Passionate, Playful, Poetic
Nelson groups words together in ways you'd never expect. Lennie is attracted to boys "WTF-edly" (8.27), and Lennie and Bailey go "road-reading" (3.8), walking along their street while reading books. Nelson plays with language constantly, and we're grateful, because her little sentence-surprises lighten (and even bring a some joy) to an otherwise depressing subject. Not to mention they make Lennie's poetry-writing-and-scattering habit believable. Lennie's playfulness with distributing her words fits neatly in a book that plays with words in general.
Nelson goes all in on her descriptions of grief—"I want to cry and cry and cry and cry until all the dirt in the whole forest has turned to mud" (32.2), she writes at one point—and is equally attentive to descriptions of love: "Our tongues have fallen madly in love and gotten married and moved to Paris" (18.25). As readers, we feel the intensity of Lennie's experience. And it makes sense to us that someone who thinks in these all-or-nothing terms would feel compelled to blow off steam (or despair, or guilt) by writing everything down.