Well, the title is the nearest I’m ever going to get to shouting, ‘Destiny is all!’, the phrase repeated by main character Uhtred at the end of the introduction to each episode. It’s a great fun series. But to style; more exactly, writing style.

When I first started writing again, around 2014, my style was dark. Each sentence ground out one word at a time, usually by staring at the screen, willing vocabulary to come into my head. One person commented on a piece of my writing that it was like ‘melting stone’. I enjoyed trying to compose the stuff, but 1000 to 1500 words was as much as anyone, myself included, could take. You could not read 100,000 words of the material without ending up in a padded cell.

A lighter example of the ‘style’:
You said you cared, as my tears crept over faultless skin, wrinkling tissue years prematurely. Your finger wiped away salt moisture, you licked my sadness, said I was mistaken. Your thumb erased tear trails, massaging skin backwards in time, attempting restoration. Your kiss cemented and smoothed, all evidence removed before a jury could deliberate.

Then once I attended the writing group my style changed. By accident. Just before Christmas 2016 I wrote a piece which was a kind of updated Bonnie and Clyde story. For some reason I tried to write it from the woman’s point of view and tell how she became entangled with this guy and his criminal ways. It still had elements of my earlier style but toward the end I threw in the phrase ‘tire-roared away’ when the couple were escaping after robbing a bank. Some at the group commented on the phrase and I went away obsessed that I had invented a new form of writing style. For a while all my stories were full of hyphenated words; some worked well, others were simply awful, some sentences had three such phrases in them. How patient were the group as I worked through this obsession!

An example of this ‘hyphenation’ from the original Bobby Olsen book: I first saw her at the interval, a young twenty-something hovering close to a fifty-something belt-bulged business suit. Long Ava Gardner brown waves waved to me, shoulder-bouncing an SOS through the crowded foyer, her eyes flickering with a plea for a savior from a night of heavyweight bed-bouncing. I leaned against a bill-posted wall, hands nonchalant pocket-pushed, watching the little doll curse her choice of career.

Realising the error of my ways, and noticing the closing eyelids of the writing group around me when I announced this week’s episode of Bobby Olsen..., I switched back to normality. At least normality in that I tried to make the writing sound like ‘soft-boiled’ detective stories set in 1950s New York. And now, leaving that era of fiction behind, I find myself influenced by the recent books I’ve read from established, highly respected writers (all American, I think). Joyce Carol Oates (mentioned in my previous blog), John Williams (of Stoner fame), Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness). My writing is now a combination of Oates’ short, sharp phrases, an omission of the dreaded ‘and’ word, and (sic) the flowing sentences of Yates and Williams. I’m probably falling between a thousand stools, but it’s challenging, rewarding, stimulating, and fascinating that at a relatively later stage of life I still learn new ideas about writing, my writing, and experimenting and developing a style. I may never get ‘there’, but the journey is fun for sure.

An example of recent writing: Johnny recovered, took another smoke, breathed it out without reaction. For a moment all was quiet. The traffic hum faded, no voices cracked into the square, no music sounded out, no cutlery clattered, no hammers, no doors. He sat there, Daisy a foot away, elbows on the table, cigarettes held high whispering out smoke into the air.