[The Spartan king] Agesilaus called a council meeting at which all the Spartan allies sat down on one side and the Spartans on the other. The king then told a herald to proclaim that all the potters among the allies and the Spartans should stand up. After this the herald called on the blacksmiths, the masons, and the carpenters to do likewise; and so he went on through all the crafts and trades. By the end of the herald's recital almost every single man among the allies had risen to his feet. But not a Spartan had moved. The laws of Lycurgus still obtained. The king laughed and, turned to his allies, remarking: 'You see, my friends, how many more soldiers we send out than you do.'
The whole Spartan attitude is contained in those words.
- Ernle Bradford, Thermopylae
As you may well have noticed, my writing style tends to be both verbose and complex. To make it easier for readers, I've broken it down into three categories.
The first concerns essay-writing. When forming ideas in this sequence, I try to keep things as simple as possible. I myself have read essays from a wide variety of sources, and found them mostly dull. In order to avoid this problem in my own writing (and it isn't easy, I can assure you), I try to streamline my word choices, making it more accessible to people who have no idea what the hell they've stumbled on.
The second style I reserve mostly for my short stories and occasional longer works of fiction. I play around with sentence structure and double meanings more freely, often adopting thematic direction. That's probably the best way I can describe it,and it may or may not be what the final prose actually sounds like. I've never actually bothered to consult a third party.
And finally, there's my poetry writing. Since poetry generally has many meanings, and very few people understand it with detail, I go all out here. In my poetry writing, I try simply to make the audience feel. Mood is crucial. Mood is everything.
The place to go if you need a friendly nudge. The advice contained herein were written by literary experts (trust me, I worked under one of them!), so they're just the thing to get you past writer's block. Even those of you not interested in a career as an author might find some handy tips to smooth up essay-writing skills and the like.
