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Finding Your Unique Writing Flavor-Mild, Spicy, or Extra Hot-
A Quick Guide for First-Time Authors
Victoria A. Witkewitz
27 June 2021
As a first-time author, you may be wondering what your writing style is and how you can further develop an approach to express your own unique flair. This quick guide focuses on fictional creative novel writing style development.
Your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to bring to the forefront how to foster and embrace a writing style you can be proud of calling your own. Okay, enough stalling, let's get!
There is one piece of advice I like to offer first-time authors before they begin churning the pages. First, take a step back and identify their favorite author and what it is they enjoy about their writing. The purpose of this exercise is to create a foundation, or starting point, to build a style of writing that will eventually become their own.
To assist in this process, I created a comprehensive exercise as a benchmark to assist in identifying your own unique writing style. I call it the 360-Degree View Author Analysis Exercise. I have followed this exercise for years yielding successful results. It is a questionnaire to analyze a particular writing style you are fond of and why plus how to apply this knowledge to your own writing process.
360-degree VIEW author analysis Exercise
Visit our Author Tools member portal to access the exercise. Basically, the process is as follows:
1. Read a book by your favorite author in the genre you are writing in its entirety. Start with one author and one book only.
2. Print the 360-Degree View Author Analysis Exercise. Complete your answers as fully and as honestly as possible.
3. Leave the questionnaire aside for a week then review your answers again. Observe if any of your answers have changed and why.
After completing this exercise, thoroughly examine your answers as you may be surprised by what you learn. Carefully evaluate the responses to the questions that resonate with your liking, tastes, and habits. The more ah-ha moments you have, the better understanding you have of establishing your writing style.
Once you have completed this exercise let's put this into action.
Try a journaling routine
If you are new to creative writing, consider starting a journaling routine with one topic to address in your journal at least twice a week. These journal prompts are a great way to help you identify a topic and expand on it. You can use a paper or online journal for your writing objectives.
Visit our Writing Projects page to access Journal Doodles, and Seasonal Scribbles. These guides include writing prompts to create a writing routine.
Let's try a journal prompt
The idea of a journal prompt is to start with the main idea and then build supporting thoughts and descriptive words to provide a high level of detail.
Journal prompt: What was the most difficult recipe you tried? What made it so challenging?
Example: The most difficult recipe I followed was a banana split multi-layer cake. The reason this cake is so difficult to prepare is due to the time needed to ensure all the layers are topped perfectly on the cake. Without causing the ingredients to melt into one another required patience and excellent multi-tasking skills. Layers included fresh strawberries, whipped cream, vanilla cake, and a crispy layer of nuts sprinkled on top with the right consistency of fudge and caramel harmoniously intertwined. This combination would leave any mouth satisfied for days.
So the idea is not only to answer the original question and intent but to expand the details until you have exhausted the topic fully. This will help you to visualize not only how you think, but how you build sentence structures and use punctuation. Eventually, over time your journaling routine will assist in refining your writing skills.
Also, read what you wrote back immediately and at a later time. This process will help you to determine the consistency of your writing. Do you find what you wrote is the same thought conveyed from the beginning or did you mean something else?
Building a solid foundation
The key to a journaling routine is to take what you learned from the 360-Degree Author Analysis View Exercise and start to apply these thinking points to your writing. Eventually, you will create your own flavor of writing that will be unique and comfortable to you whether that be mild, spicy, or extra hot!
As you continue to write in your journal, challenge yourself to expand from a single page to multiple pages. Add a sense of depth by accessing descriptive adjectives to provide the reader form a mental picture of what you are trying to convey.
Final punctuation
As you continue to write, over time you will continually improve and nurture your writing skills. Creative writing is a fluid process and one that evolves over time. Once you feel comfortable with a journaling routine, use this practice to master your first novel or short story.
For additional information please click the links below. Questions? Contact Us.
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