Self and Story

The relationship between them is ironic. Without sufficient ego to believe you have something to say, you can’t write a word. Yet value self over story, and you might be fine. But your story won’t be.

For one thing, if your ego transcends everything else, you’ll disregard legitimate feedback. And few writers succeed, either materially or artistically, without a courageous, creative response to insightful critique.

Curtailing your ego also reminds you who controls your story. Though the obvious answer is “You, of course,” it’s actually more complicated. The author (you) generates a cast of characters to dramatize the fiction and a narrator to guide readers as they follow those characters. Even in memoir, a persona, rather than an author, delivers the story.

What makes for a successful persona? Focus on the readers. In both fiction and nonfiction, guiding readers is the narrator’s purpose. But if ego drowns out everything else, the author begins upstaging the more audience-oriented narrator.

Here’s Katerina Cosgrove on that subject:

I've found, over the fifteen-plus years of being a published writer, that I suffer intensely every time if I let my ego get in the way. Even if I give it permission to stick its tiny little toe out. It always trips me up. In fact, the only way for me to write at all is to let go of any expectations entirely. Otherwise, the disapproval of others, the hot shame of not being enough, the squirmy feeling of not making the grade—or of being simply ignored by the critics, pundits and gatekeepers—is enough to make me want to give up. — “Removing Your Ego From Your Art”

Ah. Though ego might seem to be one’s best ally, that’s rarely true. In “Art and the Ego,” Emma Welsh reminds that as writers

We’re seeking our true voice, our power, our authenticity as artists. We realize—through blood, sweat and tears—that betting on the ego is not going to get us there.

She feels strongly enough about this to pose an extremely challenging question about priorities:

To find out, check out this ultimate test to measure your ego—one that even I can’t pass yet. (Truthfully it may be impossible.) Ask yourself this: if your story was one day incredibly well-loved and highly regarded, would you care whether or not your name was on the project? 

How do you feel about your answer? Maybe you dislike the question, perhaps consider it unfair. Maybe you dislike your answer even more. Fortunately, this isn’t up to any fictitious narrator(s) or characters. You control your own ego.  Maybe a little scary, but also mighty satisfying. It’s your call.x

Tip: Value story over self.

**** Laurel's new book, Beyond the First Draft, is now available from Amazon or Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing. ****

Scene: The Big Picture

In a way, every scene resembles a bouquet. Individual elements compose both. The end result must offer a coherent whole with a clear yet unobtrusive focal point. When the elements complement each other, the totality becomes far more effective than a single contribution. It’s the difference between this:

and this:

No one would mistake a couple of flowers for a bouquet. With scenes, though, it’s less clear. Precisely what constitutes a scene?

A scene is a sequence of events that happens at a particular place and time and that moves the story forward. — Randy Ingermanson, “The Art and science of Writing Scenes”

Another slant on the scene comes from Jane Friedman:

A scene is a stylized, sharper simulacrum of reality.

Ideally, the scene integrates everything from both definitions. So a scene needs:

~ Tension.

Unless there’s substantial suspense, summarize instead.

~ Momentum.

The scene must contribute to character arc, or, again, wouldn’t summary be better?

~ Setting.

Although locale mustn’t dominate, characters need grounding. Always.

~ Artistry.

Along with drama, scenes need causality, propulsion, originality, and grace.

~ Credibility.

Only plausible characters and events evoke reader emotion. 

~ Focus.

Regardless of style or voice, tension is the crux of every scene.

Yet novelists conceptualize scenes differently. Drawn to setting or symbolism? You might disregard tension. Maybe you’re an action sort of gal. Will your characters be disembodied? Will you emphasize what they do and ignore why they do it?

Scenes work when novelists disregard personal predilection to provide the whole picture. Who wants a lopsided bouquet? 

Tip: Readers enjoy scenes that balance their elements—that complete the picture.

To Reach, Neither Preach Nor Teach

This applies to many people, about many things, but especially so for novelists. No matter how literary or curious the reader, pleasure remains the novel’s purpose. If readers want judgment, there’s plenty of philosophy or scripture to peruse. If readers seek information or education, there’s plenty of stellar nonfiction out there. Where does fiction fall on this continuum?

