Style Should Be Experimental

Be brave enough to try something attuned to the specific sensibilities of a writer who is honest with themselves and their art, even if you feel it doesn’t line up with the status quo.

In my own work, I’m releasing a set of stories that most Christians would find “out of character” for a believer to write.

Those novels come out at the end of September. And I have written what I have written.

Solomon wrote erotic poetry about a non-married couple—not to mention hundreds of other stories like it—and it’s in your Bible, so stop being prude about sexuality.

Never apologize for making your art. The best art comes from not filtering yourself for the sake of what has been done or continues to be done.

If you want to write a story about submachine-gun-armed ballet dancers fighting maids from Zeta Reticuli, the only permission you need is your own. The best writers will make that ridiculous concept come alive in their prose, igniting the senses with powerful storytelling ability and writing that invokes all senses.

They’ll use short sentences for action.

They’ll.

Do.

Single.

Words.

In.

Lines.

For my upcoming novels (I’ve never seen this done before), I’m sprinkling song lyrics in italics during the more emotionally charged scenes. This hasn’t been widely done that I know of outside of epigraphs—as it is almost more like a film score—so I thought it’d be a fundamental and new technique in my stories to stretch the writerly muscles and help me practice (that’s a dirty word in writing for some reason) for my musical stories.

I’ve written about my Antiphonal Metaphor Combat System here a few times before, but it is these artistic decisions that help our own author voices emerge. That will be Orchestrylus Odyssey’s signature feature.

In Crown of the Orphic Queen and The Man Who Paints Fire, there are locutions (divine whispers from the gods and goddesses) throughout the prose that are offset from the main paragraphs which set the tone of scenes and envelop the characters in mysterious happenings apart from the repeating cycles of Orphism.

If I wanted to play it safe, then I wouldn’t write books like these. Some might see these techniques as jarring, whereas I see that as opening my writerly instincts to a higher level of the craft.

Experimental writing sets new standards and new lines for us. It might take us years to develop these new ideas.

Let’s not forget to be artists as much as writers.

A writer can write an email. *Avoided the comma splice here when it was so easy to do* An artist can send blood into your extremities as they tense up from a turn of phrase from the fingers or voice (if dictating) of a person who crafts their stories with an intended permanence.

I want to leave a ghostly impression on someone’s mind long after they pass the brazenly painted section of the story that I rewrote sixty times to get the feel of the words correctly on paper.

If we’re going to push boundaries, it means severing the notion that we must put out the fastest novel possible for the sake of an algorithm or Kindle Unlimited reads.

Take your time, or the experimental facets of the book will never deliver what you intended.

We need more carved-out voices in the literary sphere. Genre-bending, meta, and philosophical books that follow the reader for years to come because the way they were written forced new things to surface in the works.

Again, the only permission you need to try new things is from yourself.

Use that writer’s block to surf on the waves of the artisanal depths instead of resigning yourself to limiting your creativity. There is no writer’s block for those who put their pen to the page. Even on bad days.

Happy writing!