Writing Style (by sarah)
Having writen yesturdays post I felt I should write this post which I have been meaning to do for awhile.
I get told at writing groups anf clsses that I've been too that I have a distinctive style, Alaric had reackoned that it was bordering on Cyber punk and has therefore been steadily giving me books such as Nueromancer and Snow Crash to read. And yes it was close to my style but not quiet write, the dark intensity still wasn't there, I have to try and water the intensity down if I want the story to be a noval. People kept telling me that I had such a unique and strong style. I felt that I had seen it somewhere else but couldn't quiet place it.
I then thought it was time I got through my back log of books I'd been meaning to read for ages. Amoungst these books was one of those old thine penguine books that my friend had given me after seeing me hungrily devour Forty-Nine Steps on our last field trip - I had finished my book and several other peoples as my back had gone so had to be stuck in the coach whilst everybody else was crawling over rock faces. I'd picked up the slim orange book in the youth hostel and read it avidly.
This book was green and was called The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler and I opened it and my writing voice, my 'unique' style echoed back off the page at me. Thinking I was perhapse being arrogant I took it too Alaric and he agreed this was my writing style though without the scifi horror content.
So why was my style so cyberpunky? When it was obviously based on all those old black and white films I used to watch with my Grandmother on a Sunday afternoon? Films with Humphry Bogart in, one of which turned out to be the very book I was reading.
A quick trip to wikipedia solved the mystery : cyber punk was trying to emulate the style of these books, and some how I had come up with this concept all by myself having been brought up on classic scifi and Anne McCaffery I had no concept that the genre I was trying to write had been around for awhile and felt lost and duanted in the vastness that it possed but now it is populated by other authors who I can go and read (I will shoot anyone who comments that that should be whom - ok!).
The style of The Big Sleep was I feel a little to intense but that was fine becuase it was a slim volume which ment that it wasn't too exhorsting to read but I think for the sort of size novels you get at the moment it would be too heavy.
Another thing that I have discovered is that I can emmulate styles very easily much to the suprise of the writing group who had assumed I was 'stuck' writting the same sort of stuff. One of the excersises they do is to give you the first line or sometimes paragraph of a book and you continue it for ten minutes. I even had them confused with one of these excersises as even those who had read the book had trouble deciding if mine was the original or not - and I had no idea what the story was actually about! I think it was called 'a metamorphosis' or something like that. The story had a natural feel to me and I followed where it lead which scarily produced something so close to the origonal as to be almost indistiguishable. This supports my current theory that the stories have a shape they want to be and that I am just moulding them - I have this when I'm carving or making things with fimo too - they want to be a certain thing I am just helping them to be that shape.
It makes no logical scense thats just how it feels to me when I fall through the page or paint or do maths (yes I know thats a weired mix).
Sun 20th Jan 2008 12:36 pm 
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