My Writing Style

I keep thinking about my writing style.  It was only when I started writing my book these past couple of weeks that I've accepted my style as my own.  I know that I am still growing as a writer, but at least now I have come to terms with it, and accepted it.  I used to think it was inadequate, unoriginal, childish, sometimes overly flowery, sometimes not flowery enough.  But I have psychologically found a happy medium.  

C. S. Lewis says that "... no man who bothers about originality will ever be original, whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."

So that was where it started for me.  I stopped thinking about how such and such would say this.  I just said it how I would say it.  And I am proud of my results.  

It's actually quite amazing how I can see the influences of other writers in my work.  Within a couple of chapters, I was able to clearly recognise which books I read had impacted me most powerfully as a writer.     My greatest influence is The Chronicles of Narnia.  It's not at all like I'm copying the style of Narnia - not at all.  It's that I can see how my values have been shaped through my childhood reading of it.  I respect certain things from authors, and I appreciate and adore others.  For example, I have always loved when authors interrupt the narrative to make quick, personal observations.  Not only am I the sort of person who enjoys this in writing, but I am the sort of person who finds it easy to do this in my own writing, because of the nature of my own personal observations.  

I also see my other childhood favourite in my work - E. Nesbit.  E. Nesbit has a beautifully uncanny knack of making extraordinary things seem ordinary, and ordinary things seem extraordinary.  This has been a huge part of my book, and I feel I owe it to her for my appreciation of making both the little things special and the special things normal.  

Things like short chapters, descriptions of scenery and all five senses, have been pounded into me by the things I have read.  My style is built upon a lifetime of learning, incorporating my knowledge and my learnt likes and dislikes to weave a new writer.  Even if it has grown from the influence of others, it is still my own.