“Why do your books change style so often?”

Tory from Gree­ley, CO, writes: “Why do your books change style so often?”

My usu­al response to this often-asked ques­tion is, “do you only like one fla­vor of ice cream?”

My changes of style occur in part because it’s much more fun to write in dif­fer­ent ways. Sim­ply put, it’s chal­leng­ing to write dif­fer­ent kinds of books. Rep­e­ti­tion can be boring.

The more inter­est­ing answer is to quote Flaubert—the French novelist—who said, “Style is a way of seeing.”

In oth­er words, the way a book is writ­ten is part of the book itself. Style is, if you will, a silent char­ac­ter in the book, the char­ac­ter who allows the plot, the char­ac­ters, and the ideas in the book to be expressed in dif­fer­ent ways. Is the lan­guage terse? It is poet­ic? Does the action unfold slow­ly, quick­ly? Is the sto­ry tense? Lan­guid? Or is it a mix of these things?

For each book I write, I try to decide how the sto­ry is to be told. Indeed, each time, I need to think who is telling the sto­ry. In short, the sto­ry teller is always part of the story.