Tip: Share what’s on your mind, so long as it doesn’t feel like school or synagogue.

Don’t let anything upstage the entertainment. That’s easy to forget, because storytelling grew from painfully didactic roots: Greek drama threatened the dire results of hubristic arrogance, and Samuel Richardson (Pamela) and Henry Fielding (Tom Jones) respectively outlined how to be a virtuous woman or man. These plays and novels remain historically and aesthetically valuable, but today’s audience usually rejects an onslaught of oversimplified morality.

Because many see a broad of expanse of gray where exclusive good or evil once resided. And even on polarized issues, today’s readers prefer understatement. According to playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America):

I go into any movie that's historical fiction thinking, 'OK, I'm here to watch a work of art, something delivering a series of opinions, and if it's a good work of art, these opinions become so deeply embedded in complexity and richness that I won't even be bothered by the opinions. I'll make my own mind up.

Some would insist that to accomplish this, you must never “tell.” But what exactly does that  mean? Most writers occasionally “tell,” sometimes quite intentionally. All but the most inexperienced writers know this already, so this judgment against judgment often sounds patronizing. The reminder to give your audience the exquisite pleasure of inference seems far more useful.

The “teaching” aspect of fiction is a more ambiguous than the “showing” component. After all, superb novels like Life Mask (Emma Donoghue), Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel), A Conspiracy of Paper (David Liss), or Galatea 2.2 (Richard Powers) convey vast amounts of information.  Does it feel like being educated? Not at all. Does it feel like school? Never.

And this is why.

~ Put characters foremost. 

Guy Vanderhaeghe reminds that “History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt.”

~ Harness the power of plot. 

Integrate facts about the environment with the events occurring there. As Hilary Mantel puts it:

Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that’s the point to step back and fill in the details of their world.

~ Stay in voice.

The thousands of superb creative nonfiction books out there prove that facts needn’t bore. It entirely depends on tension, characterization, tone, word choice, humor, lyricism, even sentence structure.

How do writers reach you? That’s no different from how readers want you to reach them.

Getting to Know What Readers Know—or Don’t

Unless you enjoy clairvoyance along with creativity, you’ll never be certain what readers find baffling or belaboring. But you can develop significant skill at approximating, and the better your guesswork becomes, then the likelier you are to avoid dispensing too much or little. 

If readers have chosen your novel, don’t they want to hear everything you have to say? Of course not. 

Here’s the sort of thing they want you to omit.

“x.” What they’ve already heard.

Never be less aware of repetition than your readers.When writers revise over and over, as we definitely need to do, we sometimes forget what’s been established. This is especially treacherous when informing other characters about preceding events. Assume your readers are smart and have good memories. This encourages you to replace repetition with swift summary.

“x” Abstract description of emotions.

You “tell” every time you say, “Esmerelda was angry,” or “Romanov was sad.” Novelists frequently adopt such wording when transitioning from a general overview to a specific example. But that solves one problem by introducing another. Engage readers with body language and literal or symbolic imagery.

“x” Tedious logistics.

It’s charming that you can pinpoint the distance between the village where Prudence lives and the park where she makes love with Oscar in the bushes. Still, the lovemaking intrigues readers, not the park being 7.4 miles northwest of town, how long it takes to bike there, or even the exact number of hills Oscar must surmount to reach his beloved.

“x” Painful didactics.

Just because you know all about shipbuilding in ancient Greece, Caillebotte’s palette, or every detail about America’s greatest quarterback, don’t assume that readers also want to know. Never bury the plot or lose your voice. Instead? Integrate facts into the story itself, or use them as a delaying tactic to escalate suspense. Keep the emphasis on the fiction—not the “non.” 

Of course you must also guess what readers do want. That’s qualities like these:

~ Clarity.

Readers want to feel grounded. Who is this guy? When did the revelers leave the house? Where are we, and how did we get there?

~ Causality.

What induced this moment? Reveal motive not only through scene goals, pressure points, and character arc, but at the level of the sentence with words like “while” and “but.”  

