Personal Style Manuals

 I ran across Colin Mustful's 5 Reasons to Create Your Own Personal Style Guide thanks to the newsletter from History Through Fiction. Having reached a stopping point in typing my own novel, I have not thought much on this subject. Certainly, I never formalized my thinking. Mustful defines a style guide as follows:

A style guide is a set of rules for your writing. This includes spelling, punctuation, grammar, and even formatting. There are a lot of formal ones out there such as the Chicago Manual of Style  and the MLA Handbook for Writers. Those are great for providing basic principles of style but they shouldn’t dictate your personal style, they should merely guide you. What you need is your own personal style guide. Here are five reasons why.

His five reasons are:

1. Consistency

2. To keep your readers engaged in the story

3. To maintain your voice

4. To save you a lot of work

5. To save you a lot of money 

Mustful expands on each five, and I think his explanations for each of the five are on the money. I have to admit, number 5 was never a conscious thought for me (hey, I was in prison when I wrote my novels, all I worried about with money was how to afford typewriting materials from what friends and family sent me for my commissary). Nor did I see the issues raised by Mustful in support of number 2. I thought in terms of numbers 1 and 3 as keeping my readers interested in the story, and I still do. When I started on "Love Stinks," I had learned enough to write up a list of characters, figure out their birthdates, and have a general chronology at hand. Working recently on the short story "True Love Ways Gone Astray" (2014), I came upon a reference to a restaurant which figures in several of the stories and could not recall the name it would have at the end of the stories; memory did not serve; and I could not find my notes in the all the clutter that are my manuscripts. I decided that there was a name change while the character was gone to prison. I will see how that works. 

To Mustful's list, I would add an explicit overriding reason for a style manual: we cannot keep everything in our heads. Well, I cannot do so any more.

sch 1/2/23