's probably something of yourself in them, and you're confessing them to the reader.
Doing something sad with ponies can also be an exercise in keeping that shield up. So many of the sad fics follow certain conventions, in the sense that they talk about things that we can all safely and impersonally agree are sad in concept. Death, anger between friends, or a few other things can (and I want to emphasize can, because you can also do the same subjects in a very personal way) be talked about without making it personal--without the author making themselves vulnerable.
Making a really gut-punchingly sad story about Twilight Sparkle's friends dying requires the author to really dig into their own wells of fear of being alone, fear of the void, and personal loss, and use that to touch those wells in the audience. Or be very, very studied and practiced at string-pulling, but that's a caveat that sort of runs through the whole discussion.
Anyway, doing something sentimental for me is terrifying, but it's also liberating. Publishing it gives me that singing feeling of stepping out into the void. Once it's committed and out of my hands, there is a certain serenity to it. Most importantly, though, because there's more of myself in it, any success it has is so very, very much more rewarding.
I'm afraid...huh. I'm afraid of the reader taking me too seriously. I'm afraid of being held accountable for my stories, though, perversely, I crave it, too. Thus my style tends towards the self-deprecating, in a way. Gently self-mocking. The exceptions is Twilight Sparkle Makes a Cup of Tea (which has its own style), Hoofprints (which is weird), and On The Nature of War (which I wrote in its own style but then defused at the very end with an arch ironic twist).
I'm also afraid of the reader looking at a story and going "Yes? And?" Afraid of the story being too insubstantial, too pointless. That's why my stories tend to have a filigree of jokes, nods, winks, and careful turns of phrase. I'm afraid that unless I keep that going, the reader will just up and leave.
Popular opinion aside, I'm not against things sad or dark, but I do have a problem with bleakness. I don't handle hopelessness well in real life (and heavens know I've a surfeit of it) and this transfers to fiction, too.
But all of that said, I don't think it's quite right to say that my style is the sum of my inhibitions. Oh, certainly, it's a glib phrasing and very clever, but I don't think it is universally applicable. I can shift styles when the story calls for it easily enough, for instance, but I think it is clear that I still have a style. But that style, for all that I've written above, isn't really defined by what I fear that much[1]. It's more defined by how I see the world. For me, reality comes with footnotes and an attitude of gentle and utterly benign mockery, especially self-mockery, is the only way to cope with it.
[1] It's a way to model it, sure, but, really, I'm cheery-picking the data something fierce. I mean, I worry that my stories are horrible, that they are of interest to nobody, and that people have been hitherto humoring me but will soon reveal that they know I am an impostor. This is pretty much my overriding fear, and yet it doesn't really influence my style. It just makes me miserable. Not all fears translate to style alterations. Those that do, I contend, are merely the reflection of a deeper personal trait that informs both the fear and the style.
1679792
So, is your writing being too florid something you actively dread, or is it just something to consider? And does it impact your style[2]?
[2] I'd say yes, maybe. I always found your style pellucid. You say precisely what you set out to, with a minimum of fuss and wasted effort. I've always quite admired that, even more so because it is quite the opposite of how I write.
1679958
I am intrigued by your comments about sentimentality. I can certainly understand the discomfort with writing sentiment. It's always a bit like taking shards of yourself and putting them out there, slightly anonymized, for all to see.
This blog/question deserves a serious answer, but I've been in a car for 12 hours today and I'm not prepared to give one.
What I can perhaps do, is address 1679818 's question about referring to characters by name/pronoun/descriptors, which is sort of off-topic but more easily handled, I think.
The way I view it, advice about how to refer to characters can get lumped into a more general piece of advice: don't ask your reader to devote cognitive resources to something that isn't important. Beyond a basic need for sentence diversity and clarity of action, names, pronouns, and the word 'said' all place very little cognitive demand on the reader. They're unlikely to cause confusion and misunderstanding; they're unlikely to provoke a loss of immersion as the reader tries to figure out what's going on with your writing. Generally speaking, you want readers immersed as deeply as possible in a story.
But a story that's a pure mess of names, pronouns, and said-tagged dialogue can get boring pretty quickly, too, by lack of variety—and this is where the balancing act comes in. It's perfectly reasonable to refer to characters by some sort of descriptive phrase, as long as you're prepared to pay the price in reader attention for making that choice. If you do it too often, your reader is going to disengage and ditch your story. But using it occasionally can help you establish traits you want your reader to have in mind about your characters. If Twilight's decision-making process in a story is going to depend on her neuroticism, it may be reasonable to designate her with phrases that play up that side of her personality so the reader has it in mind when it later becomes important for characterization, for her actions feeling in character.
Generally speaking, I think there are usually better ways of dropping these sorts of hints, especially if you're working inside a 3rd limited or 1st person voice. It's often easier, I think, to communicate this sort of advance characterization by massaging the way a character views events unfolding around them. But that doesn't mean you can't do productive work with descriptive character designations, and I can definitely see how they might prove more useful in a 3rd omniscient voice.