~ Mystery. 

Manipulate details so that readers can frequently infer without ever feeling confused. That’s the not-so-secret secret to what readers want to know.

Tip: Successful fiction masters the delicate balance between inference and explanation.

The Novelist’s Vocal Chords

As D.W. Wilson noted in The White Review,

Voice is not talking. In fact that makes no sense – the written word being an inherently silent medium. We say we like the sound of a writer’s voice, but this is purely metaphorical, this is hand-waving, this is gross simplification of the highest order. What we actually like is some analogue of sound in a writer’s voice, some approximation of how the voice-as-written represents the voice-as-spoken.

Voice in fiction is so elusive that it’s as difficult to define as to release. But every novelist must grapple with it, because “if you like the person telling you the story—which is to say the voice, not the author—you generally will let them tell you a story” (Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic).

 Like sinful chocolate or cheese, satisfying complex voice teases and fulfills, begins as one flavor and ends with another. That can’t happen with a simplistic taste or sound. Instead, it’s an immersion in sensation: the result seems as original as it is familiar.

The source of this rich stuff is a combination of elements: innovation plus tradition, inventive plus archetypal, subjective and socio-political, and not just dramatic or poetic or side-splittingly hilarious, but the magic of seamlessly interweaving those.

Thaisa Frank and Dorothy Wall call their book Finding Your Writers’ Voice. This implies that it must be lost, so you must you find it. But how can you with that “must” daring you to screw up? Threatening not only humiliation, but the consequences of lacking the fresh and innovative sound that every agent, publisher, editor, and reader seeks? Voice synthesizes “must” and “can.”

In fiction, great voices suggest not one singer with a guitar, but an entire band or orchestra. How do you avoid sounding like a one-note wonder?

~ Personality.

How do you sound when you’re really yourself? Uncensored, and thus possibly whiney or arrogant or meticulous or—the person no one else can earth can be. This fosters sound enhancing language while imagery enhances meaning. It comes from going deep inside yourself while remembering that you’re not doing this just for yourself:

The issue in most manuscripts, then, is not whether the author has a voice but whether they are using it to maximum effect. Does the language of the novel light it up? Does the story stab our hearts? Does its passion grip us? Do we see the world in new ways? – Don Maass

~ Impersonality.

“The individual voice is the communal voice,” Joyce Carol Oates reminds. Want to be so much yourself that you write only for yourself? Fine, just don’t ask anyone else to read it.

Tip: Ironically, voice is the paradoxical merger of tightening up and letting loose.

Purity and Impurity in Jonathan Franzen’s "Purity"

Depending on your definition of masterpiece, this novel might just be one. Pip needs love, money, and her dad’s identity—not necessarily in that order. Impurities and all, I want everyone to read it. So I won’t divulge any of its many secrets. Want the actual plot? Read this book!

It’s not perfect. In crystals, impurities alter the basic structure, adding color and fire; this describes Franzen as well. Some reviewers attack these distortions: self-indulgence, sexism, oversimplification, snobbishness, one-dimensional protagonists, and disconnected narrative threads.

There’s more. Tension can be as low as breadth is huge. The remarkable characterization occurs less from action than backstory. Lots and lots of “telling.”

Maybe. But here’s what else Purity offers:

~ Zingers.

 “Don’t talk to me about hatred if you haven’t been married.”

~ Analogy.

“It’s like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.”

~ Insight.

“And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety.”

~ Irony.

“Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.”

~ The “extra” in “extraordinary”:

“Fog spilled from the heights of San Francisco like the liquid it almost was.”

~ Voice.

“The tropics were an olfactory revelation. She realized that, coming from a temperate place like the other Santa Cruz, her own Santa Cruz, she’d been like a person developing her vision in poor light. There was such a relative paucity of smells in California that the inerconnecteness of all possible smells was not apparent….How many smells the earth alone had! One kind of soil was distinctly like cloves, another like catfish; one sandy loam was like citrus and chalk, others had elements of patchouli or fresh horseradish. And was there anything a fungus couldn’t smell like in the tropics?”

