While there’s no one way of getting style right, there are many ways of getting it wrong. Much of our growth as writers is stripping away the common mistakes until we get down to the shared grammar of style. The basic level is easy to find on Youtube. Meanwhile, I’ve tried to intuit my way through the possibilities of more advanced line work and share my discoveries here.
In the beginning, new writers rebel against this process. They fear that stripping away amateurish habits will make their writing sound like everyone else’s. Their writing feels unique because they don’t see anything else like it on the store shelves. Unfortunately, those habits make their work read like all the others in the slush pile. Ripping away bad habits is a necessary process of tearing down our writing to this shared language and then finding ourselves anew within it.
That finding ourselves is largely the process of learning the various tools available to us, but today, I want to address something different. I want to talk about the idiosyncratic nature of your style.
When William Faulkner lambasted the idea of pursuing a style, I think this is what he meant. He wasn’t belittling writers for learning how to write better, he was mocking them for trying to figure out what would be their unique signature. I first began to appreciate how correct he was as I heard Cormac McCarthy and Charlie Kaufman talk about their own writing. It’s less obvious with David Lynch, but through them, I understood Lynch better as well.
I mention these three because they’re all favorites of mine and I longed to be more like them. In the early 90’s, it seemed every TV show and movie was aping the style of either David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino. None captured the magic and were quickly forgotten, but even with all that evidence before us, many of us longed to be like our favorite novelists or screenwriters. Only the original writers could convince me I needed to find my own path.
Kaufman has spoken on the subject, but it was Cormac McCarthy’s history in developing his minimal use of punctuation that really struck home.
The first time I ever checked out a book by McCarthy, the librarian commented that she had tried to read his stuff but couldn’t get past his lack of punctuation, and it does take some getting used to. For McCarthy, however, he thought it made the prose clearer. It began when someone charged him with rewriting something to make it easier for them to read. McCarthy stripped away much of what he considered to be the unnecessary punctuation, and it worked. That experience birthed it all.
McCarthy wasn’t trying to distinguish himself from other writers. He was pursuing the path he thought led to greater clarity. Kaufman isn’t trying to be avant-garde. He has a particular type of story to tell, and he’s looking for the best way to tell it. Lynch isn’t trying to give homespun Americana a weird twist; down to his soul, that’s simply who Lynch is.
Each of these storytellers is a unique voice, but they were simply being true to themselves and telling a story as clearly as they could. That holding true to themselves wasn’t about clinging to amateurish habits. They learned the language of their medium but held to their convictions about how each story should be told.
I walked away from this with my mantra: clarity with conviction.
As I work on my fourth short story for 2026, I see the choices I make that aren’t grammatically required but feel right and necessary to me. If the patterns of my writing were different, I might have made other choices, but I have emerged with two new rules, strictly for myself, that I believe conform to this idea of clarity with conviction.
The choices are similar in nature. First, I write “and” instead of “but” unless the context absolutely demands I do otherwise. Second, my character tags use “said” instead of “asked” unless context demands otherwise. My characters say most questions. In both cases, the words fade into the unseen parts of the sentences, whereas the change to a but or an asked demands too much attention for itself. My choices allow the focus to be elsewhere while sustaining the rhythms of repetition that are important to my work.
Whether I’m right or wrong is irrelevant. You don’t have to agree with me. That librarian certainly didn’t think McCarthy’s use of punctuation increased clarity. In addition, if I didn’t point these choices out, I suspect most readers wouldn’t notice. It’s not a stylistic signature in the sense of some expert noting how Thomas does this or that. It’s a personal conviction about what brings clarity to the flow and meaning of my writing.
The intent is clarity with conviction.
Is it a big deal? No. Probably the most important improvement in my writing in recent years has been a better intuitive understanding of subjective writing, writing tinted with the opinions and judgments of the POV character, as opposed to objective writing that presents events without opinion. I believe objective writing has an important role to play, but as I unlearned some bad teachings about subjective writing, the consistency of my writing improved. Maybe I should write about that soon, but my point in this context is that clarity with conviction isn’t a back door to being more like our favorite authors.
These can be small choices, but the goal is to tell a story clearly without chaining ourselves a committee’s approval about what clarity means.
— Thaddeus Thomas
I like it! Clarity with conviction is much better than, say, wishy-washy confusion (abbreviated by WTF?) or cowardly convolution. Fourth story this year? Is this indicative of one-a-month, and should we think of each story as your monthly-visitor?