Voice workshop! Part 1

My critique group has spent the past week doing a workshop on voice. At first we were hesitant to do this, as none of us feel particularly expert. But we decided to forge ahead, and I think we’ve all learned a lot. I have, anyhow! Here’s an overview of what we did, and some of the things I learned in the process.

Day 1: Definitions.

Read and discuss articles that ARE written by experts on what voice is and how you develop it. Here are links to the articles we read:

Editor Caroline Meckler on voice: http://tabwriter.blogspot.com/2008/12/voice-giving-us-voice.html (EXCELLENT, clear definition of voice and its aspects--read this first)

Editor Martha Mihalick on voice: http://christyscreativespace.blogspot.com/2008/04/martha-mihalik-editor-at-greenwillow.html

Verla Kay discussion: http://www.verlakay.com/boards/index.php?topic=45917.0

Margot Finke on character voice: http://www.underdown.org/mf-powerful-voice.htm

Cheryl Klein on voice: http://chavelaque.blogspot.com/2009/03/faq-9-i-think-questions-about-voice.html (and read the comments, too, because there are some good ideas down there)

And an interesting writer's take on critiquing voice: http://katieganshert.blogspot.com/2010/08/dont-take-my-voice-away.html

http://cba-ramblings.blogspot.com/2010/07/what-is-writers-voice.html

We concluded that there was such a thing as author voice, and also such a thing as character voice. Author voice is like your face. It’s YOU. The YOU-ist You you can write. Character voice (or even different kinds of voice for different books) is like different clothing or hairstyles. People will react to you differently and expect different things from you based on how you look, or what kind of voice your book has. It’s important for your characters to all have their own voice.

Strong, exact nouns and verbs tend to be important for voice.

Voice is rooted in character.

You can have such a thing as strong voice and yet not everyone will like it. Voice subject to taste.

Voice helps you get inside a character’s head. The more in a character’s head you are, the more you feel, which usually affects how much you like a book. (Of course, if you find the character annoying, you might not want to stick around. Like I said, it’s subjective.)

To see what others in my group have to say about it all, check out the following blog:

Sandy Carlson, starting with this post.
Jaclyn McMahon's take here.

Prime Real Estate

Here we go--an agent's discussion of Prime Real Estate in your novel, by Mary Kole! READ THIS.

The most important point in here is this: The prime real estate in any novel is: the first page of the novel, the first paragraph of a new chapter, and the last paragraph of a chapter.

Emotional impact and prime real estate

Serenissima over at Verla Kay’s boards came up with a really great way of thinking about what you should and should not put in your first chapter. She calls certain places “prime real estate,” ie, places your reader expects certain key information to appear. The things you put on that prime real estate—the characters, problems, settings you choose to introduce here—become a sort of promise from the author of what to expect in this book. This means that if you put it there, it had better be important over the course of your novel. If you point out a gun on the fireplace, it had better go off in your story. If you devote five pages to a character who only disappears, never to be mentioned again, your readers will feel you have broken trust. If you don’t hint at (or blatantly plant) your main concept there, the reader will be confused as to what the main plot is. Things like that. I love that phrase, “prime real estate,” because it really highlights how to set up your key parts of the story right from the beginning.

Lately I’ve been thinking about what makes a book beloved. Is it because it’s well written? Certainly. Is it because the plot is thrilling? To be sure. But I don’t think those are the most important reasons a book becomes beloved. I think it’s because of how it makes you feel. It’s the soul of the book. And most people want a book with a soul they can identify with, a character to be their friend as they navigate all the emotions that come over the course of the story.

Here’s the thing: different kinds of book souls appeal to different kinds of people. You’re not going to write one that will universally appeal to everyone.

However, I do think it’s reasonable to say that readers want to feel sympathetic toward the main character. You might be fascinated by a cruel or insane character and feel compelled to read on, but I’m not convinced that people reread say, Crime and Punishment as lovingly as a book like A Wrinkle in Time. People love Tolstoy’s Levin (shy, somewhat bumbling, but searching for answers), but er, Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (a deluded axe murderer) not so much. What exactly makes a character sympathetic varies a bit—believability with regards to the reader’s experience, someone who doesn’t lie to the reader, someone who is vulnerable yet acts—those are all things that generally tend to appeal to readers.

