Some writers don't like to read when they're writing, afraid that somebody else's voice may creep into their manuscript.
Novelist Linda Hall disagrees:
I can't understand people saying you might "lose your voice" if you read something while writing. To me that's like saying you might lose your personality or part of your character, something that can't be done. Or can't be done easily. I never worry about losing my voice, and when I'm writing, even after I've read something very different than my own style, it seems my "voice," whatever that is, always is there. I've had this very question come up in writers conferences on panels and my best advice is to always read, and not be ever afraid of losing your voice, and never stop reading.
As does novelist Athol Dickson:
A voice that one could lose would not be their voice to begin with; it would be something else they've consciously invented, the way some people fake an accent because they think it makes them seem more interesting. One's true voice flows from writing the words that come, just as they come. That said, I do learn a lot about craftsmanship from other writers, by both positive and negative example. But craftsmanship is not about figuring out your voice, it's just training the voice you already have. The way to figure out your voice is to stop trying and just write the words that come.
Let It Flow
Letting your voice flow the first time out, without writhing on the floor looking for the perfect word, is one way to develop a voice. When you click off that internal editor and let the words come out, you sometimes write things you never would have if you were more purposeful about it.
Some novelists write one page, then keep working and working that one page until it's just the way they want it. And then move on to the next page, and do the same thing. This also seems to be an apt description of madness, yet it works for some.
One thing you can do is print out your daily writing and carry those pages with you, reading them at odd moments during the day. Do this rather than surf the Internet on your iPhone. You want to be a writer, don't you?
The First to Third Flip
Want a radical suggestion? Turn your first-person point of view into third person. Or try it with a portion of your manuscript. You may even, when first drafting, start off in first and, once you've established a voice, switch to third, keeping the voice.
Here's what I mean. I once began a novel as first-person POV. Here's a short section:
My cross of Officer Siebel was the last order of business on a hot August Friday. Monday we'd all come back for closing arguments. I had a whole weekend to come up with some verbal gold. Which I'd better if I hoped to get Carlos Mendez a fair shake.
Actually, since he was guilty as sin, I could have been practically comatose and it wouldn't make a difference to Carlos. But he had to think so. He had some nasty customers in his family tree that might take issue with a less than competent defense.
I drove the Ark toward my Canoga Park office. The Ark is my vintage Cadillac, if by vintage you mean has seen better days. It dates from the Reagan administration and has been overhauled and redone and taped together many times. I got it at a police auction five years ago. The main advantage was it was big. I could sleep in it if I needed to. Even then, as I was sucking blow up my snout like some Hollywood brat, I suspected I might be homeless someday.
Hadn't happened yet. And with the help of the State Bar's Lawyer Assistance Program, maybe it wouldn't. The LAP is supposed to help lawyers with substance abuse problems. I'd managed to keep the coke monkey off my back for a year. Not that I wasn't close to falling, especially on those nights when I could not sleep.
For a couple of reasons I decided to switch the book to third-person POV. I had written about 10,000 words already in first, and had established a voice (first person is all about attitude). But I was able to keep the voice consistent, even in third:
Steve's cross of Officer Siebel was the last order of business on a hot August Friday. Monday they'd all come back for closing arguments, giving Steve a whole weekend to come up with some verbal gold. Which he knew he had to if he hoped to get Carlos Mendez a fair shake.
It would also give him time, he hoped, to get some sleep.
Steve pointed his Ark toward his Canoga Park office. The Ark was what he called his vintage Cadillac, and by vintage he meant has seen better days. It dated from the Reagan administration and has been overhauled and redone and taped together many times. Steve scored it at a police auction five years earlier. The main advantage was it was big. He could sleep in it if he needed to. Even back then, as he was sucking blow up his snout like some Hollywood brat, Steve suspected he might be homeless someday.
Hadn't happened yet. And with the help of the State Bar's Lawyer Assistance Program, maybe it wouldn't. The LAP is supposed to help lawyers with substance abuse problems. Steve had managed to keep the coke monkey off his back for a year. Not that he wasn't close to falling, especially on those nights when he couldn't sleep.
What happened for me was a much more intimate third-person narration. The first to third flip will do that for you. It makes the prose richly related to the character the story is about.
You only have to do this with a couple of chapters to get the feel for the style you're creating. Just be sure to change all the pronouns!
In most branches of human endeavor there is said to be a right and a wrong way of doing things. In writing there can only be your way, whether you pose as an aesthete, or whether you frankly admit you write for money.
—Jack Woodford
Emulate Your Favorites
This may seem counterintuitive if you're trying to develop your own voice and style. But really, our writing is the product of all the reading we've done in our lives. We've been influenced already by writers we admire.
There's nothing wrong with emulating your favorite writers, so long as you don't try to imitate them.
