Writing Skill: Register Mismatch

 

"Register", in language, is how formally or casually we speak, in different situations and to different people – for example, the way we speak at work is different to how we chat with friends to how we address a cat. Playing around with register is a great tool for humour, whether you're writing comedy or just want to include some lighter moments. One of the ways of doing that is to mis-match the register with the situation.

So, first off, spend a couple of minutes brainstorming a) very sophisticated actions, and b) very crass actions. For example, sophisticated actions might be…

• sweeping up to the red carpet at a glamourous award, greeting the crowd and fellow red-carpeters
• meeting the king at a Buckingham Palace garden party
• graciously hosting an elegant meal
• waltzing around a ballroom with the cream of society

And very crass actions – I'm thinking of that New Year's mayhem in Manchester photo for inspiration, to start with. So that might be…

• being absolutely hammered and trying to ask someone on a date while fighting the police off with a bin lid
• dumpster-diving in your dressing gown and slippers for something important you lost, and trying to explain it away to a passerby
• taking the wrong route home, climbing through a hedge, tearing your clothes to distressingly revealing degrees, walking through a bog, losing one shoe to it, and also falling faceforward into it at one point (only some of which I've done making my way across Port Meadow in winter!)

Once you've brainstormed both lists, pick one item from each list, to describe in the most opposite way possible. Start with the "crass" action: describe it in the most elegant, formal, and sophisticated language possible: "Enamoured by his charm, I once more thrust my distressing shield, still fragrant with kitchen discards, at the officer of the law, thus buying me time to beseech..." etc. And then for the elegant action, describe it in the most casual, slangiest, vernacular way possible: "I ponced my way up the long rug, with a proper arse wiggle for the gawkers, grinning at my chums in their penguin get-up..." etc. If you'd like to keep this to a 10-minuter, spend 4 minutes on each.

Then reread, share with your writing buddies if you can, and have a good giggle!

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Writing Skill: Dark Beauty

First off, choose a location that you think is just stunningly beautiful. Not creepy at all: gorgeous, soothing, filling your soul with beauty. Somewhere you've been on holiday perhaps or somewhere you've recently visited – a picturesque village, beautiful gardens, the inside of a college if you went to Oxford Open Doors. It can be just one building, if you like: standing at the bus stop one evening, I was blown away by how picture-perfect the Royal Oak on Woodstock Road looked. Anywhere, wild, rural, suburban, or urban, that you think is unequivocally beautiful.

Next, you're going to describe its beauty – but with the most menacing verbs you can find. Let things loom, creep, snake, throttle, seep… (Verb: a doing word. Test it by putting "to" in front of it: to loom, to creep, to snake, etc.) I suggest you spend ten minutes on this, though you could do more if you fancy a longer writing session. And have fun with it!

When you’re done, type it up and schedule an email to yourself for a week’s time – without specifying that you were practising using creepy verbs. When you reread it with fresh eyes, you’ll be surprised at how effective your verb choices are and how much subtler it feels to read than to write.

What you're doing in this prompt is called writing around a semantic field: your semantic field is "danger" and the verbs you're choosing all reflect that. The actual thing you're writing about isn't dangerous – it's beautiful! – but the way you're writing about it creates that sense of danger. We all know how powerful description and sense of place can be for creating a mood in a story. That doesn't limit you to places that echo that mood exactly, though: by playing around with your semantic field like this, you can make any place reflect any mood that you want it to! That gives you a lot more freedom to choose more original and exciting locations, which itself helps the story live on in the reader's mind.

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Finding Your Own Style

When you think about your writing style, it’s easy to feel caught between an amorphous blue cloud – a sense of self, unrealised or indefinable, an elusive mystery – and a bristling red pen, scratching things out and dictating schoolish rules.

Like most writers, I started with no idea what My Style was, beyond a vague hope that I must have one (surely?) and an iron conviction that I was a Good Writer. I wrote my entire first novel like that. Looking back, it was mostly transparent prose in literary register, with some of Angela Carter’s influence on immersive description, and some of AS Byatt’s influence to pare that back. It did work out as a decent style, because I had good models, but it wasn’t mine.

