Style

I hate a book that sounds exactly like something else I’ve read. It drives me mad. It’s not to do with similar storylines, because I’ve read two books with a plot and storyline so similar, I thought I was imagining things until I compared them side-by-side. The plotting of these two books were the same, but the style the authors wrote in were polar opposites. I ask myself if my writing is unique every time I finish a scene. It seems I do this to torture myself needlessly as other writers are worrying about things, like character length and formatting. When does style become annoying, and at what point should you reel yourself in? Is that what makes good writers stand out from the pack, a natural style too distinctive not to resonate above the others? Can you engineer it or train yourself to write in one fashion than another, more popular one? Is that why on occasion you read a writer’s work, become fascinated by their use of language then buy their further work only to be bitterly disappointed? It makes it hard to have confidence in your work when you have no idea if it’s vivid or flat and lifeless.

My solution is to keep writing until every person on the planet agrees my writing is crap and without character.