In an NPR interview, Franzen describes fiction-writing as expertly as he describes everything else: “It’s like having this dream that you can go back to, kind of on demand. When it’s really going well...you’re in a fantasy land and feeling no pain.”

You’ll need chutzpah to create that kind of “ fantasy land.” Here’s the thing about risk. Take none, and “good” is the most you’ll get. Defy “pure” convention, and you might fail; you might inspire loathing as well as adoration. Personally, I pray that Franzen keeps doing his own thing.

Tip: Too much risk is—risky. But none at all? No color or fire there.

Too Good to Be True?

How good can a good protagonist really be? In a recent N.Y. Times “Bookends,” Thomas Mallon rightly observed that, “No one has ever preferred Amelia to Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, or Melanie to Scarlett in Gone with the Wind.”

Tip: Perfectly good is perfectly—boring.

Good protagonists must be morally sound, but definitely troubled and definitely rebellious about constraint. Too selfish makes them unpalatable. But too perfect and they swiftly become at best uninteresting and at worst mildly self-righteous. To inspire and excite, protagonists need to get going with enough oomph to offer:

~ Fire.

This might be the main ingredient. A good protagonist has a great deal to gain or lose. Passion makes people care enough to act, screw up, and have another go. That journey makes fiction fiction.      

~ Arc.

If your character starts perfect, where can she go? The fun of fiction is watching someone conquer something, whether that’s the snotty guy with the huge estate (Pride and Prejudice), the power of death (The Fault in Our Stars), the mystery of the genetic code (The Gold Bug Variations), anyone who opposes the Borgias (Blood and Beauty), or an early crop of crooked bankers and lawyers (A Conspiracy of Paper).

~ Voice.

Especially in first person, the protagonist must be charming, funny, dramatic, and mysterious. Something very much out of the ordinary. Often someone with passionate opinions, but a nice sense of humor about them.

~ Desire.

This needn’t be sensual, just a motivation for action. Too much politeness, modesty, resignation, even stoicism can be unappetizing. If you think everyone and everything is fine, you won’t take many risks. This might be a terrific way to live. Just not in a novel.

~ Credibility.

As a friend recently said, we’re all “emerging.” Anyone delighted with his or her “goodness” is too arrogant (and naïve and misinformed) to really be that good. Real people are flawed people. Preferably a bit honest about it. This goes for protagonists, too.

~ Inconsistent consistency.

That’s another way to spell “credibility.” If your protagonist has a weakness (and your protagonist must), then this might generate a succession of similar mistakes. But if your protagonist always repeats exactly the same mistake, or never makes one at all, readers won’t believe, won’t care, or both.

~ Resolution.

Nice people can be very accepting, very forgiving, very tolerant—very lovely to be around but not to read about. Protagonists judge and act. That’s the source of story.

A good protagonist is one who’s good enough—and no better.

Smart Novels

Not everyone wants to read them. Not everyone wants to write them. But for certain readers and writers, unless a novel stretches your mind—at least a trifle—it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. It doesn’t have quite enough substance. Whether you wrote it or read it, you’re pretty much who you were when you started. Where’s the fun in that?

But “smart” has another meaning. Somewhat ironically, as a verb, “to smart” becomes the action of irritating or wounding. It’s easy to inflict that on readers: just sound like a smarty-pants.

How do you offer the heft that leaves one changed when the book ends—without depriving readers of the entertainment they seek? And without being a smarty-pants?

*** Mystery.

In Andrew Winer’s The Marriage Artist, readers learn about the richly illuminated Jewish marriage contract called a “ketubah.”  Murders to solve and sex to savor keep us turning pages while delving into not only Jewish tradition but the meaning of art—especially when it stops being representational.

*** Humanity.

On a panel at the recent AWP conference in Minneapolis, Joan Silber remarked that historical fiction comes alive when readers grasp what “the characters would know and feel.” That “makes the history yours.” This explains the popularity of Hilary Mantel. We’re certainly being educated. But it doesn’t “smart” to wade through all those royals and edicts and Thomases—because they’re as real as a Piggly Wiggly clerk.

