<aside> 💡 I started collecting quotes from books to exemplify styles. The key question I try to answer is “how does x write y”? Note that as it stands, there are mixed excerpts in English and Italian.

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What makes style

• Rhythm. Eg. Alternate sprawling, meditative sentences and short, poignant ones.
• Repetition, paralelism, chasms.
• Choice of words
• Themes→Imagery and symbolism: concrete/visual (eg. nature, craft), abstract (eg. solid vs fragile, ); focus on the tension

https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/11/21/ursula-k-le-guin-where-do-you-get-your-ideas/

Mystical as the process may be, Le Guin goes on to outline its “five principal elements,” which must “work in one insoluble unitary movement” in order to produce great writing:

1. The patterns of the language — the sounds of words.
2. The patterns of syntax and grammar; the way the words and sentences connect themselves together; the ways their connections interconnect to form the larger units (paragraphs, sections, chapters); hence the movement of the work, its tempo, pace, gait, and shape in time.
3. The patterns of the images: what the words make us or let us see with the mind’s eye or sense imaginatively.
4. The patterns of the ideas: what the words and the narration of events make us understand, or use our understanding upon.
5. The patterns of the feelings: what the words and the narration, by using all the above means, make us experience emotionally or spiritually, in areas of our being not directly accessible to or expressible in words.

Beginners’ failures are often the result of trying to work with strong feelings and ideas without having found the images to embody them, or without even knowing how to find the words and string them together.

THEMES AND STYLE