On Style

I feel like Lewis and Clark would have felt if they had not kept a journal, but rather tried to remember everything to write it down once they got home.

But of all the adventures that have kept me busy (and away from my blog – sorry) over the last month, the one I am most excited to tell you about is the New York Summer Writer’s Institute.

For two weeks I wrote, read, listened to others read, critiqued work and took in feedback from my fellow writers. It was the first time that I ever immersed myself in my writing so completely, and it has left me a little stunned.

While there is much to say about the experience, and I intend to talk a lot about it in the coming weeks, the thing I’ve been ruminating the most on is style. My instructor at the Institute was Rick Moody. He wrote The Ice Storm, Garden State, Right Livelihoods, and his new book The Four Fingers of Death just came out (I am half way through my autographed copy and loving it).

He has a very clean, direct style that is different from some of the writers I’ve studied with. I tend to lean toward more languid, flowery writing, with digressions of visceral descriptions. That’s the writing I usually love to read, and so it’s the style I tend to emulate. Rick pushed me to consider a different kind of style, to trim everything that isn’t absolutely necessary and whittle down my writing to the barest of shiny white bones.

What’s more, he told me to take his advice with a grain of salt. He very earnestly said that no matter who I try to imitate in my writing, I will always be me, and so the best thing I can possibly do is just keep writing and let my own style develop. What great advice.

So I’m back at the keyboard, typing away once more. Please accept my apologies for my recent absence, and rest assured, now that life is returning to normal, I will be back to my regular routine of Monday morning blogging.