The important thing, though, I think, is that any time you write something your reader has to decipher, it comes at a cost. You're distancing the reader from your story. Sometimes, that can be worthwhile. Sometimes (cf. Iain M. Banks), confusing your readers can actually be a great narrative device. Sometimes (cf. Kim Stanley Robinson, though YMMV) it can become such a barrier that readers just decide it's not worth reading your work. So the real key, in my opinion, is recognizing the cost and deciding whether you think it's worth paying for a particular passage to be written a particular way.
I worry that a lot of my scenes really only serve to set up other scenes or plot points down the line, and don't really "say" anything on their own. So, I try to justify each scene, either with thematics or by exploring little character moments.
And as a result, I then wind up feeling like the story is meandering and/or overstating everything. So I'm never safe.
I'm afraid that I just plain suck at this, and you all know it but are too polite to say anything. Yet I can take comfort in knowing that pretty much everyone has that same fear, so at least I'm not weird. (Though I still think I might suck)
Inhibitions? That seem like it might refer to a writer's overall style, but that needs to be distinguished from the style of particular works, does it not?
1680138
I'm normally pretty spare with my writing, but every once in a while I'll go off on a lark and get fancy with my prose. It then falls to my editors to lasso me back to earth. Usually we meet somewhere in the middle, with some fancy prose but not so much that it distracts from the narrative.
1679889
It normally depends on the mood I'm trying to set. For example, this bit from Carnivore's Prayer, uses very simple and direct writing:
Other times, particularly toward the end of a story, when everything comes together and I want to leave the reader with an emotional impression of the entire story, I'll start employing rhetorical devices like repetition or parallelism. Here's a pair of examples from the endings of The Glass Blower (repeated use of "he worked") and Lost Cities (parallel structure):
As much as I firmly believe that simple, direct sentences (and, by extension, paragraphs and prose) are the best way to write, I also believe that rhetorical devices do have a place in writing. My worry, as noted above, is that I'll lose track of where those places are, and use the wrong ones at the wrong times.
1680138
I think you put your finger right on what I was approaching from another direction when you talk about being held accountable for your stories.
You can't repudiate those little shards of yourself. You can say it was never there, but if you were honest enough to put it in in the first place, you're also honest enough that you'll never be able to fool yourself.
When the reader holds you accountable for a story with one of those little shards, they are, unavoidably, passing judgement on some part of yourself that you thought was important enough to wrap in a story. That makes the highs of praise higher, and the lows of attacks lower. Something, as you said, to be afraid of, and to crave all at once.
In my opinion, a "Style" is simply a set of tools in the toolbox that an author does not wish to pick up and use. One thing I've admired about Bad Horse is something I've attempted to emulate; he's not afraid to pick up a tool and use it, even if the result looks a little funny. An author with sharply defined style simply has perfected their use of a certain limited number of tools at the expense of any ability to use any of the others, much like a physician specializing in the left nostril.
1680272 And that's one of the frustrating things about reading your stuff. You can describe in a sentence what takes me several paragraphs to describe, and make it real. Seriously, your Lost Cities stuff gives me the chills. (and makes me up my game, which is great. Keep it up.)
1680164 On Lavender Unicorn Syndrome (LUS): I've written a couple fics with multiple viewpoints, and generally LUS can be avoided by just using the character's name more often. Although it did flare up a bit when I was using a long character name (Green Grass), which looks 'funny' when repeated, so he gets called, the tutor, the stallion, or just 'he' a lot. With *six* female main characters, just using 'she' tends to be extremely vague, so using dialogue to differentiate between them without using names is doable.
"Y'all gonna come help me, or what?"
"Darling, I can't go out there. It's covered in dirt."
"Actually that's a well-packed silty clay loam with a high percentage of silica, so it should hold your weight without hoofprints."
"If I draw a hopscotch board on it, will you cross then?"
"I suppose I could just fly over. If that's all right with you. Is it?"
"What are you all waiting on? I've been over here for hours waiting on you slowpokes."
1680164 thanks. So basically, use those sorts of things if the information provided to the reader outweighs the resulting amount of disimmersion? (I know that's not a word.)
1680272 so to sum your philosophy (a good philosophy to have, I might add.) up in a trite phrase, one should "Use fancier writing in select places to really sell the story"?
1680437
I wouldn't say that's my whole philosophy, but it's probably a good reflection of my view toward rhetoric in prose :)
Somewhat unrelated, but I can answer your question from the interview regarding your jobs:
The pattern is that you have infiltrated every single important government organization and are secretly a mad scientist bent on world destruction or domination, or a hero, trying to save the world from inside the system.
One of the two.
Someday, we will fight over Australia, and it will be glorious.
Anyway, regarding the ACTUAL BLOG POST:
I really don't know. I like trying a lot of things. I presently have a variety of stories I'm working on, including a romance, a comedy, a serious story, a narrative, a serious-seeming short-story that is actually 7k words setting up for a terrible pun, and... another romance hits on some random other things. Oh, and a game.
As far as you...
I dunno what you're afraid of. Well, other than being happy. And your master plan not succeeding in killing/saving everyone.
