#...possibly i should have a category tag for creative-work-in-broad-generality?

[moonlit-tulip]

Purpose and Technique

There are two distinct things which are both often referred to as 'style', in creative contexts like writing / art / music-composition / etc.

The first—let's call it style-of-purpose—is style in the sense of patterns in one's choices of creative objectives. What sorts of concepts or themes or emotions or aesthetics or suchlike one is looking to convey to one's audience.

The second—let's call it style-of-technique—is style in the sense of patterns in one's choices of techniques to use in pursuit of those objectives. How one fills in all the implementation-details which, while necessary to fill in to fulfill one's objectives, aren't objectives on any deeper level than that. Prose-style, in a story being told for the sake of conveying a certain plot; character-design, in an art-piece being created for the sake of conveying a certain sort of brushwork; described events, in a set of song-lyrics written for the sake of conveying a a certain sort of feeling; et cetera.

Style-of-purpose is pretty much inevitable for anyone engaging in deliberate production or presentation of creative work for an audience. There's no practical way to avoid it, and not much reason to want to. Style-of-purpose is a habit, but not a constraint: it doesn't prevent you from doing what you want to do, but rather emerges naturally from doing what you want to do.

Style-of-technique, on the other hand, can very easily turn into a constraint. A technique effective in pursuit of one work's objectives can easily be counterproductive in another work. Someone who leans heavily on Hardboiled Detective Narration might have some trouble conveying their desired tone when trying to write a (prototypical, non-subversive) cute-girls-doing-cute-things story about water-skiing, for example.

As such, it's important, when doing creative work in any field where one intends to create new material, as opposed to just variations on the same themes over and over again, to have range. To practice a varied and ideally ever-growing array of different techniques one can use in any given part of one's work, so that no matter what one's creative objectives are one can pursue them effectively. Developing a strong distinctive style-of-technique across one's works, then, is a trap: an artist with that sort of style is one who isn't getting enough practice doing anything else, and who accordingly will have trouble doing anything else when they want to.

It's very easy to fall into a feedback-loop of finding a single effective technique in a given domain—a method of narration one is good at, or of lineart-drawing, or suchlike—and then, since that's the technique with which one produces one's best work, to use it and neglect other techniques. The longer one does this for, the larger the gap in quality between one's output with that technique and others grows, and the more tempting it becomes to keep on using that technique more and others less. And thus the less able one becomes to create works up to one's quality standards with any other techniques, even when those other techniques would, if performed with the benefit of practice, lead to more effective realization of one's artistic aims.

People talk a lot about trying to find their styles, when doing creative work. This is fine, when it comes to style-of-purpose. But, for style-of-technique, I recommend against trying to develop it for oneself, and in fact recommend actively avoiding developing it; it's far too easy to become trapped in a niche narrower than one can comfortably fit in.