The end is in sight & Voice
August 13, 2007
I was going to say I was beavering away, bashing away or had my head down but all of those phrases probably have connotations in some cultures so I am working. I am just about to hit 60k in Just Say Yes and the most dramatic moment of the whole book (and there have been quite a few!) There was a talk at the conference about how pace should pick up at the end of a novel and I think that happens naturally. I think it will be about 70k when I’ve finished – just one small sub-plot thread that I haven’t decided how to tie up yet, which is appropriate as it is about a missing person. Should it be happy or sad or a mix of the two? I’m inclined towards the last.
I will run the Wish You Were Here paperback comp later this week; just waiting on a small detail.
Voice
I have been reading a lot of blog posts about how you develop your own ‘writing’ voice. I think that if you’re writing romance, you should, of course, read a lot of romances. But I’d strongly urge any aspiring romance author to read widely in a lot of other genres such as crime (Ian Rankin’s Rebus has glorious male POV’s IMHO), thrillers, literary, non-fiction, comedy, chick-lit etc. Maybe one romance, followed by something completely different.
I’d suggest watching copious amounts of drama to see how it is structured and paced and to listen to the dialogue. I think that reading and watching quirky stuff helps give your voice the edge it needs. You don’t want a bland, one-size-fits-no-one voice, do you? You want your voice to sound out loud and clear with tons of personality and you can’t please everyone…
Let me know what you think helps bring out your writing voice.
Posted by Phillipa @ 9:54 am | Leave a Comment
Liz Fenwick Says:
Well done on the work accomplished 🙂
Voice is an interesting thing….I know that the book that I wrote at the beginning of this year was much more my voice. I think when I wrote the August Rock I had the self edit on too strongly and that took something from it. Although AG improved with each rewrite I am not sure that it will ever have my voice as clearly as a Cornish House does and hopefully the next book that is burning inside at present. Any way just a my rambling thoughts 🙂
Phillipa Says:
Liz – I think you’re right. Your voice does develop as you carry on using it. Jenny Haddon (Sophie Weston) also gave me a great piece of advice recently: she said ‘you have to get in touch with your subconccious’ when you writ: maybe this is the key to writing in your own voice. Not easy when the phone’s going, you’re moving house and the children need you!
Liz Fenwick Says:
I think it was more a chance of kids reading over my shoulder and the thought of my mother reading the book!!!! I haven’t let her read A Cornish house because of the language along – the 15yr old girl is really stoppy 🙂
Michelle Styles Says:
Voice comes from recognising that you can only write like yourself. It is about word choice and the decuisions you make in telling a story.
Voices grow and change over the years just as authors do.
If you try to work against your voice, it will show. Tell the story your way.
Poeple pick out different things in voices. Once famously the Spectator ran a contest where people had to write a paragraph like Grahame Greene. Greene entered under a false identity and did not win. They discovered the truth when his next book started with the paragraph he had submitted and I think he mentioned it an interview. The Spectator went back and checked. And yes it had been submitted, but never published!
Congrats on your progress.
Phillipa Says:
Michelle – I agree that you can only write like yourself. I think (no, I know) that it’s agony to try and be something you’re not.
I do think that your voice is inevitably going to be influenced by what you read and watch and have read and watched – as well as your personality and philosophy on life. So I think it’s important to read widely and consider what you can learn from other media such as film and television.
Rosy Thornton Says:
The thing I can never understand – and maybe there is no answer to it – is how you can write either in the first person, or third person but from the close-in POV of your main character(s), and yet still have your own ‘voice’ as an author?
I can see that an author who uses an intrusively ‘omniscient’ voice to move the story along and comment externally on events – like Dickens, for example! – has a distinct authorial voice. But these days – and especially in romance and women’s commercial fiction – that’s meant to be outmoded and not the thing to do, except very sparingly. We are told that it blocvs enagagement, and in our genre, engagement is all. Yet we are also told that our characters should each speak in their own distinct voice – not only their dialogue but their internal monologues should be written to their own distinct rhythms, refelecting the patternns of their speech and thoughts. And all our characters are meant to be new and different, right? So how, if we are speaking in our characters’ voices almost all the time, can we at the same time have our own ‘voice’ as author?
It’s a mystery to me! Can anyone elucidate?
Rosy x
P.S. And many congrats on being on the final stretch, Phillipa. Must be very exciting!
Phillipa Says:
Ah Rosy…thank you for dropping by. All I can say is that you have one of the most distinctive ‘voices’ of any author I know. Open one of your books and it’s YOU and couldn’t be anyone else and maybe that helped you get your novel published (aside from the Faustian pact of course).
Firstly, it’s your style which is so unusual – all that original description, the horror of cliche and the noticing of tiny details that are outside the peripheral vision of most people – yet we recognise those details when you point them out.
The humour, of course.You’re bonkers, naturally.
Then the big picture; the determination to bring in bigger issues through individual experiences. It’s part of your voice to make readers want to care too.
So you see, although all your characters’ voices are distinct, your subconscious voice in telling the story, is also unique.
Or is that rubbish?
Some of the distinct voices I enjoy in series and mainstream romance/women’s fiction include: Jenny Colgan, Liz Fielding, Rachel Gibson, Sharon Kendrick, Jill Mansell, early Jilly Cooper and Veronica Henry. I haven’t read Fiona Harper’s first book yet but the opening blew me away. ‘Serena – sounded kind of horsey.’ I love it, Fiona. 🙂
Rosy Thornton Says:
You’re very sweet, Phillipa – even though it’s baloney.
But I still reckon there’s a dangerous line – a weird kind of paradox. If an author wants all her books to sound decidedly and individually her own, won’t all her characters end up sounding like her? They’ll all display the same self-deprecating humour, or all have the same habit of suddenly making amusing links back to things that happened in childhood, or they’ll all love the smell of coffee, or think in zany non-sequiturs, or keep feeling guilty for things that aren’t their fault, or be damaged but not too scared to make the leap into loving again… or whatever it is that becomes the author’s trademark. Her readers will welcome that – it’s what they like in her books – but won’t the characters, in the end, be all too samey?
It confuses me.
R x
P.S. “Serena – sounded kind of horsey” – fabulous opening, I agree!
Phillipa Says:
Rosy – Not baloney but I know what you mean. I think it’s difficult to get away from your characters sharing similiar values and quirks. I don’t know the answer but I know I do it too. Because if you don’t like your main heroine and hero, who will? So they inevitably end up being made in your image or the image of a person you empathise with strongly. It is indeed, a paradox.
Nell Dixon Says:
For me voice is the tone of the book as a whole, the feel of the story. You can’t pick different aspects it’s just how the words come together that gives the ‘voice’ of the author. Characters all have their own quirks and dialogue but the overall writing of the book and how it’s constructed to me is like a fingerprint.
Barb H Says:
I’m coming in very late on this fascinating discussion and I don’t really think I have much to add, except that I agree with just about everything. Voice is all about the choices we make. We might all (hypothetically) be given the same plotline, but we’d choose totally different settings and characters, levels of humour and sensuality. Part of it is to do with our fantasies, and I guess that’s where the subconscious comes in.
But we can only write from our own experience and colour it with our own personality — our own world view. We try to make our characters different from us, but even then, our choices are restricted by what we know of the world.
The more experiences we’ve gathered, whether they’ve come from reading, viewing, living or travelling, the deeper the well!