That's an interesting point. Is it really the case, though?
Maybe you like to focus on a particular theme or subject in a one-shot instead. If so, what would you fill a novel-length story with?
1680427 Or if you feel that to be the case—yes, I'd say that's a fair recapitulation of what I think on the subject.
1680331 I generally agree with you on this, and I rarely find the cost to be worth paying in my own writing. There are too many good ways to deliver characterization that effectively don't cost any reader immersion, and outright description as name substitute can easily turn heavy-handed and intrusive.
I suspect, though don't know, that proper names work like the word 'said' in that the eye basically just skips over them during reading. I've only recently gotten comfortable enough in my own writing to start using 'said' regularly instead of constantly falling back on action-tagging dialogue. I think the word may show up more in "Three Nights" than in everything I've written on Fimfiction thus far, combined. I'm tempted to start experimenting with more regular use of proper names. I'm also tempted to go looking at some professional fiction and seeing what the usage rate looks like among some of my favorite authors.
I am terrified of losing any respect I have among those I know, and it is paralyzing. It makes it borderline impossible to look at anything I write down and not want destroy it as trash. And I have yet to be able to do anything without having someone there to at least keep an eye on me.
1681283 dude, that's pretty harsh. Why do you think you feel this way?
1681290
I have never felt particularly comfortable with writing to begin with. Unpleasant memories of writing exercises from when I was in school do not help matters.
Mostly though I have simply always viewed myself as unimaginative, and as such have felt that my few forays into writing were equally so. Recent developments within the fandom's writing community have been successfully challenging that view however. My recent working with Kobalstromo and Hyzaku (Hyzaku in particular, see the story Apprentice Ship, in which I worked with him fairly closely for it's second half.) Both have also strongly encouraged me to try my own hand at the craft.
I'm afraid of leaving stones unturned and not exploring an avenue or angle. So all of my story ideas tend to grow to huge proportions in my head. I can't really write one-shots because of this and because I always form much stronger attachments to longer stories, whether or not they're fics.
I'm also afraid of getting it wrong the first time and getting started, so my story page is pretty sparse. I'm trying to fix that as a bit of a goal for the new year.
1680138
You could create a new account to post a story. Once you have enough faith in it, you can let people know about it in a blog from your main account. Avoid your fears and satisfy your cravings at the same time.
I am afraid of writing any perspective other than first person, happy endings, exposition, be conjugations, and stories longer than two-thousand words. I am concerned about my tendency to over-saturate stories with theme, my inability to create vivid characters, and my stilted dialogue.
I'm afraid of being inarticulate, being misunderstood, and being laughed at by the cool kids.
Of being inarticulate: Ever since I was small I've had trouble communicating with people. I thought this was due to a lack of language skills, so I've worked hard every day for half a century to be articulate, concise, eloquent and even witty in speech and writing. Helas! My trouble had nothing to do with language skills and everything to do with a condition called autism which, in my childhood, people associated only with profoundly disturbed children. Communication, as we now know, is not so much a matter of how well we speak or write as one of looks, height, tone of voice, and above all the unconscious way in which we perceive and respond to the emotions of those around us. It is an innate skill, unteachable and only imitable with long effort and inferior result, as actors who learn stage fencing may imitate, but not compete with Olympic fencers.
So here I am stuck with a bunch of language skills as outdated as blacksmithing. Yet still I go on banging out horseshoes.
Of being misunderstood: I am so afraid of saying something unintentionally stupid, even to the perception of those very dull of ear and mind, that I am inclined to ruin the grace of a line, the power of a phrase through superfluous conditionals and specificties. "Overdetermining the system, " as we rude mechanicals call it: tying something down so firmly against breakage that it breaks.
I struggle against this at every line. Fortunately I have very clever prereaders--or is that so fortunate, actually? Well it's pleasant at any rate.
Of being laughed at by the cool kids: Again, since I was small I've held enthusiasms and fascinations which very few shared. So of course I fell in with the geeks. At twelve I attended the first Star Trek convention in southern California and since then I've been dropping down the ladder rung by rung 'til I wound up here, in a place no cool kid would admit to knowing anything about much less visiting.
Freed from the stress of their regard I find I'm writing more and better than I ever have. Once you've landed in the gutter, there's no reason not to be looking at the stars.
1680138
What's said in jest is often meant in earnest. That's a line I first encountered in The Canterbury Tales and even there Chaucer uses it as a long-established truism.
I don't think any reasonably perceptive reader could confuse unserious tone with unserious intent.
1683538
Heck, that's how I ended up writing my poni books. I got the first thing I wrote for the fandom into EqD, and rather than try to go farther with that I thought I'd do a clop idea I liked. Immediately it became obvious that I could do it however I wished, because not even bronies would take it seriously, and the worst likely to happen was mockery, which happened within the first comment or so. I have nothing else of significance to lose.
Then, folks started to notice what was being done there, even while the rest of that continued to be true. And with a few obvious (better yet, articulate and literate) fans, my Applejack-ness kicked in, and I got down to work as I understand it.
Five books later…