Voice and Style: A Question, A Case Study, A Ritual
I received a question for my occasional writing advice series that helped me to think through these questions.
I’ve been reading guidelines for places I would like to submit my work and so many of them mention that they are looking for a writer who has a distinctive “style”. What is “style” and how do I know if I have it, or how to develop it if I don’t?
Style is a combination of language and form. Style relates to the words you choose and the form you use. Through language and form, you conjure a world.
This doesn’t mean that style is always noticeable, or excessive. Sometimes, style is about what is left out, pared-down, and invisible.
If you have style, the world you create is all your own, even if it might seem eerily familiar to ours.
How might you figure out a style? You start word by word, page by page, building slowly, incrementally, and intuitively.
You unearth your work like an archaeologist discovers treasures, or a farmer pulls up crops.
Case Study: Excessive Female Voice
When I wrote my short horror experiment The Luminol Reels, I wanted my style to convey “excessive female voice”.
I wanted to interrogate the value judgments and assumptions in that constellation of words, even as I used it to guide my writing.
I knew that I wanted it to be messy and chaotic, a story about gendered violence that was also about the violence of gender. I was writing about dead girls who weren’t necessarily dead, and weren’t always girls. A meditation on femicide that refused a didactic position. That was my hope.
To convey this, I chose a style. My style was influenced by extreme vocal performers such as Pharmakon, Sonny and Linda Sharrock, Evangelista, Runhild Gammelsæter, and Eugene S. Robinson of Oxbow.
These were artists who performed gender and violence with virtuoso control.
I didn’t expect to achieve what these performers had done in an entire career by just listening to their work. I immersed myself in their practices through seeing them perform live or on video, by writing down their cadences, and letting the imagery come to me.
I felt my way into excessive female voice. I discovered derangement as both precise critique and emotional expression.
Ritual
Almost a decade ago (!) I taught Kim Hyesoon’s Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream to an undergraduate experimental writing class, and we explored her idea of using magic words in poetry. Some of her words were:
Death
Woman
South Korea
You
Seoul
Absence
Illness
Rats
Poetry
I invited students to bring the last several pieces they had written and some coloured pens to discover their own magic words.
If you would like to do this, you can begin right now! Take out the last 3-5 things you wrote (these can be in your notebook or on your computer, in books or magazines, or wherever you keep your most precious work). Create a paper version of the work, if possible. Take a favourite coloured pen, it can be anything you have to hand, but if you have a special pen (and who doesn’t), then take that pen out to begin the ritual.
Find words and phrases that repeat across the different pieces. This is especially helpful if they are different types of work (a poem, a scene for a novel, an essay plan, a spell, an outline for a newsletter) so you can see how your magic words occur without you realising, from your unconscious, and into the work.
Make a list of the 15-20 words or phrases that stand out to you, either because they recur, or because they give you a tingle of electricity when you read them. They are the lighting-in-a-bottle that powers your work.
Then, narrow this list down to 5-7 words. They are your magic words. They are what is currently guiding you, and they contribute to your style.
If you want to take it further, you can write your 5-7 magic words on pieces of coloured paper. Burn each one in a candle flame. How do the flames change? How does the paper smell? Which colour burns fastest? What will you do with the ash?