I am pretty safe in saying that Diane Keaton is regarded as
someone who has a distinctive style of
dress. You know it is Diane Keaton. I
like it, by the way, but I know a lot of women who are not crazy about it.
NOTE: For the guys out there, most women dress for other women, at least that’s according to Mrs. WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com
I have noticed a style in my writing, too. Some people have referred to it as conversational and easy going. It is not something for which I strive. It flows out that way. I try to keep in free of as much fluff as I can.
One thing I am prone to, however, are sentence fragments. My dialog is peppered with them. Few people talk in complete sentences, with the exception of maybe the nuns who taught me and Mattie Ross, the heroine in True Grit. Dialog that comes with full sentences and no conjunctions would be stilted and not very realistic.
I wrote Rules for Giving in first-person, with the story being told from the perspective of the protagonist Few people think in complete sentences. It is logical that some of the narration of be in fragments. Some of the story is told in a style that borders stream-of-conscious writing—especially in a series of scenes when the protagonist is stoned on doctor-prescribed Darvocet. More fragments.
When I write I don’t strive for sentence fragments. My goal is to tell a story the reader can follow. It is usually only after I write the sentence that I realize it is a fragment. I ask myself if it communicates what I want it to communicate. If so, then I leave it.
No one in my critique group has picked up on this quirk in my writing. I try not to overuse it so it will not be a problem. We’ll see what an agent or publisher says.
Which gets me to the issue of style in your writing. I can be wrong, but I think style is the way you write when you are not thinking about it. In your editing you might see certain elements in the style and highlight it. You can see passive verbs and substitute them for more active ones, but after a while those things come naturally. I find myself editing email correspondence based habits and preferences I have adapted as a writer.
Does my writing have a Diane Keaton flair to it? I don’t know. It just feels right to me, which I am sure is the way Diane Keaton’s clothes feel to her.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Photo by Kim Snellink from Spotsylvania, USA (us with Diane Keaton) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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