Style Points Matter

One thing still not quite finalised is what style we're going for with all of this. It's a weird thing, style -- it's hard to truly define without actually doing. I do have already (to me) a very distinctive writing style, replete with my usual parentheticals (like above) and also a certain friendly tone.

It's a style I use in most of my "normal" correspondence, though it flexes a bit depending on the situation -- in business I will be careful not to seem too much like I'm asking for permission, so much less of the "I think" and "I guess" and "it's probably" and instead more certainty. I do get a bit more playful if it's less serious, and I have my little tricks I love ... manufactured words that really are more like everything-I-could-hyphenate-together-to-make-a-point-and-which-function-as-nouns, strange alliteration (don't worry, I won't demonstrate that one), certain ways of analogizing and certain types of sentence construction.

And in my first 2,000 words of The Manuscript committed to paper (or whatever this is), I used them all. ALL. Sigh. Because, well, this is new to me -- not expression through typing on a screen, but telling a story in a progressive fashion over at least an hour and perhaps a number of days, depending upon the reader.

This is where I think book support groups come in, able to help you see things in your writing that you yourself may not.  So let's see if I end up there when the time comes (when 2,000 words turns to 20,000 and maybe 100,000).  In the meantime, I'll work with new ways to say and shape my thoughts, even ones that are foreign and strange to me.  Because not doing so, staying-in-the-same-place-forever-ness, is going to be worse, and harder on the reader.  And ultimately, it's about using the right tool to get the right point across, meaning the more tools I have, the better.  Quoting (correctly! hopefully ...) an old fave, Abraham Maslow: "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." (The Psychology of Science, 1966).  So, yes to more hammers!  Even if some of them are alliteration ...