100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019
Don’t play the Tom Wolfe game
Twelve ways to avoid making your reader hate you
If you have read any of Tom Wolfe’s early books, you know that Wolfe employed a lot of visual GIMMICKS like ZOWeeee!!!!!, lively little passages full of CAPITAL LETTERS, and unUSual Punk Chew A Shun. . . . !!!?
I call that the Tom Wolfe game, and it was fine for Wolfe. It was fun. It worked. It became part of his writing personality. It’s his.
But ninety-nine percent of the time this sort of thing fails. It draws attention to the gimmick and away from the content. It reminds readers that they are reading, and it occasionally brands the writer a moron.
Certainly the appearance of your story is not irrelevant. Clean fonts, good margins, consistent spacing—all of these things affect the success of the story. But writing is not primarily a visual art. It is more like music than oil painting, and the extent to which it must depend on the shape, size, and color of those squiggly little lines is the extent to which it is not writing, but is something else.
If you cannot state a good reason for doing SOMEthing LYKE Thhhhiiiissss!!!, don’t do it.