author voice

Voice

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Voice is something that a lot of authors and writing teachers spend a lot of time talking about. I’ve even talked about it before.

However, I recently came across some posts by author/teacher James VanPelt about teaching voice that are about the finest posts on the subject I’ve ever seen. I am going to reproduce some of it below, but please see the original posts here, here, here and here. The part below is taken from the first one.

Basically, the question is, how do you develop voice? Well, that is the million dollar question. But Jim has some real concrete tips that I think are worthwhile:

– Put the writer on a linking/helping verb diet. No more than two to a page, say. By forcing writers into action verbs, you also force them to make specific choices. Not, “The day was nice,” (argh!), but some sentence based on an action verb that shows a nice day, like “Children laughed on the jungle gym.” There’s a zillion ways that “the day was nice.” As soon as writers choose a way to show it, they choose among the zillion. Their choice marks the beginning of voice. Distrust an overuse of am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been.

– Put the writer on a passive sentence diet. Here I mean the grammatically passive, the silliness of “The ball was kicked by John,” or my favorite, “My eyes were opened by me.” I’m not sure why passives creep into so much school writing, other than writers will put the effect in front of the cause because they see the effect first. Students will also commonly leave the cause out altogether. The passiveness of “The law was debated,” “The discrimination was done,” “The punishments were taken” infect their writing with unattributed actors performing faceless deeds.

– Outlaw “very,” any pronoun ending in “thing,” most of the “ly” words, and for crying out loud, don’t let them use a broad generality without having earned the right by piling up enough specifics first. The student who writes, “We shared everything,” can only say so after a solid paragraph of what they shared. A list that includes a vinyl collection of Vivaldi, turn of the century tea cozies, an appreciation of the Dutch masters, and a fondness for truffles stands miles away for the “everything” they shared if that list includes bootleg compilations of garage/punk/techno/emo mp3s, metal windup toys from 1950’s television shows, temporary tattoos done in henna, and a secret vice of fried pork rinds dipped in warm velveeta.

This is all advice I’ve seen sprinkled around elsewhere, but something about this list really struck a chord with me. I don’t know if it was his particular examples or what, but it makes sense. Most people say something like, “Don’t use passive voice” but he explains why you shouldn’t and how it will help your voice if you don’t.

Thanks Jim! (even if you don’t know that you helped)

Does blogging help with Author Voice?

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Something that many beginning authors struggle with, is finding their “voice”. I’m not talking about character voice, I’m talking about the voice used for the words in between the dialog. Basically, how does one construct their sentences, what types of words do they use, what is the word rhythm, etc. Another way of thinking about it is, if you know me, and you read what I wrote, is it natural to imagine it in my speaking voice?

Every person has a unique way of talking, but when they sit down to write they have time to analyze each word. Often, instead of writing the way they talk, they write the way they were taught to write, or the way they think they ought to write. Writing like another famous author might be technically correct, but it isn’t interesting. That author already exists in the world. Publishers want something unique (unless you are ghost writing or something like that, obviously in that case you are trying to suppress your own voice).

This search for “voice” has taken on almost an epic meaning. Writing teachers and writers just past the newbie stage spend a lot of time talking about it. In fact, writing in your own voice is the most natural thing in the world. The hard part is un-learning everything you ever learned about how to write, and go back to your natural state. The ironic thing about your voice is that the more you think about it, the less you are able to grasp it. Therefore, most exercises designed to help you “find your voice” usually involve writing really fast or in a stream of consciousness to bypass the rational part of your brain and engage the subconscious.

Now, this is not something I ever really had trouble with (at least, that’s my opinion, I’m certainly no expert). I always tend to write how I talk. Maybe this is because not-thinking is sort of my default state of being, I don’t know. But my other theory relates to the title of this post: does blogging help find one’s “author voice”?

In all the posts I’ve written on this blog, I was not attempting some formal writing exercise. I was writing very informal, in a very “talky” sort of style. So, after all this time, I’ve had a lot of practice writing in my own author voice. Therefore, when I sit down to write some fiction, I naturally fall into that. Since I don’t have any sort of writing degree, I have had less “formal” training than a lot of beginning writers. Maybe years of blogging are actually *better* education wise, because I have less to un-learn.

So maybe there is a benefit to blogging after all! Maybe it is not just a waste of time, as many authors claim.