I think all writers have their own style and it took me a while to figure out what my style was. And for whatever reason I had in my head when I was younger that the best writers are overly metaphoric and, you know, incredibly verbose and use these long flowing sentences. But the more that I would write, I realized that my style is a little bit more, I don’t know what the word would be, but maybe economical. It feels like a very cerebral word, but we’ll use that.
I like to think of my writing style as subtle. By that I mean my goal in my books and a lot of the books that I like to read I really appreciate the value of subtlety.
And what I mean by that is life is full of all these little happenings, you know. It’s not often that there are big happenings, there are usually little steps that we take every day, every hour, every moment that kind of change and navigate the course of our lives. And because they’re not these big huge events sometimes our reactions to them in life are subtle and we may not even understand what’s going on.
There are moments in Hello Universe when Virgil cries out for help and it’s kind of a big loud moment. But a lot of the book is kind of peppered with more subtle feelings of emotion and anticipation and nervousness and all these little things that we experience in life. So my goal as a writer is to bring those things forward, so that people can relate to those emotions that are happening on the page, even little small moments that life is made of.