How to Develop Style as a Writer

A 5-step Guide to Developing Your Voice

Learning Objective: By the end of this post, you’ll know how to use a five-step exercise to develop your style as a writer.

“[Good writing] looks like a glass of water, but turns out to be gin.”

Poet Laureate Andrew Motion said this to my class eleven years ago, and I’ve thought about it every day since. People often ask me questions about style—how do writers develop a signature style that sets their writing apart? I usually answer this question by identifying two common style problems: overwriting and underwriting.

Sometimes—in an attempt to create a unique style—a writer might write long, complicated sentences to demonstrate their command of language. This overwriting can open a lot of doors for exploration when developing style, but overwritten prose can also become inaccessible as readers struggle to parse meaning from each sentence. Underwriters have the opposite problem. While some writers look to discover style in long sentences governed by complicated syntax, others might seek style in restraint. Underwriting often prioritizes clarity in meaning over anything else. A reader can find meaning in the prose immediately, but the sensory or emotional experience of the story might be sparse on the line level. As a result, underwriting can limit emotional access to characters. Stories need emotional access because emotion makes stories memorable. When a reader walks away from a story, they’re more likely to remember how the story made them feel than the words on the page themselves.

In order to develop style, our goal as writers is to move away from overwriting or underwriting and into writing that is authentic to our storytelling sensibilities. Andrew Motion’s metaphor has helped me develop my own style over the years by redefining what “good” writing actually is. For me, effective writing is simple on the sentence level but complex on the emotional level. Style is not just a writer’s use of tone, diction, and syntax; it’s how the writer combines meaning and evocative imagery to create emotion.

For this month’s craft lesson, we’re diving into a five-step exercise that will help you develop your style as a writer. Before we jump in, you know what to do: take anything that’s useful and leave everything that’s not.

Five Steps to Developing Style

To develop our individual styles as writers, we have to study style conventions in our chosen genre(s). It’s obvious advice, but the best thing a writer can do for their writing is read a lot and read widely. The strongest writers I know are deeply well-read in both their chosen genre and other genres their readers might also be engaging with. By maintaining a diverse TBR list, you can learn new approaches to various craft elements. In addition to that, a diverse reading list can also teach you new ways to combine meaning and imagery to create emotion. While developing my own style, I’ve had the biggest breakthroughs by taking my reading to the next level. Today’s style exercise combines close reading with revision.

For me, style is something that I’ve developed in revision rather than the drafting process. The following exercise works best if you have the first draft of a story or scene that you’re ready to revise, but you could also use the steps in this exercise as a writing warm up before generating a first draft.