Writers are sometimes lumped into one of two categories: the story-teller and the stylist. As if they were separate skills. In fact they are two sides of the same coin. There are no novels completely devoid of style, and none empty of story (even if only the one the reader creates). What is the relation between story and style?
Story is the field of imagined event and character that the writer hopes to convey. It is an ambition. Style is the manner in which story is made legible, given shape and tone. It is the ambition's execution.
Sounds simplistic.
But I think we can use this distinction to help us think about the act of writing, about how stories change and grow from insight through imagination to the blank page and finally finished work.
Looking at writing from the point of view of the completely blank page, from the first glimmer of story — what happens?
Imagination fills with image and event and character and voices.
This is the right brain's domain. Free-associating. Concocting story, letting the imagination have free rein. Or reign.
I like to think of this stage in writing as "brain dumping." Putting it down more or less as it streams out.
But as we start the hard work of transposing the imagined story to paper — giving it a physical form — the left brain must take over. And we compose. We construct.
Writing is not simply a matter of transcribing the contents of your imagination. It isn't a matter of simply taking dictation from your inspired self. If you simply dump your imagined world — more or less in the order in which it occurred to you — onto the page you will, I am certain, produce an unreadable, perhaps illegible, mess.
The brain dump must be composed. From the many imagined images and scenes and speeches and incidents, the writer must choose those that work, that function, that communicate intention.
Writing is a constant back and forth between imagination and composition. The more you construct the artifact the more the story settles, grows, becomes cogent and coherent. And in the act of taking story to composition, the choices — how the choices are made — render the writer's style visible on the page. Style refines story. Story-telling manifests style.
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