A ramble and some favorite quotes on "style" On Approaching Style, or Diving into Your Favorite Rabbit Holes

"We all swipe when we start. We trace, we copy, we emulate. But the most important thing is to get to the place where you’re telling your own stories, painting your own pictures, doing the stuff that no-one else could have done but you...


As a writer, or as a storyteller, try to tell the stories that only you can tell. Try to tell the stories that you cannot help but tell, the stories you would be telling yourself if you had no audience to listen. The ones that reveal a little too much about you to the world...


Don’t worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can’t help doing. If you write enough, if you draw enough, you’ll have a style whether you want it or not. Don’t worry about whether you’re "commercial". Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures." - Neil Gaman from a blog post, found at: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/05/what-you-cant-help-doing.html

So I definitely planned on just using that paragraph chunk but there was too much not to swipe post a bit more.  This is also something I've been thinking about as I've had the luck in the past two weeks to get out to multiple readings as well as talk with some of my friends and acquaintances who have been writing about twice as long as I've been living.  One poet, Martha Collins, whose book "White Papers" (buy it) I especially love, I saw give a reading a few weeks back.  When I mentioned especially liking her first and last poems in the book, ones that are the only two I have ever seen that follow their type of form, I asked her how those poems came to that style.  Her response was a very honest "I don't know.  When you've been writing as long as me, it just sort of happens."  Not the answer I had hoped for.  As being a follower of "don't try and imitate your favorite artists' finished works, imitate and explore how they developed it and what they were going for*" I was hoping she would give me something to play with on how she approached the poems.  She didn't, but she also did.  I had no direct link to the invention of that form, but what I can learn from her is what I had already begun wrestling with from that Gaiman article and different conversations and experiences since then.  Keep playing around, putting in work, and making the art you want the world to have.

 Stylish as ever,
Jason Four-Names


Tomorrow: Rambling on "style some more" - What is a Jason Poem?
The Day after Tomorrow: Meeting Nikky Finney and Patricia Smith, or, Most "Well Known" Poets Aren't Scary


* a sentiment well explored/discussed in two awesome books, both by young writers, on artistic process/legacy/possibility:
"Understanding Comics," by Scott McCloud, 1993
"Steal Like An Artist," by Austin Kleon, 2012"