A Liquid Style for Authors
Ditching genre conventions for complete tonal freedom.
Every genre has a gravitational pull. A default register that new writers drift into without quite noticing. Literary fiction leans into interiority and poetic world-building. Thrillers run lean and punish dense descriptions. Speculative fiction goes coldly technical. Pulp goes breathlessly propulsive.
Pick a shelf, and it comes with a house style attached. Most of us absorb it before we’ve even decided we want it. Take cyberpunk: neon-drenched streets, characters who talk like hard-boiled assholes with PhDs in computer science, and a heavy lexicon of hacker slang.
I refuse to fall in line and write to a fixed register because I don’t believe a story needs one. Right now I’m writing short and flash fiction across multiple genres, but my main long-term project is a sci-fi saga. It’s a long way off, but I’ve developed a specific style for it. I describe it as:
Literary fiction in a speculative sci-fi wrapper, with a pulpy candy center.
Smart. Beautifully haunting. Propulsively fun. These things do not belong in separate rooms. Anyone telling you otherwise is wrong.
The narrative voice isn’t confined to a single shape. Every scene has its own shape and needs its own register. It’s the most honest form of writing because that’s how real life is.
I don’t adjust my scenes to suit a voice. I adjust my voice to suit the scene. My style is liquid.
Every moment of my story is engineered. The smell, the sound, the taste, the feel. Characters get deconstructed, what they’re carrying, and what they’re moving toward. Then I build the turn, and the story tells me what it needs to be.
Sweet and whimsical. Tense and close. Funny. Heartbreaking. Quietly terrifying. The scene is the container. The style flows to fill it.
That’s why, in the middle of a dark and heavy story, there’s room for a sweet, heartfelt scene or a laugh-out-loud beat. Even in the darkest times, humanity peeks through. That’s not a tonal mismatch. It might be messy. It’s also honest, and it’s essential.
None of this is new. This is what stories were before the publishing and academic world decided a story had to choose between pulpy and smart. Folk tales. Oral histories. Fairy tales told by firelight. Shakespeare wrote for the snobs and the peasants. Dickens wrote thought-provoking page-turners that thrilled the plebs and royalty alike. They both assailed the class system and the aristocrats as they watched. Those works were always smart and entertaining by design. The entertainment was the sugar that helped the medicine go down.
But somewhere that changed, and serious came to mean solemn, and enjoyable came to mean thin. And I get it. Some readers want dumb popcorn fun. Some want deep, thought-provoking tales that assault and tear at their emotions. But between that gulf is a massive middle ground that craves both food and candy for the brain. And right now, the traditional publishing world is under-serving them.
Writing is a spectacular medium that can do what no other can. It can get right down into the very center of a person’s mind and reach for taste, smell, grief, lust, doubt, and the specific weight of regret at 3 a.m. It’s the only form with a direct line into the conscious subconscious, and the ability to pull apart the threads of one’s entire being. It can make you feel something you’ve never felt before, in a life you never lived, and a place you’ve never been. And unlike film and television, writing opens the vast universe of internal thought and emotion that they gloss over.
A medium capable of holding all of that should never be handcuffed by a genre label and a shelf. I refuse to let a form that can do everything be flattened into a single emotional note. Real life is dynamic and fluid, and it is surprising and messy, and it never announces itself or warns you that change is coming; it just happens. It’s immediate and emergent, and that’s exactly how I choose to write.
My style isn’t a genre checklist. My style is liquid.
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About Liminal Space Creative
Independent creator attempting to spill the messy worlds in my head onto the page. At present, I am attending online design school as part of a very unexpected and unplanned career change. This space is where I will share random pieces of the journey: inspiration, experiments, school projects, and lessons I learn along the way.
