Hey everyone! Made it again to another Saturday successfully surviving life and back again to talk about writing. One of my favorite things in the whole world! Today we are going to talk about the next step in the process. This step is so big that it will actually be broken down into two separate steps so stay tuned for that. So, without further ado...
From Idea to Book: Writing Part 1
Writing is the next step in the book process. While every step in the writing process is difficult and has its own difficulty This step and the next are the largest part of writing a book. Plotting and developing ideas can take a long time but not as long as writing and editing. Writing is such a big step that we are going to take it into two separate posts. This part one post will be about writing style and genre and part two will be about different places to write and sites to write on.
As mentioned before; there are many different parts of writing. If there weren’t many different parts of writing, I wouldn’t be coming up on my 7th year of writing this blog. Every writer writes a little differently and every writer writes different stories. However, there are some things that can be categorized and tracked depending on the type of book, genre, or writing style. These are the things we are going to talk about a bit today. Writing style and genre.
Writing Style
A writer’s writing style can shape the whole tone of the book. I’ve discussed the writing style a bit more in-depth in my prose series when talking about the things that are important when it comes to Prose. Prose is basically the actual meat of the story. The story as the reader reads it. However, writing style is the story as the writer intends it – as the writer wishes to speak it.
It sounds very flowery and kind of abstract but it’s really very simple. A writer writes differently than every other writer does because every writer thinks a little bit differently than other writers. This kind of writing can be seen in the way writers might choose to lay out the scenes. Whether the writer focuses more on the descriptions or the dialogue. It may be seen in the way that the writer phrases their sentences. Maybe the writer isn’t a native English speaker (when writing in English) – this might be seen in the grammar they use in their sentences. Perhaps the writer is a person who is always feeling a bit humorous and so this might be seen in their writing through the words the characters say, or the way things are described.
If given the same story with the same plot points and the same characters, I might write a story that feels completely different from someone else, and that writer is writing something completely different than another writer. This is what writing style is. Knowing what your writing style is and trying to write stories that fit with it can increase your chances of having fun while writing and writing a bit easier. It can also increase your chances of publication.
Genre
The genre you write also has a large effect on your writing. Different genres often require different tones or different writing styles. Or they might require different writing skills that might be more difficult for you to write. For example, I am horrible at writing foreshadowing. I have tried many times in many different ways, but I just don’t have the skill to write foreshadowing. Because of this I tend to not write mystery novels or books with a lot of court intrigue. I just can’t write that foreshadowing that is essential to stories such as that.
I personally am a big fantasy or sci-fi writer. I am good at these genres because I love to and excel at world building. I could spend hours building interesting worlds with unique characters, magic systems, countries, political systems, and economics. I have so many of these worlds written that I have never actually written because the world building itself is so much fun for me. Not every writer enjoys world building. Writers who don’t enjoy world building don’t usually write epic high fantasy novels.
Knowing which genre you like, which genre you are good at, and what those genres require of you can really help in the writing process. Because foreshadowing is hard for me and I have practiced it and not gotten better, writing a mystery novel will not be as fun, will take more time, and will feel like a drag. Not writing mystery novels helps me to avoid falling into the pitfall of writers block so bad that I stop writing entirely. If you take time to recognize these things about genre that it can really help you with the writing process.
That’s all that I had for this week’s post. I hope that this post on a few important points about writing was helpful. I personally did not know a lot of this stuff until later on in my writing. I didn’t learn about writing style until I was in my last couple years of high school, and no one really explained genre to me until I was almost done with University, and I was complaining about how I struggled to write any sort of romance novel and another writer discussed it with me.
I hope that this week’s post helps. Writing can be the hardest or most fun part of the writing process depending on what you are writing and how you are writing it. I hope this helps you to more fully enjoy your writing all the time and not just some of the time. Next week we will be back with writing part 2 with more details about writing sites and places to write. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, and follow me on social media at the link on the bottom of the page. And remember,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
Comments