Your audience is looking for who you really are, not who you wish you were.
—C. Robert Cargill
Style is vivid
Part of an author’s style is how they describe the world—how vividly they evoke emotions.
One way is through vividness. To explain vividness, here is what writer Venkatesh Rao said about the vividness of writer David Foster Wallace:
“When I read a passage from Wallace, it’s like looking cambodia mobile database at a clear photograph — compared to my own blurry ones. He effortlessly chooses words to use that are 100 times better than my choices. It’s like he has a 15-megapixel camera and a tripod, and I’m using a 3-megapixel point-and-shoot. A larger vocabulary isn’t enough. The skill lies in matching the words to the need.”
One of my favorite moments of the year is when a beetle does yoga on a desert dune. In Africa's Namib Desert, a beetle's day begins on the rise of a massive dune. A tiny creature faces a trek the size of the Himalayas. Undaunted, it marches forward, legs as bony as a runner's, toward the summit, which is shrouded in mist from the Atlantic Ocean.
When it gets there, the beetle turns its body upside down and stands still. And then magic happens. No, wait, this is something more magical than magic, it's nature. This is the natural world where magic is about to happen.
As the mist condenses on its shell, water droplets form. Then slowly, using the grooves in the beetle's shell, the water rolls into its thirsty mouth. This is how life on Earth is sustained.