Style is the concept every writing teacher swears by and almost none of them can explain. Find it, they say. You either have it or you don’t. But comparing writing to something completely unrelated, something with no literary baggage attached, usually illuminates elusive style far better than trying to isolate it on the page.

We’re using two examples here: basketball and high heels. The overlap between people who want to read both is, admittedly, probably quite small. Skip to whichever one is yours. But do the exercise from the other example too. It might help more than you’d expect, precisely because it isn’t the one you would have chosen.

What Sports Reveal about Developing Your Writing Style

Developing your writing style isn’t the kind of exercise you can master through repetition at the gym or by running drills. The first step to cultivating style is self-recognition. For those sports enjoyers among us, we know that a deep enough dive into watching a team play, following the same players through a full season, will unlock something clarifying about personal style. The way each player’s movements translate into a feeling on the court, a presence, a signature, a series of strengths and weaknesses, these become a lens for understanding what style actually is in writing.

A player’s personal sense of movement on the court can be viewed the same way as the style of a writer on the page. There’s a quality to both that’s entirely particular, immediately legible even at a distance. Everyone has a way of moving that belongs only to them. Even with less-than-perfect eyesight, even when faces are a blur, you can tell who’s coming just from the way they move. That’s how style manifests in writing.

And yet style remains one of the most contested concepts in craft. Find it, they say. You either have it or you don’t. A well-developed sense of style is the prime indicator of a talented writer.

We can provide an observation that’s not quite as empty as the standard advice: you may not be able to define style, but you recognize it instantly in writing you love. You can see it develop across an author’s entire body of work, and most dedicated readers will sacrifice almost everything else in exchange for that quality (plot, character, even coherence) if the style is extraordinary enough. The style itself can carry you.

Think of Mitchell Robinson’s impact on the 2026 NBA Finals, or Shaq’s presence on the court. Both big men struggled at the free throw line, but their impact on the game was undeniable. Their own personal styles carried their respective teams when they needed it most.

Consider what it means to love a player’s game across multiple seasons. They don’t disappear for you. Likewise, as you move from one written work to another, an author’s style is what sticks with you. 

Exercise: Sports and Style

1. Watch a player you know well for a few minutes. Don’t get too involved in team-play—pay attention to the way they play aesthetically. How do they occupy space? Now close your eyes and try to describe that quality in three words. Weird abstract words are fine. Encouraged even.
2. Do the same for a writer you love. Same exercise, different court.
3. Now write a paragraph about anything—a grievance, an egg, a Google review for your local gym. Read it back like you’re an alien who’s never even heard of you. What are three words for this person’s movement?
4. Rewrite your paragraph in the style of your chosen author. Then in the style of your favorite player. At some point something will snap back like a rubber band.
5. That snap is you. Don’t fix it. 

Sports not your thing? Bad heels can provide another useful example.

What Fashion Teaches You about Your Unique Writing Style

Some people dress beautifully on very little. Some dress poorly on a great deal.

Learning to dress well is genuinely difficult, and it has almost nothing to do with money. The first lesson is also the hardest: you must understand what you can and cannot pull off. Not in the abstract. You personally. Your body, your shape, what you like and why you like it, weighed against whether you, looking the way you look, your own body, can actually pull it off.

Leave your baggage about what other people like at the door. This is about your style and preferences. If you’ve ever worked late nights at a bar, you’d have seen it play out constantly. Groups of women heading home for the night, all dressed up, and inevitably half of them making their way home with heels in hand, their shoes dangling like little purses, padding the pavement in bare feet. Those were, perhaps, the sensible ones, the ones who understand how to back out of a fashion choice before they sink with it.

The other kind of woman is the one you should take note of for the purposes of writing style. The women still committed to her pair heels, but who hasn’t quite learned to walk in them, or who’s simply run out of steam. She’s hobbling now, like a strange pony on its hind legs. And there’s no amount of money she could have spent on those shoes that can save her. Because she doesn’t know how to wear them.

If you wore $15 heels but knew how to walk in them, your style would hold.

This maps directly onto your unique writing style. Force a certain level of lyricism on yourself because you’ve decided you’re a poetic writer (nevermind that’s not how you actually think, or talk, or move through the world) and the writing will betray you. The same applies for Lish minimalism, prose stripped down to almost nothing: some writers simply can’t get there. And they shouldn’t try! They’re more lush, more lyrical by instinct. There’s sentiment and sincerity that can’t be scrubbed out, no matter how hard they try.

Exercise: The Heels Test

1. Find a piece of writing you produced that you’re proud of. Now find one you’re embarrassed by. Read both. What’s the difference, not in quality, but in fit? Was the embarrassing one you trying to walk in shoes that aren’t for you?
2. Name three styles you’re attracted to but suspect you can’t pull off. Lush and lyrical? Stark minimalism? Arch and ironic? Write a paragraph deliberately in one of them. Notice where it starts to hobble.
3. Now rewrite the paragraph in whatever register feels most natural, the way you’d explain something to a friend. Don’t dress it up.
4. Compare the two. Where does the second one move better, and why?

The goal isn’t to lower your ambitions. It’s to know which shoes you can actually walk in — and then walk fierce.

Why Does Protecting Your Writing Style Take Courage?

Protecting your writing style means resisting the pressure to sound like whoever you’re currently reading, to meet market expectations, to give an audience what you think they want. It means writing what you understand emotionally but perhaps not intellectually, and trusting that your instincts are worth following, even when you can’t fully explain them. That trust, more than any technique, is what separates a writer with a distinct voice from one still performing someone else’s.

David Lynch spent his career demonstrating what a commitment to personal style looks like in practice. The courage is in making things you understand emotionally, but perhaps not intellectually about yourself, then protecting that right to retain mystery. On working with David Lynch, Isabella Rosellini says in the experimental biography of the director, Room to Dream:

“David is always dealing with some sort of mystery in his work . . . He once said something that really helped me understand his work. He said, ‘In life you don’t know everything. You enter a room and people are sitting there and there’s an atmosphere, and you immediately know if you have to be careful about what you say, or if you have to be loud, or silent, or subdued—you immediately know it. The thing you don’t know is what’s next. In life we don’t know where the story is going or even where a conversation is going to go in the next minute.’ David’s awareness of this is central to his films. He’s very sensitive to the mystery that surrounds everything.”

Your style isn’t a formula to build. At Hewes House, our book coaching and manuscript development work starts with what’s already there, and it’s our goal to help you trust it enough to go all the way.