Style signatures are bits of words and phrases used consistently throughout the entirety of a work (but not necessarily among my unrelated works). I would like to try using style signatures in a work of mine - things that won't stand out at individual usages, but I think the effect across a long piece will be interesting.
Patterns I'm using:
- Using a specific set of 'said-bookism's' everywhere in the book. eg.:
- "~ whispered." for all dialog in low voice.
- "~ cried (out)." for all belted out, high-voice dialog. (Notice, only in dialog tags; not in the narration.)
- "~ asked ~." for all questions regardless of voice.
- "~ said." for even-voiced dialog or otherwise un-indicated states.
Always using double paragraph breaks to indicate change in scenes. The reader is therefore expected to 'read it with a new eye' and disregard the setting, characters and -much more importantly- the time of the immediately previous scene.
Indicating pauses in speech by ellipses and em-dashes instead of the now popular comma. That's the more radical point so far (the third in the series) so I need feedback on how well it would show up to the reader since -as far as I know- it's ungrammatical.
Does anyone have more suggestions?
Would this work well for the reader? That I leave invisible patterns in my writing in the paper-voice (between the narrator and reader where the narrator is a character)? I plan to partly use this as an embedded signature (again, this's an example) but I want to know how it would really work with the reader.