[Writerpreneur OS] Lesson 0305: Choosing Your Contemporary Style For Success

The effectiveness of your writing style determines how you attract and retain your audience. And that determines in turn your publishing success.

Style, for our use, is best defined as the means where we use a subject, within the limits of our model, to produce the desired effect upon a certain reader, and so make our chosen market.

If your model choice is extremely successful—as it should be—you may have to diverge widely enough to catch a neighboring body of readers.

And in this matter, we find writers fall into three groups. There are (a) the independent experimenters, (b) the die-hard conservatives, and (c) the middle group, which uses old methods for new purposes. It puts its new wine into old bottles. Or, it may be, its old wine into new bottles.

The middle group, using their common sense, reaps most of the fame and fortune. They are often the best artists, too. Not because they are canny, but because in their middle position they can use the resources of both the other groups. Naturally, the more devices a man commands, the better his work will be.

In using models one should follow the advice cf Ben Jonson, who was “‘father’’ to an entire generation of successful writers in his own day. Ben borrowed freely from everybody. The description went that what would have been a theft in other poets was a victory for him. He apparently followed the advice of Vida, who told beginners to steal from every source.

The moral is, in literature, not to steal from one author, but to learn from many.

Our task is to appropriate the methods of the masters, not to steal their work.

And you will also do well to study the different styles employed by writers in different mediums.

So, if you will consider the style used in the quality magazines, you will find it varies widely from that employed by writers for the smooth paper family magazines, and that used in the popular pulp magazines.

Similarly, in books there are different styles (all ‘‘fashionable,’’ in this sense) used for different purposes, and in works put out by different publishers.

Every style must, of course, maintain the balance between monotony and variety. It must give us that right proportion of familiarity and strangeness, which at once satisfies us and also keeps us on the alert. Different writers achieve these ends by different means.

In attempting a particular market, there is always style to consider, and the vocabulary to which readers expect.

Your studies of contemporary models will show you these in the currently popular magazines, newspapers, or books.

As you make your choices, you are measuring and fitting your future success. You may change your writing style (or “voice”) for a certain magazine or paper, in order to get your story purchased. A prominent writer will choose the style which makes the greatest effect on the chosen reader.

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