Every writer’s relationship with language shifts over time. What once may have felt like the only way to write—muscular, stripped-down, fighting for every syllable—can give way to something softer, stranger, and far more yours. Paying attention to that shift is one of the most useful things you can do for your craft.

You might notice it first in the writers you’re drawn to. For many, an early writing model is with Hemingway: bold, angular, declarative, which extends, naturally, into Ray Carver and the 80s realists. The appeal is obvious: sentences with the density of metalwork, hammered down to their essential load-bearing elements. It’s a taste for loudness, precision, no fat. A Montepulciano phase, if you will.

And then, gradually, you back off. The palette softens. You find yourself wanting things that feel velvety, conversational in a way that surprises you. An introduction to Proust can be illuminating on this front—suddenly you may want things that are a little more delicate, not so intensely polished as a steel Hemingway sentence. This taste arc tends to mirror itself across everything: music, reading, writing. It’s worth evaluating what yours is telling you.

The Craft of Over-Editing

The metalworking instinct has a shadow side. You might recognize it in your own revision process: an urge to edit! edit! edit! Chop sentences, hammer them, make them muscular and declarative! Really just melt them down and hammer them and fight with them until they conform to some ideal of toughness.

Consider a writer who gives a piece five, six, seven, eight passes before letting anyone see it, reading everything previously written before starting each new writing session. It’s a process many writers share. But that instinct to over-refine, to hammer every sentence into hard, declarative steel, can work against the very tone a piece needs to breathe.

The question is not whether a sentence is correct. It is whether a sentence is right for this piece.

The Pinot Noir Sentence: When Good Writing Craft Breaks the Rules

Imagine a fiction writer of hard sci-fi, a genre that rewards precision and construction. Let’s call him John Constable. John Constable writes a reflective nonfiction piece for the first time about something that happened when he was young. The voice is rosy and nostalgic, with a warmth not usually present in his work. Not better or worse, mind you—just different. Like To Kill a Mockingbird versus Hemingway. A welcoming atmosphere in the prose.

Consider this sentence: “So, the plan was hatched.” 

In a short story subjected to the usual editing process, this sentence would never survive. Too basic. The metaphor is a little mixed, actually. John Constable scratches his chin and gets ready to smash backspace.

But for one moment too long, he pauses to think. The impulse to tighten, to clarify, to remove the conjunction from the front, is John Constable’s editing instinct asserting itself. But what if that sloppy little sentence is perfect the way it is?

It’s a cliche. It’s in the passive voice. It begins with a conjunction. Every rule of traditional writing wisdom says it’s wrong— yet it’s exactly the kind of sentence that lends its blase tone to the piece. It’s not a good sentence. It’s soft and warm. It’s awkward, and that is precisely the point.

Think of the above as a Pinot Noir sentence. Soft on the tongue, silky, by all traditional measures, unnecessary. Nobody needs a Pinot Noir—until the weather hits you just right and it’s exactly what the moment calls for. 

Your writing style development will eventually bring you to sentences like this one: sentences that break the rules in service of something truer than the rules themselves.

Developing Your Taste: A Practice

The taste arc isn’t something that happens to you passively. It’s something you can cultivate deliberately. Here’s where to start:

1. Read widely and outside your comfort zone. The Hemingway-to-Proust arc doesn’t happen without Proust. Make a list of writers whose work repels or unsettles you (not necessarily in a way that seems appealing) and spend time with them seriously. You may be surprised.
2. Track what moves you across all your tastes. Keep a running note in your phone, a sentence or two is fine, every time something arrests you: a sentence, a record, a movie, a glass of wine. Look for patterns. Your aesthetic preferences across every domain are data you can use in your writing voice.
3. Notice when your taste shifts, and don’t resist it. The moment you find yourself drawn to something you would have dismissed a year ago is not inconsistency. It’s growth! Follow it rather than explaining it away.
4. Bring that awareness to your revision. Before cutting a sentence, ask not just “Is this correct?” but “What is the effect of this sentence?” The answer lives in your taste, not in the rules.

Finding Your Writing Voice Takes Time (and a Trusted Eye)

The taste arc, the over-editing instinct, the Pinot Noir sentence. These are not separate phenomena. They are the same story told at different scales. Your writing voice is not a fixed destination but a set of evolving preferences, and the work is learning to trust yourself.

The developmental editing process is often where these discoveries happen: a trusted reader notices the warmth in a sentence you were about to cut. That’s where a good editor or fiction writing coach comes in. They won’t strip your work down to its bones as Hemingway may have done on the balcony of his Cuban retreat, but they’ll help you recognize when the awkward sentence is exactly right. If your writing style development has brought you somewhere unexpected, pause a moment and reflect. Hewes House is here to have that conversation with you.