A Voice in the Fog: Notes on Style, Story, and the Spaces In-Between

I’ve never been especially eager to pin down my writing style. Like a coastline seen through mist, it tends to shift depending on the vantage point - sometimes intimate, sometimes distant, always half-aware of the tide pulling beneath the surface. But recently, someone offered a reading of my work that surprised me in its clarity. It made me pause. Not because it told me something new, exactly, but because it caught something I hadn’t known I’d made visible.

So here, perhaps, is what I’ve come to understand about the shape of my voice - both as a reflection and an invitation.

Perspective at a Distance

I often write in third-person omniscient, though not in the grand, all-knowing way the term might suggest. My narrators hover - not above, but around. They observe, comment, occasionally blur into the characters' thoughts. This slight remove isn’t coldness; it’s a space that allows for reflection. It lets the story breathe.

Even in the quietest moments, there’s usually a thread of melancholy running beneath the surface. Not despair, exactly - more a sense of things fading, or changing, or slipping just out of reach. I tend to circle back to these feelings, not because I chase sadness, but because I find truth in the places where it intersects with memory, intimacy, and transformation.

How the Sentence Thinks

My sentences aren’t always concise. They stretch, bend, branch out like thoughts mid-formation - especially when the story leans into introspection or world-building. I do try to balance them, though. A long, winding meditation followed by a single, sharp line can land with the weight of silence after a confession.

This rhythm isn’t accidental; it’s how my mind works. I like writing that feels lived-in, paced like real thought or conversation. Meaning doesn’t always arrive neatly. Sometimes it meanders. Sometimes it interrupts.

Time, Memory, and the Speculative Thread

I’m drawn to speculative elements, but rarely for the spectacle. Magic, futurism, meta-fiction - they show up in my stories like old myths told by someone remembering them imperfectly. The point isn’t the mechanism; it’s what it reveals. A found object that shouldn’t exist. A character who knows he’s written. A history that folds into itself.

These ideas live somewhere between past and future, grounded always in the present ache of being human. It’s not the surreal for its own sake - it’s a way of reaching for something that realism can’t always touch.

What the Story Wants

I tend to write about connection - especially the kind that spans distance, time, or silence. The act of discovery, for me, often becomes the act of transformation. A character stumbles across something they weren’t meant to find: an old song, a forgotten truth, an impossible confrontation. And in that moment, something shifts. Not always dramatically. But permanently.

I also return often to the relationship between creator and creation - not just in a metafictional sense, but emotionally. What do we owe the stories we tell? What do they take from us? What do they reveal?

On Dialogue and the Small Things

My characters often reveal themselves not through grand gestures, but through quiet, human moments: the way one person hands another a cup of tea; the weight of a silence after a familiar joke. Dialogue, for me, works best when it carries history - when you can feel what isn’t being said, and why.

These relationships, even when brief, are what anchor the speculative elements. Without them, it’s all scaffolding.

An Elegy, with Warmth

If there’s a tone that threads through most of what I write, it might be this: a kind of wistful elegy. Not mourning, but remembering. Not lamenting what’s gone, but holding it up to the light one last time. Still, despite the quiet loss, there’s usually warmth at the center—a hand reaching out, even if it doesn’t quite find the other.

I don’t claim to have mastered this voice. It changes, as I do. But if you find something in these stories - something that lingers, even briefly - then perhaps the style has done its job. It’s never been about standing out. Only about trying to say something true, in the language the story asks for.

A Voice in the Fog