Trying to find my style

THEY talk in hushed whispers in a hundred and one creative writing classes of the writer finding "their voice".

Which might imply that there's some triumphant moment when you can suddenly draw it like a sword from the stone and bellow defiance at the heavens at your new-found authorial authority.

I suspect though it's more a gradual process of feeling your way with sentences. At some point eventually you squint down at the page and think "oh, yeah, I do tend to do that don't I."

Except I'm never sure I've ever even quite done that, so here I am on a chilly Monday evening, trying to. Here goes.

I'm probably a writer who likes testing what he can do with the language. I like assonance, I like the way sounds repeat, I like the way you can really rub your reader's nose in a point. Then let go. Because speed makes it urgent. Maybe.

That sort of poetry in prose approach comes, I think, from my love of Ray Bradbury. If it's possible to imagine writing with all the variety of an orchestra then Bradbury is the single best conductor I've come across.

I've plucked from the bookcase behind me my copy of Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. It's an edition I've tried to keep pristine because such a beautiful book feels like it should have a front and back to match. This one's a particularly lovely edition, a seedhead primed to detonate across the grass green cover. Now I come to think of it a graceful explosion is about the single best way to describe Bradbury's style.

And when I turn to the opening of one of the early chapters I find a line which I feel fits the author so brilliantly.

"It was a quiet morning, the town covered over in darkness and at ease in bed."

I picked that one out because it reminds me of the very start to what was probably the last proper stab I had at a novel a decade or so ago. "Dallas was halfway to winter, but the sun had come out for the President."

To be clear, I don't think I just happen to have a style that matches one of my all-time favourite writers, I suspect I've subconsciously imitated that - at least in descriptive passages. So maybe that isn't my voice at all, it's me trying to sound like what I think a great writer sounds like. Bollocks. 

Of course there are so many differences. Bradbury's brilliance is in part because he's earnest throughout. He wouldn't back-pedal from an attempt at a significant statement by swearing. Or cracking a joke.

I do both I've noticed. As if I'm aware that I'm a man who even on social media has a tendency to sermonise and sometimes the only way out of sounding like a wazzock is to try and lean into humour. It's the equivalent of making him some ardent declaration of love and scurrying back under the pretence of loose-talking. Well obviously I didn't mean it. Ha-ha-hurm...

Which worries me slightly because on a blog like this that's fine, I can retreat from my treatise on the writer's voice and up the gag-count. We're a dozen paragraphs deep, I'm worried you're getting bored by now, so why not?

In fiction writing that's probably more of a problem, because the stories I tend to want to write don't often feel like they lend themselves to those sort of pivots. There are a handful of writers - Pratchett most notably - who can be both very funny and deeply profound. I have grave doubts I can be either so would I want to consciously compound the misery by trying to be both?

Oh and I've just realised I try and be conversational, like that bit right then when I said "oh". That's probably trying to lay the ghost to rest of those teenage years where I sounded like I'd been gargling the dictionary before sitting down to the blank page. 

That's not even an "in case of emergency, put joke here" moment. I'm deadly serious. In fact I have to own up to using effulgent in a non-ironic way long before I watched that episode of Buffy. If you've not seen the series I should quickly explain that William the Bloody's poetry is exposed as being bloody awful by the use of that very word. I'm cured now. Honest. I just sometimes feel the need to prove it, hence the odd bout of trying to sounding all free-flowing and casual with my sentences.

And just finally I should point out that I do have an unnerving tendency to start a line with a conjunction. I'm not really sure if that's my voice coming through or just poor grammar. I've always tended to take the view that if poets can break sentences like hollow reeds and do very peculiar things with similes then why should the prose writer be obliged to follow the rules. Just run with it I say. Make effulgent lines. Shit. And there goes the gag release clause. Fuck...

That probably about wraps it up. I wanted this to be a bit of a stream of consciousness so I've aimed to get my thoughts down without too much forward thinking and get the post done in under an hour or so. At least I've given myself a few things to think about. 

I suppose this is part of my transitioning away from my old journalistic mindset. In that job you can turn out 10,000 words a week and really you still don't have a distinctive voice. You're just writing the way you've been taught to write to hook the reader, deliver points rapidly and ideally avoid libel. 

That's why reporters who otherwise appear to be eminently intelligent people use words like "fracas" to describe a fight at the local pub. It's not because they're like me in my verbose phrase, off their tits on the OED, it's because they've just locked on to the "out of the box" way of turning out sentences at speed.

I'm probably come back to my thoughts on the journalist's voice next time, the conscious effort to write in a certain way is probably a whole other post. Suffice to say I suspect a lot of perfectly brilliant reporters don't write very much other than what's required for their day job because they're not at heart writers of any other sort.

Am I? Not sure. Genuinely 100 per cent sure don't know. But if I'm to give it a proper go it starts with finding my voice. If I can't have my King Arthur moment I'll settle for the snippet of quiet realisation. "I do tend to do that, don't I?"