Whenever I read a favorite author of mine, I mark passages I like. It may be a line of dialogue, an apt description, or a tense scene. If I look at my manuscript and find parts of it to be lacking in a certain area, I might reread relevant passages and let the style of the author wash over me.
This clicks my head into a different mode, so to speak, and I can return to my work with a heightened awareness.
For example, I read John D. MacDonald to find what he described as a "bit of magic in the prose style, a bit of unobtrusive poetry." So I'll mark passages like the following one, from his Travis McGee mystery Darker Than Amber:
She sat up slowly, looked in turn at each of us, and her dark eyes were like twin entrances to two deep caves. Nothing lived in those caves. Maybe something had, once upon a time. There were piles of picked bones back in there, some scribbling on the walls, and some gray ash where the fires had been.
These few lines tell us more about the character than paragraphs of straight description. That's what well-chosen word pictures can do for your fiction.
Start your own collection of favorite passages. Make copies of these pages and put them in a notebook for personal study. Go through them periodically, letting the sound wash over you.
Read Poetry
Some writers, like Ray Bradbury, like to read poems before they begin the day's work. As Bradbury says in Zen in the Art of Writing:
Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don't use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition.
Where to start?
Poetry is everywhere, and soon enough you'll find your favorites. A good introduction is Bill Moyers's Fooling With Words, his interviews with eleven contemporary poets about their craft.
As Moyers puts it, poetry is first about the music, the pleasure of listening to "the best words in the best order."
Do that with the poems you take in. Listen to the music. You can read poetry before you revise a particular section, even paragraph, of your manuscript. The idea is not to copy the style of the poetry per se, but to let the words stretch your horizons.<
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Another thing you can do is write a section of description as a poem. It might turn out something like this:
The conductor beats time for the band and all the performers follow him, The child is baptized, the convert is making his first professions, The regatta is spread on the bay, the race is begun, (how the white sails sparkle!)
The drover watching his drove sings out to them that would stray, The peddler sweats with his pack on his back, (the purchaser higgling about the odd cent;)
The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute hand of the clock moves slowly,
The opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open'd lips, The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck,
The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other,
(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you;)
The President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great
Secretaries,
On the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined arms ...
—Song of Myself, by Walt Whitman
Then, as an exercise only—not for publication!—try to rewrite the poem as prose. For example, here are a couple of lines from Stanley Kunitz's The Layers:
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
You can take the key words—heart, feast of losses, manic dust of my friends—and begin a narration, coming from you or a character you create. Work the words in as you will, change them if you like, but try to create a similar sound. Don't worry about the meaning. Just the practice of moving from poetry to prose will expand the horizons of your style.
One day it dawned on me: writing is not recorded thought at all. Writing is recorded sound, and the melody the words create can enhance the thought they convey, or it can contradict it, or it can add another dimension that is entirely beyond the tethered confines of subject-verb-predicate. We all have a little person in our head who reads the words to us when we encounter good writing. With great writing, the sounds of the words work together, and that little person breaks forth into song.
—Tom Morrisey
Write Long, Run-On Sentences
Another helpful exercise is to write long, run-on sentences—a page or more at a time. Let yourself go. The only rule is don't edit yourself.
William Saroyan wrote a book filled with run-on sentences, Obituaries, most of which is a reflection on life and death. A sample:
I like being alive, but there were early times when I either didn't like it at all, or didn't like the kind of living I was doing, or thought I didn't, as at the orphanage in Oakland, and of course there are times when I do not feel any special pleasure in being alive but at the same time do not feel any special displeasure with it—certainly not for myself, for I have everything, and there is no reason at all for me to find any particular fault with the way I put up with time and the world and the human race ...
If you do this regularly, you'll find glittering nuggets of "unobtrusive poetry" popping out at you, phrases you can actually include in your work in progress. But the finding comes after. The first time out, let the words flow.
Here's a bit of run-on description from my writing journal. I didn't let my inner editor stop me, I just wrote:
He had a hat the size of a Toyota on his head, a foam thing, red as blood and wobbly as a drunk at dinner, and as he walked down the street whistling like an old flute in a windstorm he would pause and look around, his jack-in-the-box head springy, his eyes a couple of water pistols, wet with tears of frustration ...
I may never use any of these images, but just the act of writing them exercises my voice and style muscles.
Similes, Metaphors, and Surprises
Dow Mossman, author of The Stones of Summer (the subject of a documentary, Stone Reader), says he considered each page of his massive novel to be its own poem. Naturally it's filled with metaphors and similes.
He stood, leaning against the wooden jamb of the double glass doorway, looking back, and his eyes seemed almost dull, flatter than last year, muted somehow like reptiles not swimming in open water anymore.