*** Voice.

In The Gold Bug Variations (pun intended) by Richard Powers, once you acclimate to the dazzling array of verbal gymnastics, poeticisms, and intellectual prowess, you’ll earn honorary degrees in history, classical music, genetics, and more. Rhythm and metaphor sweeten a scientist’s musings about the search to crack the DNA/RNA/amino acid code:

“We knew a little; enough to know that further extrapolation would require a whole new zoo of relational models. Certain things we already suspected: a long, linear informational string wound around its complement, like a photo pinned to its own negative, for further unlimited printing.”

*** Plot.

“She was like a fossil that’s been cleaned and set so everyone can see what it is.”

In Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures, the history of fossil-hunting gets magnetically intertwined with the fates of the fossil hunters.

Tip: Smart novels are fun novels. But they have to feel like novels. That’s plot and character.

The Economics of Fiction

Lots of fiction centers on money: Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (banking), David Liss’s A Conspiracy of Paper (how banking created the mess Dickens described), or the endless array of novels touching on wealth, power, class, and the interaction between them (Tracy Chevalier, Jonathan Franzen, Chad Harbach, Hilary Mantel, Fay Weldon, and on and on).

Aside from that, novels, like everything else in the world, have value. Time it right, and you can win it all with sharks, a boy wizard, a noble adolescent girl, or the decoding of a religious mystery.

But too early or late, too similar or different, and the market isn’t there. Neither are the readers. This makes second-guessing pointless.  If you could predict the market, you could publish not only your own novel but everyone else’s. Since you can’t, and since a novel is a lot of work, write because you love the work—not because you hope to love the result of all that work.

Keep your day job. Then assess credits and debits in your fiction.

Like any other account, put in more, and you can take out more. It’s just that this particular economy runs on details, ideas, and words used to capture them.

Of course readers disagree about credits or debits. Genre and voice play a huge role. Yet certain fictional elements consistently tend toward + or – .

Debits!

• Backstory. If it already happened, it’s slowing things down.
• Setting. Unless it’s new and vibrant, it often competes with plot.
• Speaker attribution. We have to know who’s talking, but “said” is no more invisible than any other word.
• Psychological analysis. What the characters think and why—can flirt with “telling.”
• Stereotypes. Been there, done that.
• Explanation. Readers need context. But we don’t always love what we need.

Credits!

• Tension. It’s often the way to balance any item from the list above.
• Characters. They make fiction fiction.
• Clues. Engage readers in discovering what you tantalizingly hint.
• Sex/romance. You already know why it belongs on this list.
• Archetypes. Allusion adds depth and richness. It gives novels heft.
• Electricity. This could be plot, characterization, scenario, voice, or all of them.

Most novelists have an ulterior motive, like roaming with dinosaurs, uncovering racism, celebrating Impressionism, making music, or condemning war. Want readers to follow wherever you want to go? Stuff the vault with scenario, plot, voice, imagery, and characterization .

Tip: Use your novel’s assets to balance whatever you want to express.

When to “Tell”

The answer isn’t “never.” Whether to “show” or “tell” is situation-specific. Although definitions of “telling” are vague and varied, many novelists still fear this “writing crime.” Yet view “telling” as frustrating your readers, and you can differentiate “bad telling” from “good.” After all, “telling” makes up half the word for sharing a story.

Storytelling unites “showing” and “telling.” Readers want the juicy parts in scene—without commentary from the narrator. As Anton Chekhov put it, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” So in certain instances you really shouldn’t “tell”:

~ Judgments.

Rather than “telling” readers that the dog is “ugly,” describe the skinny, flea-covered mongrel that’s lost most of his hair. Let readers decide what’s “ugly.”

~ Belaboring what’s obvious or repeating what you already “showed.”

            Is the character panting? Don’t add that she’s also “breathing heavily.”

~ Summarizing the fun parts.

If we’ve waited for three hundred pages to see if they’ll go to bed, please don’t say, “She turned off the light, and they both had the time of their lives.” “Show” us their pleasure with a voyeuristic but tasteful peek inside the bedroom.