Once readers bond with that main character, they want to feel right along with him/her. They want to feel the bite of disappointment, the sting of betrayal, and the victory of rising above challenge. They want to live through that character for just a little while. People don’t care much about a book if they don’t feel much. You’ve got to make them feel. I think that’s why some books, even if they break down in other technical areas, can still be beloved if they succeed in this one area. (Cheryl Klein talks about this a bit.)

Back to the idea of prime real estate. What, then, do you want to do in that all-important first chapter? You want to make your reader bond with your character, right? So think about this. What kind of emotional impact are you greeting your reader with? What emotions are you putting in that spot of prime real estate? If you are getting responses that people are not connecting with your book, take apart your first chapter. For every scene, write down the emotional impact you are trying to achieve. Anger? Resentment? Pity party? Are you trying to create fear or disgust?

Does your reader know your character enough to begin with to take your MC’s side in this?

If you met a person or came upon a situation charged with this emotion, without knowing anything about him/her/it beforehand, would you want to stick around? Or would you decide it was none of your business, and leave?

Think about how you lay in your emotional impact over that first chapter. Spend your real estate investment wisely.

Show vs. tell

I really enjoy critiquing. Yes, it's work, and I can't always do it--I have to weave it around my own writing, not to mention my Real Life. But I always learn something from doing it, and I always love seeing glimpses into such different worlds. I've just done three crits outside of my normal crit group rotation, and once again, I'm struck by how different and unique each person's writing is.

One thing the crits made me think through was when it's appropriate to tell, and when it's better to show. I think sometimes writers get a little too uptight about The Rules, as if they can NEVER be broken, ever. Eradication of adverbs! No dialogue tags except for "said"! Never tell, always show! In general, most of the time, those are good things. But I don't think it's 100% bad to use an adverb! Or to, once in a book or so, let someone snarl instead of say a line. The telling-showing thing is most on my mind right now. Here are the kinds of things you should probably show in your writing:

--key plot movements
--key emotional points
--scenes that show decisions, changes, or character growth
--scenes that show important aspects of the relationship between characters

This is what I think telling is good for:

--transitions

As for the passing of time in a book, I think you need a mix. A small, specific, showing instance to sort of stand for all the other instances you aren't going to show. Besides, text on the page = passing of time in the text world.

Something that really helps necessary telling go down well is voice. If you can "tell" in the voice of your POV character, it just slides down like syrup. Rachel Hawkins's book Hex Hall did a good job with this, I thought. The voice let her tell the transitions and skip ahead to all the interesting parts she wanted to show us. And of course, JK Rowling is brilliant at balancing the two as well.

Second Sight, by Cheryl Klein (review)

Second Sight: An Editor’s Talks on Writing, Revising, Editing, and Publishing Books for Children and Young Adults
By Cheryl B. Klein
Asterisk Books, New York, 2011

A review by Rose Green

Second Sight is a collection of talks and workshops and blog posts on writing by Cheryl Klein, editor at Arthur A. Levine, an imprint of Scholastic. Some of these talks have appeared on her web site, and others not. Here they are all collected into one handy resource. If I was leaving the country and could only take a handful of books with me, I would include this one. It’s the single most practical writing book I’ve read.

What this book is not: an introduction to writing and/or children’s publishing. It will not tell you the standard format for manuscripts, nor will it tell you how to write a bestseller. It will not tell you how to get rich “like that woman from England who wrote a book” or how to get on Oprah. It has very few examples from adult books--with the exception of Aristotle’s writings, which should tell you something about the depth and seriousness with which Cheryl regards children’s literature.

Who this book is for: the intermediate to advanced writer, preferably someone who has already completed (or at least is deeply into) a first draft. There is definitely a hole in the market for books for intermediate writers, the ones who are past the introductory stages of how a book is put together but who don’t yet have an agent or editor of their own to guide them. It’s full of practical suggestions for deep revision, for finding those “electric fence emotions” (as she describes the raw feelings of middle school) and pulling them forward to connect with readers in a real, believable way. The book itself is written with authority; not just because of Klein’s editor hat, but because she herself is an excellent writer, particularly gifted at pinpointing and expressing plot structure, voice, characterization—in short, the underpinnings of a novel.

