Developing a Style

So I ended my last post by saying, "that's how I write, and I'm pretty happy with it." That got me thinking it might be a good idea to discuss my thoughts on developing one's own personal style.

I think there are upsides and downsides to it. The upside, obviously, is that it means there's something that differentiates your writing from the other writing out there. For me, it means telling a lot of my story through dialogue (an idea lovingly ripped from the RPGs that have influenced me so heavily), and choreographing my scenes pretty intensely. My characters don't "say" anything. Ever. I don't think you'll find a "xxx said" once in my entire body of work. And when I do put speech tags on (I think I've used "groaned" and "whispered" and such-like words) I rarely use adverbs.

Instead I try to get their emotions across by describing their actions. If they're confused, their face shows it. I'm probably guilty of over-using the phrases "pursed his/her lips" and "knit his/her eyebrows together" to this effect. This is probably lovingly ripped off from the fact that so many movies do so much storytelling simply with body language, and it's something I wanted to try myself.

The downside of trying to develop a style is that if it doesn't work you can get stuck. The preceding two tricks are things that I think work pretty well for me. I haven't gotten many bad comments about them in workshop or from other readers (except one woman who told me that my characters smile too much--but hey, that's a flaw in execution, not in theory ;-p), but I can see that it would be hard at this point to switch tacks if they weren't working and take a speechtag/adverb approach to writing dialogue.

At any rate, for me I think the upside outweighs the downside. I like being able to say that I'm doing something different, and it's fun for me to figure out ways to work in the various storytelling techniques I've picked up in places that aren't books---it's part of why I write. I'd love to hear comments from others on their own styles and how they came about.