~ Oversimplifying emotions.

Avoid abstractions like “angry,” “sad,” or “ecstatic.” Use body language. Use metaphor. Reflect the complex, inconsistent, and fleeting nature of feelings.

But in other instances, readers want “good telling”:

* For worldbuilding.

Whether fantasy, sci fi, or bankrupt Detroit, describe the setting where the action occurs. Sometimes it takes too many words to imply a social structure, moral code, time period, or atmosphere. If so, just explain.

* For transition

Svelte, sophistication transitions are simply lovely. But every so often you need to be clear and causal. Because readers need to understand.

* For voice.

Terror of “telling” would eliminate sentences like this one:  “Her correspondence had been like the pumping of a heart into a severed artery, wild and incessant at first, then slowing down with a kind of muscular reluctance to a stream that became a trickle and finally ceased; the heart had stopped.” -- Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Tip: Storytelling boils down to knowing when to “show” and “when” to “tell.”

How else can you deliver the whole story at the fastest pace with the most fun possible?

Hurry Up Already

A bit like Einstein’s iconic train, the way time unspools in fiction is relative. Just as in real life, glorious moments seem to last forty-five seconds, while the wait for news of surgery seems to last forty-five hours. Pace comes from efficient writing, sentence length and structure, and the one great detail that replaces four very good ones.

But you can’t control reader expectation and appetite. You can only strive to satisfy, and that won’t happen unless you consider who your readers are.

• Do your readers crave mostly self-explanatory action?
• Do your readers crave a thrilling new mystery or secret every couple of pages?
• Do your readers crave sentence variety?
• Do your readers crave facts and analysis?
• Do your readers crave beauty and economy of language?

 Tip: Pace is a combination of what you write and how readers respond to it.

What affects reader response?

~ In a witty or lyrical voice, readers might welcome a long passage of history, such as

   one might find in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.

~ At a crucial moment, readers might welcome a stretch of backstory, resembling what

   Phillipa Gregory executes in The Constant Princess.

~ At a life juncture, readers might welcome the psychological analysis that motivates

   Richard Russo’s characters in That Old Cape Magic.

You can and should think about your audience. But you can’t know exactly what readers think unless you could ask them. Happily, some truths about pacing pertain to almost all fiction. Avoid the following unless you include them intentionally.

Don’t:

State the obvious.

Double verbs, as in “Ellen lowered her eyes and fluttered her eyelashes.”

Bury action in logistical details.

Maintain the same pace all the time.

Disregard the “tension on every page” axiom.

Repeat words, details, or information that the reader’s already seen.

Use passive sentences when active ones work better.

Bury momentum in awkward constructions.

Ignore parallelism.

Pace protects the passion in fiction.

Voice: Vocal Cords and Chords

While vocal cords don’t literally deliver voice in fiction, they do symbolize the mechanism that lets what’s inside strike a chord with reader needs, beliefs, and expectations.

Chords—three or more harmonious notes heard as one—can impart pleasing complexity. Writers who can alternate between funny, poetic, and insightful often entertain more than those who only offer one thing.  A wide range adds complexity, as does leaving plenty of room for reader chords: for what their inference and imagination can add.

No finite boundary exists between your voice and what readers absorb, because no one approaches a novel without expectations and preconceptions.  This is so subtle that you can lose sight of the reader while writing.

Novels aren’t just author, narrator, characters. Readers participate, because each of them differs in optimism, vocabulary, tolerance for ambiguity, fondness for digression, loathing of short or long sentences, and so on. In Every Day, David Levithan reminds us that “The sound of the words as they’re said is always different from the sound they make when they’re heard, because the speaker hears some of the sound from the inside.”

Of course you need your gut to tell you what matters. But that’s not the whole story. Unless you’re journaling, your concern with reader response matters at least as much.

Tip: “Who Are You Writing For?” isn’t the main question. It’s the only one.

You can focus more on your readers by reading aloud or considering these questions:

~ Does a fondness for tautness or rhythm interfere with the accessibility of the prose?

Making syntax more important than the reader is self-indulgent.

