Once you enter into the very spirit of each happening, you will find your style will soon shape itself according to the situation. You will use the right words and expressions just as you would were you facing the situation in real life, without having to stop to think out what is best suited to the occasion.
But the beginner has to learn to be natural when writing; that is one of his hardest tasks, I often think; and he sometimes needs considerable practice before he acquires the power to write exactly as he thinks and speaks, and convey precisely what he himself feels. Therefore practise your pen particularly in this direction if you find it an effort to be natural on paper.
The Need for Condensation
All beginners need to practise condensation; our tendency while we are inexperienced is to be diffuse, and to over-load our subject with unimportant explanations or irrelevant side-issues.
It will help you if, after a finished piece of writing has been put aside for a few days, you go over it with a fresh mind, and delete everything—single words or whole sentences—that can be omitted without lessening the force or the picturesque quality of your writing, or blurring your meaning.
For example:—If the hero's grandfather has no bearing on the development of the story (and you are not seeking to prove hereditary tendencies), spare us his biography.
Do not tell the reader, "It is impossible to describe the scene," if you straightway proceed to describe it.
It is waste of space to write, "It was a dull, gloomy, cheerless November day"; one takes it for granted that a gloomy November day is dull, likewise cheerless.
If the colour of the heroine's eyes and the tint of her hair are immaterial to her career, omit such hackneyed data. Of course these matters may be important—if the lady is the villainess, for instance. I have noticed that it seems essential the wicked female should have red hair and green eyes, while the angel has violet (or grey) eyes, with long sweeping lashes—in novels, at any rate. I cannot be so certain about real life, for I have never met an out-and-out villainess in the flesh; though I have known several really nice girls, who were a joy to their aged and decrepit parents, and who married the right man into the bargain—and all this on mere mouse-coloured hair, nondescript eyebrows, and complexions verging on sallow!
If, after consideration, you are bound to admit that it will make no difference to the working out of the story, nor to its general interest, if you omit some such trivial description, or a word or a phrase, take it out; its deletion will probably improve the MS. In such a matter, however, it is very difficult for us to judge our own work.