Dull eyes like reptiles not swimming surprises in a pleasing way, but also fits the overall tone of the novel. The best similes and metaphors do both. So how do you find these images?
Make a list. At the top, write the subject. In the above example, it would be dull eyes. Dull like what?
List as many images as you can, absurd and farfetched as they may be. Push past your comfort zone. Force yourself to come up with twenty possibilities. One of them will surely work.
If not, make another list. That's how you find the word pictures. Another stylistic technique is the happy surprise. This is can be an unexpected word, or a new spin on the familiar.
Robert Newton Peck uses nouns in place of adjectives to plant the unexpected in his novel A Day No Pigs Would Die:
She was getting bigger than August. The whole sky was pink and peaches.
Like Peck, you should occasionally step outside the normal, grammatical box. You'll find some pleasant surprises when you do.
You can also take familiar expressions and glitz them up. Write out a description as it comes to you, as banal or cliche-ridden as that may be, and then find ways to make it fresh.
For example, you write, "She was beautiful." Now you start to play with it, adding or changing words along the way. You might jump immediately to the cliche, "She looked like a million dollars."
Harlan Ellison came to this point and ended up with, "She looked like a million bucks tax-free." That little addition at the end makes this a fresh expression. Hunt for the poetry, the music, the happy surprise. Come up with lots of possibilities, without judging, and only then sit back and pick the best ones. This added work will pay off as your prose reaches new stylistic heights.
Minimalism?
In the late twentieth century, minimalism became all the rage in most university writing programs. Mostly a reaction against commercial fiction, it seeks to strip away pretense and puffery in style. Use of modifiers—adjectives and adverbs—is largely discouraged.
On that score, minimalism is a good thing. Overuse of modifiers can make fiction too flabby.
But minimalist theory also preaches a certain ambiguity in style and theme. That's all right if you like that kind of fiction. But it's not the only kind, and minimalism isn't always successful.
In the hands of a Raymond Carver, and even a James M. Cain, it can work. But if you're not careful it can come off as pretentious, as having (to paraphrase Gertrude Stein) "no there there."
Take the good part of minimalism, the economical use of modifiers, and run with it. Also, when rewriting, look for places where you may have overcooked the emotion. Reading is an emotional experience, and you do need to have it in your story. But show it; don't shout it.
WRITE HOT, REVISE COOL
A good rule of thumb (and all the other typing fingers, too) is write hot, revise cool. Don't try to make every sentence perfect before moving on to the next. Write hot, letting the emotion and passion for the story carry you.
Later, you revise with a cool head. You can do this by looking at what you wrote the day before, editing that, then writing the current day's quota. You can do it by writing a first draft hot and then revise the whole thing cool.
When creating, try to be on fire. When editing, control the flames.
CLUTTER AND FLAB
What's wrong with this line?
He nodded his head in agreement.
If you identified this as coming from the Dept. of Redundancy Department, well done. It is an example of flabby writing.
Cutting flab (what William Zinsser calls "clutter") is an ongoing process. There are no rules here, no one-size-fits-all technique. It's a matte
r of experience and willingness. Note that last word. A willingness to cut what you've written, to be ruthless, is one of the hallmarks of the professional writer.
Editing Example
Below are two versions of a section from my novel, Sins of the Fathers. The first is my original. The second shows a little of the thinking process that goes into self-editing.
Original Version
First came the children.
In Lindy's dream they were running and screaming, dozens of them, in some sunlit field. A billowing surge of terrified kids, boys and girls, some in baseball garb, others in variegated ragtag clothes that gave the impression of a Dickens novel run amok.
What was behind them, what was causing the terror, was something dark, unseen. In the hovering over visions that only dreams afford, Lindy sought desperately the source of the fear.
There was a black forest behind the field, like you'd see in fairy tales. Or nightmares.
She moved toward the forest, knowing who it was, who was in there, and she'd meet him coming out. It would be Darren DiCinni, and he would have a gun, and in the dream she kept low to avoid being shot herself.
Moving closer and closer now, the screams of the scattering children fading behind her. Without having to look behind she knew that a raft of cops was pulling up to the scene.
She wondered if she was going to warn DiCinni, or was she just going to look at him?
Would he say anything to her, or she to him?
The dark forest had the kind of trees that come alive at night, with gnarly arms and knotted trunks. It was the place where the bad things lived.
Lindy didn't want to go in, but she couldn't stop herself.
That's when the dark figure started to materialize, from deep within the forest, and he was running toward her.
KEY POINTS
• Voice and style should develop naturally as you attend to the telling of your story. Don't force it.
• Read a wide variety of literature and poetry to expand your stylistic possibilities.
• Less is usually more when writing emotion. The first time out, let it flow, but be ready to pull back when you edit. Write hot, revise cool.
Revision And Self-Editing Page 16