Emulating a Style of Writing for Colonial Gothic

This piece originally appeared on the Rogue Games Substack in January 2025. As I move certain posts to Insert Title Here, I'll be bringing the best of the old posts with me. Some will be revised. Some will arrive as they were. This one got a polish.

The finishing touches were almost done. The rewrites were coming to an end, and the proofreader's notes were nearly all accounted for. It felt strange to be at the end of something that had taken so much. It always felt strange. You looked back at it all, and it never looked the way you thought it would.

I thought about the long nights, the scattered notes, and the broken sentences. The first draft was never clean. It wasn't supposed to be. It came out in fragments, half-written, scribbled by hand. Then came the long hours, the headaches, the things that went wrong. You carried those with you, even when the work started to take shape.

It had been hard. Harder than I thought it would be. But there was something else, too. There was joy in it. Not all the time, but enough to make it matter. When I hold the book in my hands, I'll see the things that went wrong, the mistakes and the rough edges, but I'll like it anyway. I'll know what it took to make it.

The goal was to make it easier, clearer. I wanted it to feel like someone was talking to you, not lecturing. I didn't want it to read like a history book. That part was important. It'll be even clearer in the Companion, I think.

I let myself have fun with it. It wasn't all serious. Sometimes it was just a line I liked or the name of a spell or a detail tucked into a corner. The character professions were the best part. They were personal. I wrote them in first person, and each one had its own voice. The proofreaders liked those the most. They said it made the book feel alive.

There was one part that stayed with me. It was about horror. The kind of horror you could use in the game. I included the Mythos. Some people wouldn't like that, but I thought it belonged. Lovecraft was from New England. His stories felt tied to the past, to history, to something older. It made sense.

Now it's almost done. It doesn't feel the way I thought it would. It never does. But it's enough. It has to be.

The veil parts, revealing not a world familiar, but one steeped in the miasmal whispers of aeons forgotten, where sanity falters before the yawning abyss of the incomprehensible. Gaze now upon the shadowed expanse of eldritch dread, a realm where the cold, uncaring vastness of the cosmos presides, and the inscrutable designs of entities primeval and malign toy mercilessly with the feeble minds of humankind. Consider the militiaman at Lexington, he who stood upon that fateful green and looked into the treeline when the smoke cleared. He came back. The others will tell you he came back. But those who knew him before that morning, those who met his eyes afterward, they will not speak of what they saw there, nor of what had gone from him, nor of what had taken its place.

Should you dare to thread the insidious strands of Lovecraft's Mythos through the tapestry of your Colonial Gothic endeavors, know this: the paths you traverse are worn smooth by countless others, their spirits indelibly marked by the unfathomable horrors they beheld. Beware, for what you inherit is no mere fiction but a doorway, a threshold to vistas that shatter reason.

Ah, so you have uncovered my secret, a forbidden tome lies among these pages, steeped in the dread essence of Lovecraft's design. It is no inclusion born of idle fancy, but of whispers that clawed at my thoughts in the solitude of the night, compelling me to grant them form. Like any implement of shadowed design, let these accursed inspirations serve your tale as you deem fit. For in the sprawling, haunted domain of Colonial Gothic, you alone are the arbiter of fate, the master of the unseen, the shaper of terrors yet to be.

I've rewritten this more times than I care to admit, and each time, I question myself. Trying to emulate someone's style is harder than it seems. Writing in the tone and structure of the 1770s is one thing; capturing the voice of an author with a style so uniquely their own? That's another matter entirely. Lovecraft, though, he's on a level all his own.

Other writers are easier to mimic. They have a rhythm, a cadence, a structure that feels accessible. Me? I write short. I hate purple prose. Overwriting drives me mad. Why use five sentences when one will do? Why bury a point in a blocky paragraph when it can be split into three crisp ones? But with Colonial Gothic, I went off course. Somewhere along the way, I overwrote. I lost my economy of words.

And now there's Lovecraft.

Writing like Lovecraft means throwing out everything I know. I have to ignore my instincts and try to write like an overly fussy, sheltered New Englander drowning in neuroses. It's like stepping into a completely foreign mindset, one that feels distant, overwrought, and strange.

It also means pulling out a thesaurus and stuffing sentences with words I'd never use, piling them into a text so self-important and dense it borders on absurd. It's exhausting, really.

So that's it. The excerpt above is my one and only attempt to channel Lovecraft. It's done. It's there. And I'm leaving it behind.

It is not like you can emulate Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises.

Right?

You're right, it's not the same. Hemingway's style is simple, clear, and stripped down to its essentials. It flows like conversation, sharp and unadorned. You feel it more than you read it. You live in it.

Lovecraft, though, that's another beast entirely. His writing is dense, baroque, and intentionally overwrought. It drags you through labyrinths of language and imagery, twisting and coiling like the horrors he describes. To write like Hemingway is to pare away the unnecessary; to write like Lovecraft is to embrace excess, to build something heavy and unsettling with words.

They couldn't be more different. Hemingway's writing breathes. Lovecraft's writing suffocates. And trying to do both? It's like stepping into two entirely different worlds. One feels natural. The other feels like an impossible performance.

The Sun Also Rises is my favorite. I've known that since 1989, freshman year, when I fell in love with it before I understood why. It took years to realize Hemingway had gotten into my bones. I spent a long time training myself not to write like him, and somewhere in that work I found my own voice. But it started there. Without 1989, I don't think I'm half the writer I am today. That's why Lovecraft is so hard. His style is entirely his own, built from a mind I can't inhabit. Hemingway I had to escape. Lovecraft I can only visit.