Style and Shtick

Sometimes I wonder if my writing's getting too stylistic.

Having a voice is essential, of course, but there's a narcissism in style: saying something, then adjusting it as if you're trying to pick up on your own signal: "Nahh, I wouldn't write that. I'd write it much more cleverly than that."

That was the problem with Pearls Before Swine, which used to be one of my favorite comic strips. Part of its appeal was this rough-and-ready feeling that it had; the drawings were simple, not bad, not inconsistent, but nicely stick-figurey and slapdash. When the zebra ran through the first panel you felt as if the artist had just tossed him off to give him a head start and was drawing the crocodiles real quick to complete the chase scene in the next panel. When the rat, in mid-conversation, pulled out a frying pan and started hitting people with it, it felt almost like an actual impulse instead of the gag he'd been leading up to all along.

Then something terrible happened. The artist developed a style. And now the characters look poised and pretty and stiff as boards. He even applies shading to them, as if they need to be rounded out like plush toys. And when the rat hits people with stuff I wonder if his heart is really in it. It feels as if he's following a script.

I could learn a lesson from that. I'm way too stuck on the internal rhymes and the run-on sentences. Rhymey words are great, but I don't want them to be my shtick, or one day the style might crumble away like so much sugary coating, and I'll find there was nothing underneath it after all.