💠 for the writeblr positivity compliment game :) I was looking at your excerpts from All Our Painted Colors and they're written in a simple and elegant way, which I find very hard to do in my own writing.
💠 Your writing style is easy-to-read and accessible yet intellectually rigorous. How did you teach yourself to strike this balance?
OH GOODNESS thank you!! 💜💜💜
This is honestly one of my main goals with my style and I’m so happy that it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing.
With AOPC, it mostly comes from the voice. Since I wrote it from Teva’s point of view (and in first person), the prose mimics the way she talks. (Also, everything I’ve posted from AOPC so far has gone through like, at least 3 rounds of edits, so take all this with a grain of salt.)
Here’s where it gets super technical for me.
(I’ll take it apart and then explain it, like the good little English major I am.)
Teva is a pretty blunt person, and I tried to make the writing reflect that. She’s training to be a storyteller, but she’s still new at it. She doesn’t use too many complex sentences. Her rhythm is straightforward. All the metaphors she uses are taken from her environment, her village, things she’s seen and things people have told her. In my mind, their language doesn’t use contractions very often, which gives the writing a bit of a Data-from-Star-Trek feel, like someone who is feeling out a language, or a culture, and is learning formality rules or is proper in ways that might contradict their actions.
I do all of that because I come from a linguistics background. A big ‘ole word nerd, that’s me. I pay attention to the niche style things that a lot of people use without analyzing it because that’s how I was taught to do it.
Now, with the creative writing background, I use a ton of contrasts and parallels. They’re my favorite, because once you get the hang of using them, they can elevate almost any piece of writing with a little bit of careful planning.
Like in this little section:
Elder Sanga said that I do not want to hear the Call. Sarevo told me to wait. Keema asked me why. What do I want? I want to be a part of my tribe, to belong to my people like I am supposed to. I want to stand beside my sister and be seen as her equal, not the sum of my potential. I want to breathe in the land and sea and sky and feel at home. I want to listen and be heard.
But still I hear nothing. I step away from the edge, keeping my eyes on the water. I don’t want to cry in front of Sarevo.
That’s like, 90% parallels and contrasts. The sentences are super simple, but the placement of them in the paragraph is what gives it that “literary” feel, you know? They say, they say, they say, I want, I want, I want, I want, but nothing, move away. It’s a build up and a drop. (It also has to do with sentence length, here in particular, and how it changes through the paragraph.)
As for teaching myself how to do this, I kinda didn’t. I had a lot of great teachers. One of them made sure to point out how important it is to edit at the sentence level, which is what all of this is. How do the sentences work together to say what you want to say? It might seem obvious, but it kinda isn’t. (Just like anything with linguistics: once it’s explained, then it seems like the most obvious thing in the world. But it’s not, really.)
This is why I love formatting. Putting things in the right place can do just as much as writing a super long fancy sentence (which I also love doing, in the right places).
It’s tough! And it takes a long time. And you gotta practice a ton. I’ve been writing for what feels like forever, and it took me ages to figure out what I was doing by accident and start doing it on purpose.
