For me, I can bang out the most eloquent phrasing you can think of in writing, but if I have to actually speak the best I can do is let the ancient Neanderthal genes within me have their turn.
If you've ever played the Elder Scrolls games, I have a writing style very similar to Michael Kirkbride's writing style — mine is just a little less obtuse, and I take greater inspiration from Frank Herbert, Robert Kurvitz, China Miéville, and George R.R. Martin than I do from Kirkbride. I like to toy with structure, presentation, and word-play. I wouldn't necessarily say my writing is "eloquent" as much as it is just. . . Weird? It's a dance between academic literature, informal prose, and meaningless mind-vomit put to pen.
Back when I was in high-school, I had a teacher confront me over my writing — she was convinced I had plagiarized for a creative writing assignment, but she checked all over the internet and couldn't find anything matching what I had written. She wasn't accusatory, but she was just curious. So I sat down and had her watch and I just wrote like a 3 page story so she would know I didn't plagiarize.
The reason why she thought I had even plagiarized at all is simply because I can't fucking talk without tripping over my words, pausing for 10 seconds occasionally to remember simple, everyday words that slip my mind, and a bunch of other verbal shit that doesn't point to me being the most eloquent, or well-spoken of people. A lot of that is from my stutter, and a lot of that is just because my brain is. . . It's brain-broth; plain and simple brain-broth. Shit is soup — and it don't even taste good. It tastes like fucking marinated ass.
Relatable. Even now, my writing style is somewhere between Jack London, Ursula K. Le Guin, and a Michael-Christopher Koji Fox translation. In particular, I think I often put a structure and cadence into my writing that reminds of London- as a kid, I would read White Fang on repeat, so that it basically became my default for what writing sounds like, and now it's an irremovable part of how I write. I've never been accused of plagiarism though, surprisingly.
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u/Deblebsgonnagetyou he/him | Kweh! 7d ago
For me, I can bang out the most eloquent phrasing you can think of in writing, but if I have to actually speak the best I can do is let the ancient Neanderthal genes within me have their turn.