Aditya Mukherjee
The development of a personal style of writing should start out as an exclusionary process. There is nothing original anymore and great artists steal.
You want to be sarcastic? It’s been done. You want to be witty? Again, done. How about casual cursing? Yep, done. The thing that makes something original is the selection of unoriginal ideas it combines to make a whole. The sensible thing to do is to absorb as much as possible and once a picture starts to form that you like, start getting rid of the fluff from around it so that what you’re left with is what you were trying to get at—much like carving a statue out of stone.
As I’ve grown up1, I’ve realized that while it’s what you write that gets people reading, it’s your style that keeps them reading it. In that sense, your style is the most important part of your writing. So if the goal of writing is to make an impact, it’s a lot more fruitful to work on developing a style rather than going crazy about the material. That’s not to say the material isn’t important. After all, you can only style what’s there. But the majority of your time should go into polishing what you’ve written.
“Style” to me involves more than just what you write and the way you write it; it’s more synonymous with presentation—just like getting on stage and talking involves more than the what you talk about. How do your words look? How do they sound? Do they flow? Or do they sound like disjointed thoughts on a string?
Probably mildly related, but I’m reminded of this line:
“The larger essays can take upwards of 50-100 hours to complete — write, edit, design, rewrite, whiskey, redesign, self-doubt, layout, cry, publish, promote, correct embarrassing invariable spelling mistakes.”
—So Long 2010, and Thanks for All the Pageviews, Craig Mod
I love’s Craig’s work—writing and designing. He’s a big source of inspiration2. And if you read through the string of steps in writing something, you’ll see he mentions actual writing just twice. I’m sure he didn’t realize it when he wrote it, but it’s a subtle inference one takes away from it, one I can get behind3.
I always shy away from using the term “matured”, choosing to go with “grown up”, because it feels like I’ve just grown up in certain aspects of life—like relationships—while I’ve actually matured in others, gaining a much bigger and fuller perspective on them. When in doubt, I think it’s a good question to ask oneself, if you have a matured or just a grown-up point of view. For now, I prefer to use the general phrase that includes all forms of growing older. ↩
Just in case it wasn’t obvious looking at the feel of this new design. One of these days I plan to take his entire web-site and create a case study in designing for writing on the web. ↩
12 Slides, 3 Writers provides an interesting insight into writing—especially about the editing and polishing parts, how writing is never really done—and the creative process. It’s worth a listen if you’re interested in this sort of stuff. ↩