Today we continue the series about writing styles! Writers are a lot like shoppers, and the writing process is a hell of a lot like shopping. Your writing process says a lot about how and what you will write, and it greatly influences your voice. The beauty here is that there is no right or wrong as long as you write in your way. Try to write like someone else, and you will fail. Note: many of us have more than one style influencing us! Today let’s check out the browser!
The Browser
For the browser, writing is an opportunity to take everything in. They view writing as an excuse to explore the world, and they slowly meander through their writing just as they do life, exploring the quality of light as it filters in the window and the texture of a nectarine against their lips. Writing is a daily essential for these writers, and it is one way in which they process their experiences and assign meaning and emotion to their sensations.
Pros: Falling into the “naive” classification of writing along with the impulse shopper (see Orhan Pamuk’s book, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist for more on this), these folks have a way of capturing the things others so often take for granted. The browser can provide readers with a sensual glimpse through their eyes. Few other writers can capture so vividly the world around them. Looking for inspiration in this type of writing? Check out Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse or Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
Cons: The browsers have a hard time keeping it short and sweet. Because these people feel so committed to their senses, they tend to write exhaustively. In Search of Lost Time is an example of this, and Proust only gets away with writing this 7-volume, million-word novel because he’s a master. The delete button is this writer’s best friend. As Antoine de Saint-Exupery says, “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Tips:
- Make time for sifting through your experiences every day. Don’t worry about forming them into something meaningful, just write.
- Find a trusted adviser when you are forming your prose, someone who can help advise you what you need to cut, but always save the original and trust your gut!
- Embrace your need to record everything. You can go back and edit things out later. The best advice on this comes from Natalie Goldberg in her book, Writing Down the Bones:
- “Our sense by themselves are dumb. They take in experience, but they need the richness of sifting for a while through our consciousness and through our whole bodies. I call this ‘composting.’ Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil.”
Tomorrow I will post about the premeditator. For now, I will leave you with this thought:
Each thing you add to your story is a drop of paint falling into clear water; it spreads through and colors everything.”
Lisa Cron
Wild Moontides 
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