How to Develop Your Writing Style for Fiction: Choosing Words Effectively

To have a workable writing style, a fiction writer has to have a skillful grasp of English or their native language. Understanding vocabulary, syntax (that is, how words are put together to form sentences) and common idiom are critical skills for developing style. Over time, these things may come naturally enough through speech, but applying them to writing can be frustrating.

Developing a good writing style, in its essence, is the art of selecting the right words and putting them down on paper (or a monitor) in an order that makes an idea come through the most clearly. Also, the writer's audience must be affected in the intended way. This is a guide to developing a writing style by making effective word choices when writing fiction by explaining several characteristics of the written word.

Developing Writing Style: Length

It doesn't matter how quickly the human eye can look at the symbols that make up letters - longer words, it goes without saying, are going to take longer to scan and register. Take the words 'cold' and 'frigid'.
Although there's only two letters' of difference and the time would be practically nil, it could take a good bit of time over the course of a 300-page novel.
All pages of a novel being the same physical size, it would take longer to read an individual page that has longer words, and also less actual information would fit. For example, let's say one page is large enough to hold the words 'scintillate, scintillate, miniscule vesper.' Its opposite page contains 'twinkle, twinkle, little star'. Maybe two or three more words could fit on the second page, allowing the author to pass along a bit more information and set a quicker pace. A large part of fiction writing is deciding what pace to set in a novel.

Developing Writing Style: Complexity

Length of a written word doesn't necessarily have a bearing on its complexity. Rather, it's the meaning that determines this. Words, over time, can develop new meanings or lose their definitions. Simple words are what a reader would know without having to pause or look at a dictionary.
In fiction, I find that simple words often work best when describing immediate circumstances or external reactions, whereas complex ones work better with broader circumstances or internal thoughts.

Developing Writing Style: Specificity

General nouns, such as 'bird', portray a larger part of the world and evoke an entirely different mental image than, say, 'robin'. Fiction is dramatic rather than expository (ie, focused on storytelling rather than giving information), so the story is more clear when the author uses specific words. Writing style depends on the situation - some styles I've seen are very general, requiring the use of my imagination. Personally, I feel it's the author's job to give readers a clear picture - the more specific, the better.

Developing Writing Style: Concrete vs Abstract

"Show, don't tell." can sum this section up. Writing needs to be clear and evoke an image that a reader can easily form. Saying that a woman is 'beautiful' does nothing to tell me what that woman looks like, but 'voluptuous' or 'pear-shaped' gives me a much better mental image. If the person or thing being written about is meant to be vague, then generalities would do perfectly. Over time, you'll develop a sense of style and know how specific to get.

Developing Writing Style: Choice of Definition

There are two types of definitions: denotative and connotative. Denotative is what the dictionary says; for example, the word 'father' means 'a male sire of offspring'. Connotative definition is more subjective - 'father' is whatever it means to someone personally.
Connotation can make writing more complex, so writers must be aware of possible slang meanings as related to different groups, an example being the word 'bad'. At its extreme, it can anger a reader and cause them to no longer participate in the story. It can be used by characters. In fact, part of a good writing style is developing characters through dialect, but that's for another article. When speaking as the author, it's unwise to overuse it.

Homework:

Yes, there's homework. It's simple, really: I want you to go and pluck a book out of your bookshelf, flip to a page at random, and observe the author's writing style based on the aspects of the words that he or she uses. Also, note the in-book situation. What's happening, who are the characters involved, etc? The only way to improve writing is to read other works, see what was done and learn how to apply it. When developing a style in writing, on that note, it can be tempting to simply mimic that of a popular author. Don't do this - it's quite obvious and is a very big turn-off.