~ Do you use the concept of “voice” to rationalize long-winded or awkward passages?

Making syntax more important than the reader is self-indulgent.

~ Do you provide the details that readers need—when they need them?

            Readers want details to serve the story rather than the author.

~ Do you use your fiction primarily to instruct or persuade?

            Learning along the way is great, but readers choose novels for pleasure.

~ Do you use your own emotions to deepen those of your characters or to grind axes?

            Writing fiction can be therapeutic, but that’s not its main purpose.

W.H. Auden put it really well: “All I have is a voice.” Indeed. But that voice is not only for self-expression but for reaching, touching, and perhaps transforming others. After all, as Zora Neale Hurston put it, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” Unless your readers “hear” you, that’s a lot like silence.

Taming and Training Your Voice

That’s already a contradiction. If your voice sounds caged or restrained or even as if you worked on it, it’s not working. So how can you train your voice?

You can’t proceed the way you’d attack plot or metaphor or an unfortunate addiction to adjectives. Still, you can get out of your own way, giving your voice every opportunity to come out and flash something appealing. Because voice is a bit wild—and should stay that way. But wild can also mean running amuck, and you don’t want that, either.

Here’s a start on taming and training.

1. Think about your audience—and only your audience. Nothing else.

Contrary as it may seem, the more you think about anything related to ego or how good or bad you sound or the effect you want to achieve or how many books you will (or won’t!) sell, then the more you damage your voice. Be yourself. Let yourself sound like yourself. That’s how your readers get the real thing. You can always polish. But you can’t polish what isn’t worth polishing because it isn’t real.

2. Ignore the superficial, obvious, or clichéd. What do only you see? Know? Value?

This necessitates risk. But gems are rarely scattered on the surface. They’re down deep. That’s what you—only you—can say, so you’ll have just the right words for it. The poet Muriel Rukeyser calls it “Going diving.” She’s talking about poetry, of course, but for any writer, “If you dive deep enough and have favorable winds or whatever is under the water, you come to a place where experience can be shared, and somehow there is somewhere in oneself that shares.”

3. Embrace tradition, then transcend it. Revere, but without losing individuality.

Use everything you’ve read and discovered to identify your place among your literary predecessors. Not so you can imitate them, of course, but so you can perfect the voice you developed because the authors before you made you who you are—a blend of yourself and those who made you yourself.

Where would Claire Messud be without Ralph Ellison and Charlotte Bronte, or Chad Harbach without Merman Melville, or Alice Hoffman without Emily Bronte? And that’s just the short list.

Obviously, these folks can generate their own scenarios or voices. Yet neither ideas nor the words for them spring out fully formed, like Aphrodite on the sea. Even Aphrodite came from somewhere, as do our thoughts and expression of them, which reflects both idiosyncrasy and tradition. As Cormac McCarthy put it, “The ugly fact is, books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.”

Tip: A great voice reflects the canon preceding it while striking a chord that resonates with both past and future, with both who we are and the forces—and voices—that created who we are. 

"Anansi Boys": Taking Risks Because You Have a Parachute Handy

Risk creates gorgeous prose, thrilling scenarios, and memorable characters. But risk without a means of protection is merely self-destructive. Neil Gaiman’s great talent is taking wild leaps, yet always landing safely. 

The character Fat Charlie Nancy has endless troubles: his father, brother, job, fiancé, and future mother-in-law. It’s partly his fault, but mostly not. His troubles take place in a world both magical and realistic, both sensuous and scary. How many writers humanely combine mystery with wit, folklore with justice, creepy bad guys with music, mythology, and the essence of family, evil, storytelling, and silliness? It’s all here.

How’d he do it? What parachutes does he use?

~ Create a narrator who’ll let you say what you want to. It’s all about voice.

    “Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead.”

~ Invigorate familiar metaphors. This can surpass creating brand-new ones.

    “Daisy looked up at him with the kind of expression that Jesus might have given someone who had just explained that he was probably allergic to bread and fishes, so could He possibly do him a quick chicken salad: there was pity in that expression, along with almost infinite compassion.”

