100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019

Don’t force a personal style
Ten ways to develop style

Style is not something you can put onto your writing like a new set of clothes. Style is your writing. It is inexorably knotted to the content of your words and the nature of you. So do not pour the clay of your thoughts into the hard mold of some personal writing style that you are determined to have. Do not create in your head some witty, erudite, unmistakably exciting persona and try to capture him or her on paper. Also, do not try to write like Elizabeth Gilbert, Hunter S. Thompson, Raymond Carver, or anybody else. If you fail you will look foolish, and if you succeed you will succeed only in announcing to the world that you are not very creative. Strive instead to write well and without self-consciousness. Then your style will emerge. It might be as specifically yours as your thumbprint, or it might be as common as sunshine. But at least it will be you.