I’m a little jealous of my kid.  His is a pretty heedless scramble through life. Not much planning, not much foresight, not much consideration of consequences, just bouncing from A to B to C as events occur.

The consequences occasionally come back to bite him, of course.  But there might be some method I could extract from the madness.

His storytelling adheres to this ultra-linear model, though admittedly his choice of detail still has that little-kid slant to the weirdly irrelevant.  “We got up super early to go to the beach, and there was a bug in the back seat and I ate a granola bar and then we got there and then we came home.”

He rarely makes the other typical little kid mistake: “I saw this movie where there were these two guys, and one was in jail, and then he got out, and then they visited a nun, and then they went to a church, and then they went to a diner, and then they went to a music store, and then they put on a concert, and … oh, I left out the part where they went to the hotel lounge and the shopping mall and their apartment blew up … and then there was a big chase scene and then they were in jail, Tha End … oh, except they also rode in an elevator.”

I hope my writing falls somewhere between these two extremes.  I’m afraid it trends more toward the latter.  I write long, I write rambly, I write hyper-detailed descriptions of car crashes.  Then I go back and read what I wrote and realize I forgot to mention whether anyone was hurt.

I’m not sure what makes one person wax rhapsodic while another writes stereo instructions.  I’m not sure one is better than the other, when it comes to literature. I do know I want Hemingway telling me how to program my DVR, not Proust. (Of course, Hemingway would probably get drunk and break the DVR, so maybe not.)

I do know my writing changes from the first draft to the third. So maybe I need to work on the distillation process before I start typing.  Run the plot through the Kid Filter, as it were.

Or, I could just shut up and write.  Probably better to get on with it.

What is your writing style?