Are you Quirky but Serious?

Influence has an important role in your writing. As you understand and work with different styles and influences, you’ll learn how to find your own voice.

This is part six of a 10-part series on style and voice. Writers in the Story Course and the Story Intensive can determine their writing style by taking the Style Diagnosis Quiz. This is a tool to help you highlight elements of style in your own work and point you to authors who may inspire you right now.

Read the rest of the Style Diagnosis series here: — Bookish — Deeper Than You Think — Fearless — Grounded Fantasist — Stylist —Intimate Orator — Visceralist — Pointy With Intellect — Minimalist — Quirky but Serious (below)

Are you Quirky but Serious?

Where do you come up with this stuff? Your stories would be purely funny, if only they weren’t also so true. The combination of absurd-yet-disturbing puts your readers in the delicate and rare place where they’re laughing, but they’re never quite sure if they should be laughing quite so hard.

Your stories show that you observe more truth about life than most, but then you twist that truth on its head and make your readers cringe — in the best way. You’re generous enough to hand over the dark truth in a way that makes us smile knowingly. So what if we shudder after we smile?

Overall, you favour clarity in your sentences. You love good dialogue especially, of course: all the better to make the gravity of your subtext ring true.