[This article originally appeared online for the Eleven Stories online writing program.– Ed.]

My mother called me after the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to talk about the bride’s gown. The daughter of a ladies coats and suit designer, my mother grew up immersed in New York city’s fashion district. She called Markle’s gown simple and beautiful.

After our conversation, I returned to my thoughts about writing styles for an article I was commissioned to write. It struck me that how we describe fashion styles might help us describe writing style, what we “know when we see it.”

When we look at someone’s clothing, we may say their style is classic, elegant, flamboyant, retro, mod, Goth, or hipster, to name a few. We may say they are dressed casually or formally. We may say their style choices are colorful and flattering or dowdy and unflattering.

Perhaps it is helpful to say that in writing, style is the clothing the writer’s voice wears, the clothing chosen to make an impression. The “garments” of the writer’s wardrobe include choice of diction, sentence structure and variety, literary devices, and the use of rhythm, which all contribute to tone. Tone is the part of style that evokes the writer’s attitude toward the story’s subject. Think of a person who wears a tee shirt and shorts to a formal wedding—dissenting and rebellious? Stating that the norms don’t apply? Think of a business suit on an interviewee — meant to make the impression of having expertise? Is the tone inflated to parody the subject, like the woman who dresses as if she might be going to a ball when she is attending a tennis match? What the story’s voice selects from a wardrobe can result in humorous, satirical, passionate, zealous, sarcastic, condescending, and irreverent attitudes, among others.

I think of makeup and hairstyles when I think of tone, how they blend or contrast with the clothing the story wears. We’ve all probably seen and been surprised by a young woman in traditional dress sporting a multitude of tattoos or a pre-teen dressed as a 25-year-old: is the story-teller going for humor, parody, absurdity, incongruity, or surprise? For passion or to calm readers, to jar and surprise them? Do the make-up and hair blend or contrast with the story’s subject?

In Lori Moore’s story “How to Become a Writer,” the title might make it seem that the narrator’s make-up will be subdued, her hair coifed rather than windblown.

The title might promise to introduce steps delineated by websites courting clients:

1. Earn a high school degree.
2. Select a professional path.
3. Get a writing education.
4. Complete an internship.
5. Land a job and build a portfolio.
6. Earn an MFA (Optional)

But we will learn from the very opening line that the tone of Moore’s story is more windblown than styled, that the wardrobe is definitely not a contained and clichéd business suit or a professor’s leather-elbowed cardigan. The “dress” and “hairdo” immediately belie what we think about traditional instruction on how one reaches goals.

“First, try to be something else, anything else,” Moore begins. Her examples of that something else shape an eclectic wardrobe, “A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably.”

What funny and/or choices. How amusing that movie star is repeated three times. What does this eclectic amusing costume show us? How does it draw us to take a closer look at what it takes to become a writer? It seems to broadcast that writers must think they can conquer the world with their wit and perception and take on improbable (yes, teaching Kindergarten is amusing in its contrast to the other occupations but also invokes the feeling of needing to keep after unruliness, thus making it a hard job) ideas. Writers start by thinking they will achieve renown and success.

But not so fast. Moore continues to the next step: “Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age—say, fourteen. Early critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire. It is a pond, a cherry blossom, a wind brushing against sparrow wing leaving for a mountain.”

In haiku, Moore’s fix for disillusionment, the images she shares are beautiful. Have you seen a sullen teen dressed up beautifully for a family wedding? Have you thought, what a beautiful girl, if only she would smile? Haiku is the smile.

Show the haiku to your mother, Moore advises. Your mother whose husband may be having an affair and whose son is serving in Vietnam, who wears brown clothes because they cover the spots. There it is—the mother’s wardrobe contrasted with the writer’s style. We know it in the clothing description and in the practical mother’s command. She has just read her daughter’s haiku and bewildered but not skipping a beat, she instructs her daughter to do what is useful to the household–empty the dishwasher.

Moore has set her readers up to see that the path one takes to becoming a writer veers from the path that peers, parents and teachers have likely laid out.

What might happen in tone and style when a story is dressed in the garments of fear, loss and grief rather than the eclectic wardrobe of one taking a dramatic and colorful path to becoming a writing?

Let’s look at the opening of James’s Baldwin’s famous short story “Sonny’s Blues.” The title speaks to us through the word blues that we know as a melancholic music of black American folk origin. We might imagine the smoky air of clubs in which listening to blues, people allow sadness to show behind smoke that protects them from having to present a different face.

I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn’t believe it, and I read it again. Then perhaps I just stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling out the story. I stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside.

It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that, as I walked from the subway station to the high school. And at the same time I couldn’t doubt it. I was scared, scared for Sonny. He became real to me again. A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long, while I taught my classes algebra.

Notice the long sentences of the first paragraph when the speaker is on the subway and the long opening sentence of the second paragraph as he walks, with the coming interspersed short sentences, “I was scared, scared for Sonny. He became real to me again.” The wardrobe of this style seems to mimic an overcoat’s fabric on a windy day, the need to slow down during a blast of wind and hold one’s hat down on the walk forward into the workday, disturbed now and unsettled.

In the sentences, we have images that place us on the subway and in the speaker’s job (swinging lights, newspaper, high school, algebra) and phrases that evoke the mood of the speaker: “trapped in the darkness which roared outside” and “a great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long.”

The wardrobe in this style seems that of a person who has his life together as a teacher, but underneath that daily duty to look sedate in his professional clothes, he is jarred because of what churns now inside of him. Who hasn’t been floored by news that makes its dishevelled appearance when we’ve worked so hard to put ourselves and our clothes together in a way that influences others to see us as earnest and succeeding? The style draws us close to the speaker because we can identify with these feelings and we want to know who Sonny is and why the speaker is affected so deeply. It puts us in the air of a club, where smoke infiltrates the fabric of clothing.

Let’s take a look at the opening of Hemingway’s famous short novel The Old Man and the Sea.

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.

The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

“Santiago,” the boy said to him as they climbed the bank from where the skiff was hauled up. “I could go with you again. We’ve made some money.”

The old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him.

“No,” the old man said. “You’re with a lucky boat. Stay with them.”

“But remember how you went eighty-seven days without fish and then we caught big ones every day for three weeks.”

“I remember,” the old man said. “I know you did not leave me because you doubted.”

I see an elderly man sharing a story of the old days, a story others have told him or one he lived (perhaps he is Santiago grown old now). If he is at a café talking with other geezers or on a park bench surrounded by neighborhood children, he is a man who doesn’t need much these days but an audience, a man who has time on his hands, time to tell his tale. And so the leisurely sentences are long like a fisherman’s sea-faring scarf: “But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week.”

The narrator’s details for describing who the old fisherman was and what he’d endured are each a stitch in the knitted scarf: fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream, skiff empty, sail patched with flour sacks, thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck, brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings, hands with deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. The make-up in this story is missing—we have instead the raw blotches of skin cancer, the sacrifice men made for their catch and livelihood.

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Practice imagining the tone and style of the writing you read as make-up, hairdo, and wardrobe, each garment belonging to a category of fashion. This will help you dig beneath the abstract definition of style–how the author describes events, objects, and ideas. You will be able visualize the style you are using in your own stories. You will be able to heighten the tone and rhythms that foster each of your stories by altering the ones that don’t go with the outfit you envision for your story.