Explaining my Writing Style by Paul Doucette

 

For details and links visit my BWL Author Page

Hello again,

I have been asked on occasion to discuss and explain my writing style. Perhaps many of you would like to know what motivates a writer to commit something/anything to paper. I can only convey what drives me to write.

The first point I believe ought to be that as a writer or potential writer, you would have something to say; to share. This axiom applies to any subject being written about. In the area of fiction, I believe the writer MUST have a story to tell regardless of the genre, i.e., mystery, suspense, espionage, intrigue and so on.

A second point I believe to be of paramount importance is to find your own specific voice. In my case, this was discovered by reading many authors with many varied voices. I refer to such writers as Stuart Kaminsky, Robert B. Parker, Arthur Cohen Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe, just to name a few. These writers adopted writing styles from using a narrative voice to using characters to convey their voice through the use of dialogue. In my case, I opted for dialogue, mostly because of my love of spoken language with its intonations, dialects, and nuances.

The third point about my writing is to heed the sense of place and history in story-telling, These ought to be treated as silent ‘characters’ by the writer. After all, the story takes place somewhere and at some point in time. I use as a guiding principle the following view that we are products of the environments we live in. Therefore how your characters act and interact is to varying degrees a consequence or a reaction to where you have placed them.

The points I offer can be seen at work in my John Robichaud Mysteries which are set in war-time Halifax between 1939 and 1946.

I hope the foregoing will be helpful to you in your own writing or in understanding the stories I have written. I will leave you with something my English Professor once told us:

 “Write what you know.”