Except for dialogue, I've always written in complete, intelligible, well crafted, properly punctuated sentences and paragraphs.
Some years ago, intending to write shorter, I tried switching to a much looser first person stylecomplete with lots of dashes. It was fun. It was much harder work than I anticipated, but the net result was lively, punchy, quick-paced, and much shorter. I pursued it a couple more years, then abandoned writing altogether in favor of painting.
A couple years ago, the Great American Novel struck out of a clear blue sky. I refused to have anything to do with it. I put it off. I tried deliberately to botch it. Finally, in desperation, I wrote the @#$%^&! thing. Somewhere around the fourth draught, I tossed it in the closet and took a break to write a novella with no dashes, no first person extravagances, no loopy conversational segues, no disjunctions or whims or spins. Returned to work on the novel, I found I was able to resume writing in a slangy style much more easily. I made it work with the tale instead of against it.
I'm now working on another novella. This one's about a sculptor, who tells his tale in sentence fragments. Lots of sentence fragments. Little fragments. Big fragments. All the various different in between fragments. Lots of missing verbs. People can probably figure it out. Right? No doubt.
I've recently discovered a most curious fact: deliberately slovenly writing is harder work than writing well. Slovenly speech isn't necessarily an indicator of slovenly thinking, but there's definitely a correlation.
I'd still much rather paint than write.
