Style Formation Quotes

As a teenager, I read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft, so I wrote like H.P. Lovecraft. And in my 20s, I read a lot of Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler, so I wrote like those guys. But, little by little, you develop your own style.

It's so difficult to be conscious of a development of a style. You find yourself writing in a certain style, and the analysis of how you came to it can only ever be applied retroactively. You're never conscious of why you're producing it.

I only went to school up until the beginning of tenth grade and I think that's when my style was developing.

I look at my first books and am glad they weren't published.... You start writing by imitating your heroes, then you keep the heart of that worship in your work. As time goes by, you get other influences and find your own voice.

You develop a style from writing a lot.

Style is made up of whatever an author can't avoid doing.

Your style is formed by what you can't do.

He who writes much will not easily escape a manner, such a recurrence of particular modes as may be easily noted.

Let us guess that whenever we read a sentence & like it, we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; & it goes, with the myriad of its fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which we call our style.

I got most of my style from people around me who I knew personally.

In order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with.

I was heavily influenced by J. R. R. Tolkien, George R. R. Martin, C. S. Friedman, Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan, R. A. Salvatore, and James Clavell to name a few, but of course every book I've ever read, whether I liked it or not, has had an influence... I think I am constantly evolving as a writer, but not to mimic anyone else or mainstream trends.

What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the unconscious choices I make.

I would observe to you that what is called style in writing or speaking is formed very early in life while the imagination is warm, and impressions are permanent.

I'm always aware of writing around things I can't do, and I've come to think that that's actually what 'style' is - an avoidance of your deficiencies.

That's the sound we developed, and that's how we played. It took us a while, but we found it.

As an artist, you take things from your environment, and there's going to be a style coming out of your environment.