What is your writing style? Don't know? That's ok.

 Dear Reader,

Before I started writing books, I worried about if my writing style would appeal to the masses. I worried that I wouldn't find my 'voice' and that my work would be confined to the perpetual slush pile of shame. I spent a lot of time in college working on academic papers along side working on my first book. (Well, revision two of my first book, because revision one got destroyed. I'll get to that in a minute.) Some of my academic writing leaked into my fiction work. Some of my fiction work leaked into my academic work. It was a weird period in my writing life.

The thing I learned from that period was that it didn't matter what my style was like or what my 'voice' was. The thing that mattered was to be precise in what I was conveying. I had to demonstrate conclusions in a manner that was clearly understood by someone who wasn't an expert on the topic. When I did use jargon, I did so in a manner that allowed my reader to figure out its meaning through context cues. In some situations, I gave definitions with the first time I introduced a term that I expected would be unfamiliar to my reader. My work had to have a logical progression, something that tied the narrative together in a fashion that made sense.

The biggest lesson that I carried away from that mixed up writing period of my life was that I had to support what I was presenting with the strongest arguments I could give. One may wonder what these practices that are more typically applied to writing non-fiction have to do with writing fiction. The ability to suspend reality is necessary for good fiction. If you can present your work in a way that holds together with an internal logic that isn't too far beyond the scope of reality, that helps suspend reality and gives you the opportunity to do some pretty nifty things in your fiction. If you have invented terms, you need to make them accessible to your reader. This will give depth to your writing and will work to draw your readers deeper into your created world. Action in a story must follow a logical progression that comes to a clearly illustrated conclusion - even if that conclusion is a cliff hanger - that would make sense to someone who hadn't read any of your work before.

I still don't know how to describe my writing style. I don't know how to describe my writing voice. It's alright, though, because I am focusing on my content. Focusing on your content and your work, the rest will fall into place.