In fact, I’d written an entire novel without using one of the most powerful tools available to me: its style. I was like an artist whose composition and perspective are coming along nicely, but who hasn’t yet discovered colour. To take the metaphor further – there’s nothing wrong with using just black and white; monochrome artwork has a fantastic tradition. But to stick to that just because I didn’t know about colour, or know how to use it – that was missing a trick.

Almost 13 novels later, I still can’t tell you what My Style is – not because it’s stayed amorphous and mysterious, but because I have many. It depends what I’m writing. Our writing styles are always plural: our own voices change and grow continuously, just as we do, and shift like a ventriloquist with different genres, stories, and character voices. I have many colour palettes at my disposal now. And I know when to choose monochrome.

So how do you go about finding your style – or indeed, styles? Will working on your style spoil its authenticity, pruning back the very things that make it yours? And won’t a course on style just teach you to write like someone else?

How you do you find your style?

Most of us start by copying other people’s styles, as I did – and that’s fine. It’s a great way to learn. The writers you copy can be a useful indicator of your own taste in style, too: who do you want to write like? Who do you want to influence you? Who do you not want to influence you, even though you like their stories? Having a sense of your own tastes and working with good models is a great start.

From there, you want to strike out further – “breaking the rules”, writing the way you’re “not supposed to”, giddy with a sense of daring, playful and perverse. It feels naughty and wrong, because you’re no longer copying something you’ve seen before. You’re writing your way.

Don’t worry about overdoing it. You can always trim it back in an edit, if you need to, but it might turn out that you don’t need to. You might become even more daring.

It’s about permission to write “improperly”: again, in ways you haven’t seen before. So here’s your permission: write improperly. Go wild, do whatever the hell you want, and see how it turns out.

Will working on my style spoil its authenticity?

It’s tempting to see our first drafts as a pure untouchable thing, the original expression of self, and to think that tampering with a word would sully it. But your self is as much there in the editing process as in the writing, and we’re always developing as writers, even across a single piece. The you that’s finished the short story has more writing experience and more knowledge of that story than the you who was writing it.

Our first drafts, if we’re really writing freely, are often a patchwork of several things. Our most unusual and original phrasing leaps out, because we didn’t censor it: hurrah! The most familiar copy-paste phrases (the clichés, the collocations) flood the page too, because they’re right there, at your fingertips, on the shelf, on tap, easy as pie: that’s fine. When we’re making things up, we often need to grab whatever language is to hand, to capture our ideas.

Some odd things happen, too. The –ing words that felt so lively and energetic in the writing feel limp and flimsy on a reread. Those unstoppable tumultuous sentences that seemed to gallop through the action are now slowing it down. That slew of vivid emotive adjectives now feels syrupy. And so on. Some of our choices are about the process of writing, not the final effect we want.

So, we start tinkering. We consult our own tastes, for what to keep, We consider the experience of reading it, not just of writing it, for the effect we want. We wash away some of the mud, so the bits we want to keep sparkle, and we add some flourishes.

Your thoughtful assessing mind is just as authentically you: this is simply another, equally authentic, part of the process.

Will a course on style just teach me to write like someone else?

Not if I’m running it! I actually held off teaching anything about writing style for the first 8 years of running courses and workshops, because I was concerned about exactly the same thing. I did not want to create some School of Megan! Over those years, I gained a lot more experience in varying my own styles, in noticing and appreciating the different strengths of various styles, and in helping my students refine their own styles through individual feedback. Then I felt ready to teach style, in all its glorious possibilities.

That's why the Writing in Style course isn’t about The Correct Way To Write: it’s about the many various ways and why we might choose each. There are some common principle of good writing across styles, which we’ll also explore, and you’ll look at how to use those for the style you’re working on, for the piece you’re working on – and when to ignore that principle, because you want a particular effect.

Above all, the course is about finding freedom: the freedom to be you on the page and the freedom to experiment with new approaches. You'll explore a wild range of styles in your writing, build your confidence in writing first draft, and develop a repertoire of techniques to refine and enliven every page – all through imaginative adventures in language and storytelling. This is your chance to experiment, to discover all the ways you can experiment, so you can choose the colour palette you want when you’re writing.

