If you asked me twenty years ago who my favorite writers were, I probably would have rattled off a list of stylists. You know, people whose sentences were unique, flashy, clever, whose perspective was unusual, whose punctuation or layout was unmistakably them. You could identify the writer if presented with an anonymous sample of their work because it stood out. 

I collected these people. This was before recommendation algorithms, and so we’d all look at bookshelves when we’d go to one another’s apartments. I’d look forward to the Q&A after a reading when the guest of honor would do what I called “the name-dropping portion” and list some influences. You couldn’t yet use Amazon to peek into every book, but you could go to publisher sites and jot down names, stick it in your wallet, and keep your eye out when you’d stumble upon used bookstores in college towns. 

This isn’t that surprising: I was young, beautiful sentences were attractive and inspiring, and I didn’t know what I was doing. Plus, I was in an MFA program (for poetry, but still) and literary writing and education tends to focus on voice and style above all else. For writers who are stylists, it is not uncommon for two or three years to pass between books being published. 

These days if you were to ask me who my favorite writers are, I’m not sure there’d be a stylist on the list. The writers I admire now are writers who wrote, not writers who wrote uniquely. There would obviously be something to recommend each name, but most of all I am impressed with writers who wrote, finished, delivered, and moved on to the next. For this group, it’s not uncommon for two or three months to pass between books being published. 

We have this idea that something written slowly is somehow better than something written quickly. This is not always true, but I get why this feeling exists: being careful or deliberate about what you write should mean that more mistakes are caught, that there’s more time to get a thought right, more time to revise for the better, whatever “better” ends up meaning. You can put your full weight into it when you polish something, so the shine is shinier. 

Sometimes it takes three hours to write 500 words, none good. Sometimes you write 4,000 words in a morning and have the rest of the day to feel smug about it. Joyce Carol Oates writes 8 hours a day. Elmore Leonard wrote from 9-6 every day. Some writers stop at 1,200 words, but do it 7 days a week (Walter Mosley). 

For me, the sweet spot is between 1,500 and 2,000 words, probably closer to 1,500. After that, I feel spent. And I have also found that a lot of writing counts towards that 1,500, even if it’s not my active creative project; I can’t write in my journal first thing in the morning any longer, as my brain counts that towards my 1,500 good words. If I write in a journal at all, it has to be after my daily work is done. This has the downside of making shorter and weaker journal entries, but who cares? It takes away less from the stories I’m working on. 

Incidentally, a blog post also appears to count towards that 1,500 words, which might explain why this blog hasn’t exactly taken off; it might not look like it, but it’s a cannibal. 

While I don’t read fantasy, I do like the perspectives of all kinds of genre writers. And not long ago, I read a book on writing technique written by an independent fantasy author, who wrote about how his targets were thousands of words per hour. This seemed outrageous to me, so I looked into his work. Not to sound unkind, but the writing is about as good as what you’d think for someone whose output is that high. The first word that came to mind was “content.” 

And yet it sells, and sells pretty well. It’s not just pixels and space. People read it, favorably and enthusiastically, and the author pays his bills with the proceeds. Then he writes another one. My MFA teachers and colleagues might be horrified by it stylistically, but that fantasy writer is out there doing what he loves and has found a grateful audience willing to pay money for what to me looks like a well-constructed, dense fantasy world full of awkward sentences, enormous words, and enough work to keep a copy editor busy for a month. Readers are forgiving if the piece provides what they want, and while it was normal for us to want style back then, that doesn’t mean it’s common for a broader readership to want that same thing. 

It’s a bit of a mindfuck to admire what you don’t like. This doesn’t happen that often with aesthetic stuff for me – I’m used to seeing well-prepared food that I can ooh and ahh over, but still not want to eat. Yes, the sushi looks gorgeous on the plate, but I can safely guess what it’ll taste like. Whether this is maturity or stubbornness, I can’t say. 

What I can say – and here is a kind of name-dropping portion of my own – is that I have recently read several works of fiction, all different. First was Elmore Leonard’s Djibouti, immediately followed up with Lawrence Block’s Lucky at Cards, then Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, then a Harlequin Romance novel that a friend edited. I noticed something about my own writing after I put the last book down and came up for air. 

Just as I realized that a blog entry or journal entry seems to mentally count as my daily writing, so too did I notice that reading for style tends to muddy the waters. When I was reading Jesus’ Son I kept defaulting to a Johnson-ish voice while getting my daily work in. My character would have to make a choice, and they’d choose hitchhiking or drugs. I’d have to go back and rewrite, forgetting at times what I sounded like. But the other three books were kept at arms’ length while I wrote, and I could be myself without any extra effort. 

Style is contagious, and I’m a germaphobe now.

I can accept that I might have a Romantic view of voice and style, as I’ve always defined it as “what comes out when you sit down to write and don’t think too hard about what you’re doing.” If I have to steer things in a certain direction, that feels unnatural and is therefore less desirable, like having to consciously maintain a foreign accent while speaking. I’m too old for affectations, and am inclined to let myself speak. I do want to revisit the idea of style in genre fiction, because there isn’t exactly zero style there. But I’ve reached the bottom of page 2, and it’s time to move on.