Some topics covered in the book: The Annotated Query Letter from Hell, back to back with an example and discussion of a good (real) query and why it works. Deep discussions of character, plot, theme, and voice. An excellent tutorial on how a picture book is put together, complete with a sample storyboard (which my daughter had me read to her--twice). An entire chapter detailing the editing process of one of her author’s books. (Note: if you think all the revision is over once you sign a contract, this chapter will be very eye-opening!) A revision checklist for writers. And more. If you are most concerned with getting the emotional heart of a book right, whether serious or funny or whatever, this is the book for you.

The only warning I need to give is that you may find yourself stopping often to put the book into practice. As I was reading it, I also happened to be revising a first draft of a book of my own, and found myself diving back and forth between my draft and this book, making notes and thinking through character arcs. So, bring a pencil when you sit down to read!

Second Sight will be available in February 2011 and further information about ordering can be found at Cheryl’s web site, www.cherylklein.com.

Writing bad guys

Just something I tried out this time. Think of a person or a kind of person who is a good guy for you. Someone you'd really trust and who you look up to. Now imagine that person gone bad. Everyone has choices, you know? And just because you start out as a good person doesn't mean you can't mess up. We all do--but of course, some people decide to fix their messups, and some don't. So imagine that good person, only soured, and you'll get a great bad guy.

Things I've learned lately about writing

1. Personalize queries. You hate getting those impersonal forms back, right? You love it when it sounds like there’s a real person at the other end, right? Well, do the same thing in your queries. (If you don’t know how to personalize something because you don’t know anything about that agent, well…maybe some homework is in order.) (Although true, if someone is extremely new, it can still be tricky.)

2. The plot development of everything jumping sideways. I forget whose blog I read this on first—but the idea is that somewhere after your inciting incident, when you’ve got your character moving forward and doing things—something completely unexpected happens that throws your MC’s plans in a different direction. (Yes, it still needs to fit logically within the book, at least if you have all knowledge, as the reader should by the end.) They discover a new element they hadn’t realized. They learn something new about someone that changes things. Etc. The book I just finished and am now revising was based on this idea, and I really like how it turned out. Plus, it keeps the plot from being stale: And then we went on a long, long journey to destroy the magical artifact that wanted to take over our minds. And then we battled the dragons in the way. And then we walked some more, so we could destroy the magical artifact. Etc. Boring! This technique livens things up beyond just a long, slow trudge to the end.

3. One model of worldbuilding involves laying out magical or real world skills/situations that, in the time of climax, your MC can use. Ie, the solution comes from the extraordinary tools the character already has rather than those skills just being window dressing. This idea is from a fabulous essay on magic systems by Brandon Sanderson (see my previous entry for a longer discussion and a link).

4. Piggybacking off of this idea is my own that if you make a character’s weaknesses become tools they can turn inside out and use as solutions in the end, you will give them an even sweeter victory.

5. Or, you may choose to take the Austen plot approach, discussed by Cheryl Klein, where the MC, in wanting something very much, acts to get it but doesn’t have the full knowledge they need. So they end up complicating the plot themselves, making the situation worse for themselves, to the point where part of the plot becomes solving that very problem. I think that characters’ actions should cause plot complications.

6. It’s always best to write those scenes that emotionally pin your work when they’re hot in your mind. A book I wrote and rewrote many, many times has one scene that is virtually unchanged from when I first set it down. It’s the one scene that readers (including hardened agents) respond to every time. True emotional punch is stronger even than lots of pretty word polishing. You can always polish. You can’t always catch that feeling.

7. When stuck on your revision, write a new book. Even if it’s completely unrelated, that new book just may teach yourself something about the old one. Mette Ivie Harrison has commented on this before—I believe she writes a whole new book before going back to revise the last one. Not sure I can write quite that fast, but even just starting a new one opens up new ideas in my head. I highly recommend it if you’re stuck!

What about you? What things have turned on lightbulbs for you in your writing lately?