Writing Like Yourself

Most of us, when we start writing, try to write like "a proper writer". And if we've been reading good writing, we often make a decent fist of it, at least for a while. Like ChatGPT, we turn out a passable collage of what constitutes good writing. Like ChatGPT, there's something curiously wrong about it: not quite uncanny valley, just... somehow a little pedestrian? And that's because, at that stage, we're not yet writing like ourselves.

The familiar clichéd similes – cold as ice, hot as fire, etc – are absolutely fine in first draft. You don't want to slam on the brakes in the middle of storming out a scene because you wrote "white as snow". And for very transparent prose, we do sometimes use those as well. But often you want a more original comparison, or one that reflects your character or your world better. So come the second draft of that scene, you're staring into the middle distance, wondering, What does my character think is really hot? What’s really hot in my world? What things are really hot?

Enter A Dictionary of Similes, by Frank J. Wilstach! First published in 1916, this is an incredibly comprehensive list of similes across literature, from all sorts of authors. We are not planning to nick other people’s similes, mind. Rather, seeing all the different things other people have used kicks off all sorts of ideas you might not have had otherwise: “hot as black pudding” suddenly suggests all sorts of other incredibly hot food; “hot as Hades” suggests other hells and places; “hot as a monkey” – wtf, Shakespeare? – suggests some kind of writer’s crisis. (You can't win 'em all. Even if you're Shakespeare.)

So, of these super-common things-we-need-idioms for, pick 3–5:

• hot
• cold
• white
• black
• good
• happy
• rich
• poor
• clever
• stubborn

Then, for each one you chose, look it up in A Dictionary of Similes and use those similes to help you think of your own original versions. Go for three or more similes for each of the words you chose: that's easier than just picking one, because you don't have to pick The One Perfect One.

How you approach this varies depending on what you're writing. If you have a story or novel in progress, think about what your own character would use, or what suits your own world. If you want to create a story or a bit of flash-fiction (a very short story), choose the more unusual similes that appeal to you or tickle you, and work outwards from there to get a sense of your character and/or world. If that simile is particular to your character, what does that tell you about them? Or if it's specific to a place or imaginary world, what does that tell you about the setting? If you're writing poems, push yourself to find the most unusual comparisons you can that still make intuitive sense to you. You can use them in the poem or take a more outlandish simile and explore it through a poem.

Why this skill?

Similes are where the familiar grain of our language is at its most obvious: the standard phrases we use because everyone else does, a communication shortcut. That's why the usual ones are often used in transparent prose, where we don't want to notice the prose, just the story it's telling. Because they're so familiar, though, they lack impact. We've heard "cold as ice" so many times that it doesn't instantly conjure up a visceral sense of cold. But how about "cold as frozen steel"? That makes me wince with cold. Playing with creating your own similes is a wonderfully fun way to make the language your own – and that's what finding, and honing, your style is all about: making the language your own.

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Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

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Fight the pretty! A writer's and artist's process

The Lovers Held Together by Words

"In the maze, she found many treasures, including a thorny crown of unicorn horn, seven foot tall and creamy white, a mermaid’s purse containing a square of bobbin lace made by a sailor, a bolt of silver lining, a small jar of crystallised time, a collection of squashed butterflies, and a map of the world’s forgotten secrets.  She began to lose track of the rope, though, and even, at times, of herself.  She was running out of words and eventually was reduced to making a spidersilk-thin thread out of such leftovers as btw, fyi, nb, and asap.  At last, only one word remained: bitch."

I wrote Rope of Words over a period of 5 years and afterwards shared a series of posts about its writing process and the various illuminations that came from sailing straight into the rocks at every turn. At least I had the advantage of hindsight, to know the story did work out in the end. The artist who illustrated it, Lin Kerr, shared her process from the outset, with no such reassurance! Lin and I spoke together to Oxford Scribes about the creative process behind the book, so here's both a writer's and an artist's take on fighting the pretty.

