: Re: Techniques for creating variety in prose When I write my short stories, I usually end up using a direct style as follows: Tim remembered the day he had to say goodbye to Cathy. He did

@Hamm6328258

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Ok, Javeer, here's some more feedback.

Thinking about style is pretty much a waste of time. What you need to be doing is thinking about what you want to write. Focus on the stories you want to tell, and let your style flow from that. Your style develops naturally out of your experiences, your thoughts, your observations, your attitudes, your knowledge, your feelings, your responses to the world. Look at people, place, things, and incidents, and see what they mean to you. Put yourself in the place of your characters and imagine what they are feeling. What would they really say to each other at each moment? How would they really react? How would the sun really look filtering through the ancient windows in that nearly ruined train station on that particular morning? Experience the world you are creating and tell us about it, and before you know it, you won't be worrying about the style; you will be writing in your own style.
If you must, however, think about style, if you need a way to flex your style muscles, then pick out some books you love or even some you don't, and copy their style. Try to write a few paragraphs in the style of Dickens, or Mark Twain, or J. K. Rowling, or anybody at all. Do it a bunch of times until you get sick of it and you find yourself saying, "hey, I see how this works; let me give it a shot on my own." By that time you will have absorbed a bunch of the "tricks" of lots of successful writers, and you won't have to think about them, you'll just reinvent them for yourself.
Do try to remember that too much attention to style can bog you down, and it has been the bane, even the death, of many writers, even many great ones. If you spend too much time picking out which hammer you want to use, you won't get the house built.

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