Greer Gilman, the author of Moonwise and Cloud and Ashes, has a great post up about style and “transparent” writing.

When I was still just starting out as a writer, I definitely was writing above all else for Story — not necessarily for plot, for I wasn’t great at plot, but for thrilling dramatic moments, for emotional highs and lows. I loved some beautifully-written books, but they seemed like something that I somehow couldn’t emulate, like my friends who dressed dramatically while I wore solid-colored shirts with jeans nearly every day. Maybe I didn’t know how, maybe it just seemed like it wasn’t for me, but in writing I just wanted to be smooth and efficient, getting to the Good Bits without too much unnecessary fuss.

It took a lot longer for me to realize that the words are not the ribbon on the package — the words are the whole package. Samuel Delany, especially, was instrumental in getting me to see that style is not optional. And even if you aspire to write the kind of stories that foreground plot, and Dramatic Emotional Moments, getting any impact from those Dramatic Emotional Moments depends utterly on how words control pacing and rhythm, how words convey tone, how … there may be characters and landscapes in the back of your mind, playing out scenes; but all that you can give to a reader, to reconstruct those characters and those landscapes, is words.

I’m still not a flashy writer by any means. I’m not Greer Gilman or Samuel Delany. But I think I have a better appreciation now for how getting the words right is a crucial part of getting the story right.