Megan: A lot of what I write plays with the edges of the genres of fantasy and fairytale, which come with their own stereotypical tropes – you have the peasant boy makes good, you have the swords, you have the dragons, the beautiful elves, the unearthly music, and so forth. Lots of prettiness, which risks becoming saccharine, so I fight that and push back against it. 

One of the ways that I avoid or resist the pretty-pretty is to play with register, going high and literary, then bringing it back down to the ground with a bump. For instance, when the woman in the story is sailing all the seven seas, looking for her words, the seas are described in grand narrative style, then she says, “She never knew for certain if she wanted to find those words or not. If she did, it would mean he had sold them or given them to charity – at any rate, chucked them out.” 

One book group that I spoke to all objected to “chucked them out” because it jarred so much, but that was exactly what I wanted. Otherwise, you do end up with something that is too smooth and too beautiful. I felt similarly about the word bitch.

Lin: I found it really difficult to spoil this drawing – it could’ve been a beautiful painting. If you just saw it in isolation, you could think it’s lovely and romantic, with that couple sleeping together. Yes, tender is encased in amber, but  the viewer wouldn’t know that it was stuck. 

Then I had to put the word bitch in and I didn’t enjoy doing that. I put it as small as I could, but nevertheless, that nasty word lies between them. That was the word that changed the whole meaning of the scene. I wasn't happy about it, I'd like to Photoshop it out for a giclée [an archival print], but I’ve got to be emotionally honest and I’ve got to stick to the script. So there we are. It’s introducing brutality.

Megan: The woman's hair was another fairytale trope that I played with and resisted. Near the beginning of the story, she vows never to cut her hair until she finds her words and finds her way back into the golden valley. So many stories feature such vows or women with extraordinarily long hair, ignoring how impractical such long hair is. So I had her make the vow, but then she's not the impractical heroine, trailing her beauteous locks behind her (in the mud!). Rather, she uses it herself: she weaves it into a sail to surf the winds of space, she uses it as a parachute, and when she doesn't need it, she gets it out her way.

The Woman Who Plumbed the Depths for Words

"She dragged the canal and the rivers in the light, late summer rain. In a netful of detritus, she saw ev- poking out, and pounced on it. Was it evensong? evection? But it was every way, just a corroding fragment of cheap disposable poetry tossed overboard by the summer-loving punters. She’d already found its partner, floating forlornly among old champagne corks, every day."

Lin: A lot of people want to know the inside story of when Megan and I disagreed. Well, one of the things was about the hair. I found an image of a woman who was leaning over what looked like a deep gorge or a canal, and she had a long plait. The hair gave me a lovely image that I could play with throughout the book, with it getting longer and longer and its hairstyles. I thought the long plait hanging into the water would look lovely. 

That was the first time I said to Megan, “Can’t you change the words?” and she said, “No! She’s a practical woman, of course she’ll put her hair up on top of her head!”

Megan: Well, quite! Not dangling in the dirty canal water!

The Woman Who Travelled the World for the Words of Love

"Her skin darkened to gold with the sun when she sailed through the bright seas below the tropics, where deserts bordered the ocean.  It paled to snow when she sailed through the midnight seas, where only the stars and the moon ever show.  She manoeuvred through the mangrove seas, where sweat dripped and plants crawled.  She navigated the bitter northern seas, where sea and sky tasted of iron and sunsets were copper, and the summer seas, with fat fish and fatter sharks.  She spanned the salt seas, where no life stirred and the ghosts of albatross circled skeletal wrecks, and the magical seas, where manatees made like mermaids, starfish shimmied in seaweed forests, and seahorses ploughed the waves."

Lin: I was also dealing with fighting against smooth and beautiful. A lot of my creative process leading up to the story was trying to find the right way to portray the woman. I first looked at photographs of nudes – if you’re going to draw, you’ve got to get a model, and it’s not that easy to just find a model.  But artistic poses are invariably classical poses and this woman was always active. So that knocked that idea to pieces. 

I then bought a book of pottery figurines by many different artists to get inspiration from that. Then we went on a family holiday for our fortieth wedding anniversary and saw a contemporary sculpture exhibition in Agatha Christie's garden. I suddenly thought, this is it.

