Writing Like Breathing or Eating or Walking

If you could master any writing style, how would you want to write?

Sparsely and vigorously, like Hemingway?

Magically and enchantingly like Gabriel Garcia Marquez?

Flamboyantly like Shakespeare?

Tersely like those American crime writers?

Impressionistically, like Chekhov?

Playfully and inventively like Emily Dickinson?

With your pen filled not with ink but with love, like Neruda?

In many styles, from the point of view of multiple heteronyms, like Fernando Pessoa?

I’ve heard it said that style is what we can’t help doing.

Our quirks, our mannerisms, our darlings.

In other words, our style chooses us.

The thing about breathing or eating or walking is that we don’t think too much about them.

We do them.

Or rather, they do themselves through us.

That’s how I would like to write too.

To write every day, out of a natural need to do it.

Without any ism and without a philosophy of writing to explain my choice of words or sentence structure.

Like breathing or eating or walking, I’d like to write without making the conscious effort to write, without even knowing that I write.

Writing in itself simple.

Stephen King called it telepathy.

But we are not simple because we are made of so many hopes and dreams and hesitations and flaws.

We tend to complicate writing as we do all things.

A flourish here, a metaphor there…

But still, I think I can write like I breathe or eat or sleep.

All it takes is writing every day and keeping at it.

And not thinking too much about it.

And not worrying about the result.

Only writing…