#44 - Beginner's Reflection(11) - Perfect Writing Style For Each Writer

Happy weekend, everyone!

Have you ever been wondering what your perfect writing style would be?

In our daily lives, we all have our own styles for hair, cloth, talking, etc.

In very early days, we didn't have any those styles, our styles mostly came from our parents, they decided what our hair looked like and what we were going to wear that day.

When we got older, we would love to try to find our own styles, we picked our own hair style and our cloth, we wanted to look the best we could.

So why don't we writers try to find our best writing style?

Maybe some of you think you have already found it, but others still don't.

In today's episode, I want to talk about perfect writing style.

Before that, I need to make something clear.

What is style?

When people say "I like your hair style." or "Your dance style is marvellous", we know what they meant by the word "style".

The word "style" means two things. It can mean what something looks like, its appearance, as in "hair style", and it can mean how someone do something or how something moves/works/operates, as in "dance style".

For writing, the word "style" is not different for its general meaning.

The process of writing can be simply described as transforming what in the writer's mind into words.

Based on that, the definition of "writing style" is including:

1. How things are going and organized in a writer's mind

2. How the writer picks words and how the writer puts these words together to convey what in her or his mind.

3. How the readers feel about the way the writer express her or his thought and imagination, not the content.

I think we all have our own definition of "writing style", maybe you don't agree with me, but I think my definition is clear and I am using some common sense. Anyways you can share your version of the definition with us.

Finding our perfect writing style is very intriguing, if it exists and we can find it, we can become the best of ourselves as writers.

We all have some writing style, whether or not you know it, but where and how did we get it?

I don't know, I don't even know what my writing style is, I just write what my mind tells me, maybe I have learned from reading other people's writings or listening to other people's speaking or talking, but wherever I get this writing style, I feel comfortable and tolerable about my process of writing at the moment, but do I think it is a perfect writing style? of course not, all I can say is that it is the best I've got so far, maybe tomorrow I can find a better style, who knows?

So writing style is not a fixed and static thing, it is flexible and dynamic, at any given moment, we can say "I am writing in the way which I think is the best at the moment, maybe next time I can do differently or better."

Writers would try different styles and the types of writing would affect the writer's writing style, for example, the style for news reports would be different from romantic comedies.

So I should ask more precisely:

Does there exist a perfect style for a specific genre? A perfect style for news reports? For horror? For criminal?

Maybe, but I don't know, maybe someone knows, and it is the job of researchers and theorists, if you know something, please share with us.

Does there exist a perfect writing style objectively? If we follow this style, we can pick perfect words for what in our mind and put them together perfectly, and make the readers feel the best.

I don't know, maybe we will find it someday, but everyone has to do writing subjectively, our writing styles are determined by our preference, intuition, experience and knowlege.

So the conclusion is that there exists the best-at-the-moment writing style, but it is more subjective and momentary. You think that a word or a group of words is perfect for a concept or idea, which is mostly reliant on the writer, not the objective rules or laws, and "perfect" means that it is perfect for now, for the moment the writer is writing, maybe next moment, the writer would find a more perfct way to express her or his concept.

We can't say "I am writing perfectly right now", we can only say "right now I am writing in the way which I think is the best".

We are keep changing and growing, we learn new things and have new experience, so our writing skills keep changing and growing. But maybe, I say maybe, in the future, at some point, some of us could reach at a state they couldn't improve and enhance any further.

Ok, that is all for today's topic, hope you enjoy it!

As always, if you want to talk with someone about writing and reading, you know what you could do.

Thanks again and let's try new writing styles!

Be humble and be unconventional!

^
June 22nd, 2019 at 06:52am