I needed to have an elongated figure with the light piercing right through the figure. You can actually cut a hole right in the middle of her body and you still haven’t lost the essence of her figure.  So that was the first thought, then it reminded me a bit of Matisse's work. Once I'd thought of Matisse, I considered his very bright colours - he totally disregards local colour. That set the scene for how I was going to do the woman.

A young friend, Katrina, offered to model for me. For "The Woman Who Travelled", she sat on a table in my studio in her bikini, with a broomstick to paddle with. This ended up being her favourite piece, because she said it made her feel like an adventurer, who was paddling her own canoe and finding her own life.  

The original drawing was very large; I photographed it, put it onto the computer, reduced it to size, put it on my lightbox and traced. I started a very very tentative tracing where I hardly got the body pierced by space at all, and then I went onto my next one and I thought, well what can I leave out, where can I make more spaces and still get away with it? And so the woman began to develop.

As well as piercing the space, I had to work on her face, from the second one to the fourth one. In a way, I uglified her, to take away the saccharine sweetness or tweeness that you could end up with.

The Woman Who Stole the Words of Angels

"One of the ships carried a vast star, which was white with cold and rimed with frost, and in that ship she saw a word, bright and smooth as a sheet of lightning: Elohim. No words on earth could express her love; then she would be The Woman Who Stole the Words of Angels. She plaited the skeins of her extraordinary floating hair and wove the plaits into a huge pointed sail. She lifted her chin, found her footing, and surfed the winds of space, chasing the angels, following the star."

For this painting, I faced a similar dilemma. (By the way my lovely model sat like this for 15 minutes while I did the drawing of her hands above her head!) At first, it just looked so pretty, as if it could be put on a duvet in a little girl’s bedroom. I really didn't want that; I had to get it more edgy. 

I started working on the face, because this was the first time I’d done a full-frontal face and suddenly I had to work with the nose again. Picasso often uses a profile view combined with a frontal view, so I borrowed that approach, and again that made her edgier.

Megan: When I collaborate with someone who works in a different art form, I try not to dictate their processes or their choices at all, because this is their language and they’re going to speak it much better than I do. 

When Lin first said that she was looking at really elongated figures, showed me the statue, and started talking about bushmen paintings and long shadows, I was horrified. Body image is something I feel very strongly about. I hate the constant photoshopping in ads, where the woman is elongated, all the parts of her body stretched and parts of her shaped away, and how that is then presented as "normal". I absolutely did not want that false ideal of beauty, especially as I related so strongly to the character. I wanted her to be a person, not a pretty idealisation. 

Nevertheless, I kept schtum, I nodded and smiled, and said, "Whatever you think’s best." When I saw the first figure, with the woman paddling, my heart sang. Yes, she’s stylised, but she still had the generous curves that I wanted to be in place, and the "uglification" (as Lin calls it) worked perfectly to create her individuality. Sometimes, uglification is more beautiful.

"Rope of Words" won the British Fantasy Society short story competition and is now a fully illustrated fine-printed book, in a limited edition of 600 signed and numbered copies, each one handbound by the artist. To see more, buy the book, or buy the artwork, visit the Rope of Words site. 

If you want to explore different approaches to your own writing style, or styles, join the Hone Your Style workshop on 20–21 January 2024: two half-days online, live, worldwide, £65 total. See the full details and book here.

A long overdue update, in pictures, & a super writing exercise

The blog's been quiet for so long, while behind the scenes I've been doing ALL THE THINGS and my blog-posts-to-write notebook is bursting its spine with lovely things to come, plus NaNoWriMo is already sending its unearthly shimmer over the horizon, so here's a quick rundown of the (mostly) writerly things I've been up to and a glimpse of all the blog-posts-to-come that I've foraged. Plus A BONUS KITTEN. And at the end, a super writing exercise.

5 questions to ask for your writing style

In my Dead Good Poets Radio interview, Ashley Lister asked me what I thought were the five most important things a writer should consider when putting pen to paper.