Let’s start with style. What do we mean by it? Well, style is the outward expression of your inward voice. That’s all it means in the context of writing.
And what about voice? To put it simply, your voice is the rhythm you carry.
Let me illustrate further.
Just close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths. Observe the rhythm of your thoughts. Maybe they move too fast. Maybe you have too many things to say, too many words waiting to come out.
Like Marcel Proust, perhaps you go on for long stretches, forming long, winding sentences that seem to breathe on their own.
Or maybe… it’s the other way around. Your thoughts arrive slowly, in brief measures — simple, direct — like the utterances of a Buddhist monk.
Most likely, you exist somewhere in between: between Proust and a monk.
The important thing to understand is this: the pleasure, the clarity, the force of a piece of writing does not come from the content alone, it’s more about the style you have. And the style develops by listening closely to your own rhythm. The same experience, the same idea, can feel entirely different depending on the inner state from which it is written, just as the same cup of tea tastes different when you are restless than when you are calm.
Even if you cannot articulate your voice (and hence your style) clearly, you definitely feel it. You feel it deep inside you. And you know it.
That is your voice.
Now all the effort, all the work of art, must be devoted to giving that voice an expression. To finding the words, the pauses, the sentences that match it honestly.
That expression — nothing more, nothing less — is your style.
Kalampedia 