Music is a good place for me to understand the meaning of style. Also, I could do without Stevie… I could probably do without Jimmy too. Just thought I’d put that out there to get some hate : )
Even though he played it note-for-note perfectly in comparison to the original, it sounded completely different due to his personal tone.
Oh I totally get this. I keep referencing the uncanny valley for this. Like a cover version of a song. For those with good ears or memories, a remastered song, or even a song you grew up hearing on LP. Someone was complaining to me the other day about old songs being remastered, when the truth is, if they were mastered for anything it was a needle, not the speakers. When tones went outside of a certain range on a record it would cause the needle to jump. So once there were better speakers, and no needles, everyone needed some bass in their seventies jams.
So I get that the sublte inflection of writing, the dynamic, is a part of the style. I guess the question is what are ones thoughts on imitating a style. Or is it the subtlty of using the right synonym? Like envoking the style, maybe?
In the case of drawing, it is very common for people to study and recreate exact styles (to the best of their abilities, of course). Part of this is sometimes tracing. To the artist, this is learning. Many people in music consider covers cheap, many feel that about art too, but most of the great artists studied one another to the point of what many would consider creepy.
A simple example of this is what I did when I learned the concept. I was twenty-something, just getting ready to drop out of art school and pursue my career in full-time drug use. I decided that anime and manga art had tainted my style to the point where it looked, not only like that uncanny valley of not-close-enough, but it was also the same thing every white-twenty-something jackass kid was drawing. So I learned to draw all the characters from Archie. Sure enough, the style creeped into mine. Can I draw Archie today? Probably not, but to this day I still see a little of it in there.
Plot is the specific events, structure is just pattern recognition of certain types of plots and the way plots can be defined (3 act structure, 5 act structure, etc.) by various media
This is really what I’m trying to figure out. As an attempted musician and artist, there are guidelines to the art. But, there is also the common knowledge that rules are meant to be broken.
There are general rules for playing music like:
- What key are you playing in?
- What is the tempo?
- Are we in tune? … and remembering to ask this question multiple times throughout the show no matter how much you drank.
There’s improvisational rules like?
- If you fuck up, do it 2 or 4 times so it seems like you meant to.
- As long as you started together and stopped together, it was a song.
- No matter how many of us there are, at least one of you mother fuckers need to be keeping some sort of steady rhythm most of the time. It can’t just be 4 hours of improv delay harmonica… but four hours of a delayed mouth harp with a beat, I can do that.
There’s vibe rules? Some of which can be key.
- Bluesy: The Blues Scale
- Dark: Minor
- Mysterious: Minor harmonic
Some can be tone.
- Metal: Distortion
- Bluesy: Overdrive
- 80s: A snare that’s lower than the kick, and bass in the mid range with chorus on it played with a pick… chorus on vox and gits too…
A tale that I like to tell, especially to those familiar with Scandinavian folk tales and sagas, is one that combines a couple of tales regarding how Christian Bishops would “exorcise” pagan land spirits from their homes, effectively making them outcasts and now into demonic “trolls.”
Is there a recording of this I can hear?
Lets see if I’m understanding the break down here. I know this is all stuff you know.
Tense
Past Tense: already happened
Present Tense: happening now
Future Tense: will happen in the future
Person
First Person: “I” to refer to the protagonist or narrator
Second Person: “you” to directly address the reader
Third Person: pronouns such as “he”, “she”, “it”, or “they” to refer to characters
Narration or Voice
First-person narrator: uses “I” to tell the story
Limited omniscient narrator: access to the thoughts and feelings of only one or a few characters
Unreliable narrator: credibility is questionable due to bias, mental state, or lack of understanding
Second-person narrator: addresses the reader or listener directly using “you”, as if they are a character in the story
Objective or dramatic: presents the story in a straightforward, factual manner, without providing access to the thoughts or feelings of any characters.
Epistolary narrator: tells the story through a series of letters or documents.
Stream of consciousness: a continuous flow of thoughts and impressions, without clear structure.
Omniscient: third-person perspective with knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of all the characters in a story.
Then we’ve got things like language and sentence structure.
I guess this is the part I’m trying to quantify in my understanding of style and it’s use. I found myself reading these over and over… to the point I enjoyed trimming them down to get a better and better rudimentary undertanding… I think.
Lovecraft...lack of characterization...that the reader...will feel themselves in the...main character...drawing the reader into...personal dreams/nightmares.
J.G. Ballad, in The Atrocity Exhibition...non-linear manner...goals of a shifting set of perspectives on social atrocities and the...way they are...experienced.
Bret Easton Ellis, in Less Than Zero...a minimalist approach, with an emotionally cool voice on present tense events...matter-of-fact response...to demonstrate “Numbness as a feeling”.
So I guess that is my goal. Being a failed musician, that loves comics, epic stories and diverse fantasy genres, leading to diverse styles, I have landing myself with a somewhat “Andy Warhol’s the Factory” attitude toward writing and publishing. Probably not the best thing to admit as a writer as it probably makes me sound like a money grubber. But that’s not it. It really fits my hat as the publisher.
So when it comes to style, I’m kind of looking for the quantifiables… items that a newb would use to better understand the art.
- Tense
- Person
- Voice
- Aesthetics
- Other?
Questions:
- Is it generally accepted for writers to purposfully mimic other writers as a way of learning like artists or musicians do?
- Is there a recording of Christian Bishops Exorcising Pagan Land Spirits I can hear?
Sidenote:
- In order to better follow the “lesson” I have been giving a thorough listen to Crimson Tatters. We need to get that on some other platforms, it’s really good. My business comment on it is that it appears to be embedded in the site in a way that you will not be able to tell how many plays you have gotton. Also, it appears the the Google Analytics on the page has an error keeping you from seeing how many people went to the page.
