From Walt Whitman

Recently, I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting my stories where I want them. I’ve spent excruciating amounts of time breaking apart the sentences, rearranging and rewriting them into the ground. But I came across this passage by Walt Whitman in the introduction to his book Leaves of Grass, and it helped me see what I was doing wrong. For anybody interested, the introduction gives a lot of useful advice to new writers. It's a very tough read though; he forgets commas (purposefully).

“The greatest poet has less a marked style and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself. He swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. I will have nothing in the way, not the richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what it is... What I experience or portray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition. You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me.”

And that rings true. It seems right to say that a writer should feel an idea/emotion deeply enough that it comes out in the writing without force. It seems right to say the writer should feel the thought’s own cadence, and channel this cadence, instead of forcing one on it (I think here of the overly-dressed prose of Dickens).

The fact is that I’ve been so far away from the content at every stage of the writing process recently, that I’ve had no idea what the right expression is. This has forced me into a cold editing process where one sentence seems just as good another one, with very little idea of which one works best.

Of course, that’s not to say that I’ll never work on style, but, rather, I’ll let the writing style develop as a function of and in relation to the story’s content in the future.