~ Create character with dialogue. Spider and Charlie each sound unique.

    “The ties of blood,” said Spider, “are stronger than water.”

“Water’s not strong,” objected Fat Charlie.

“Stronger than vodka, then. Or volcanoes. Or, or ammonia.”

~ Characterize quickly and concisely. Go for the sentence that speaks volumes.

    “Ahh,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy. She could disapprove with just that one syllable.

~ Stay in voice when you shift time or offer transitions. Don’t freeze up.

    “Like all sentient beings, Fat Charlie had a weirdness quotient. For some days the needle had been over in the red, occasionally banging jerkily against the pin. Now the meter broke.”

~ Go a little wild. Just know where your parachutes are.

    “There was something about being in the vicinity of Grahame Coats that always made Fat Charlie (a) speak in clichés and (b) begin to daydream about huge black helicopters first opening fire upon, then dropping buckets of flaming napalm onto the offices of the Grahame Coats agency. Fat Charlie would not be in the office in those daydreams…”

Tip: Find your own parachute and take your own leaps. You can’t pull back from what you never wrote.

Passive Voice and the Novelist’s Voice

Novel readers don’t ask for much: A powerful plot. Compelling characters. A voice you could listen to forever.

What don’t novel readers ask for? A novel where there is a plot based on decisions that should be made by characters who are being described by a narrator resulting in a voice that is passive. There is (good construction to avoid) no justification for that!

Novelists rarely incite that much irritation. But the sentence does illustrate the connection between passive voice—and no voice. In “The Pleasures and Perils of the Passive,” Constance Hale identifies both kinds of voice: “Most (though not all) verbs have a property known as ‘voice,’ which can be either active or passive. The voice of a verb is different from both the common notion of voice (the timbre produced by a person’s vocal cords) and the literary notion (the ineffable way the writer’s words work on the page).”

Stephen King delivers this warning in “Why and How to Avoid Passive Voice”:  “You should avoid the passive voice. I’m not the only one who says so; you can find the same advice in ‘The Elements of Style’.  Messrs. Strunk and White don't speculate as to why so many writers are attracted to passive verbs, but I'm willing to; I think timid writers like them for the same reason timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe.”

Safe or not, the passive voice is wordy, cumbersome, and unintentionally comic: “The ball was hit by the girl.” Will that release your voice? Seriously?

To find your voice, you must first counteract insecurity and self-consciousness, then enchant through syntax, music, diction, rhythm, figurative language, and on and on. Why add an awkward, usually displeasing construction that makes all that harder?  Because exceptions exist (though preferably not expressed as “There are exceptions”).

~ Would a sentence become unclear or ungainly if you traded subject for object?

The Emperor was attacked by an enraged people, starving and humiliated, whom he’d recently enslaved in a victory that generated, song, poem, statue and—revolution.

~ Do you intentionally seek distance? Ambiguity? A certain tone or rhythm?

There are truths few humans can endure, truths awaiting someone to voice them.

How to choose when to give in and use passive voice?

Tip: Imagine that each passive sentence costs $50,000. Then spend your cash wisely.

After all, W.H. Auden proclaimed, “All I have is a voice.” And that’s all anyone has.

Revision and the “Real” Questions

Novelists often face the question, “How’s your writing going?” It often feels like the subtext is “How long will it take to finish/seek an agent/make money/prove your worth/quit fiddling around?” So however sincere, the query frequently disheartens. But perhaps it disheartens less than the questions writers ask ourselves.

As you revise, do you “object” when your own questions “lead the witness”? Maybe you should. Sometimes these pseudo-questions arrive in the form of rationalization. “Isn’t this passage pretty much good enough?” or “Surely tension on every page is an exaggeration?”

Then there are the attacks, either direct or insidious. “What makes you think you’re a writer?” “Do you seriously believe you’ll ever publish?” And finally, “Why bother?”

These mimic questions, but they’re really not. The real questions are ones where you don’t know the answers in advance: a genuine question seeks new information. Fake questions demoralize. Worse, they impede asking—and answering—the real ones.

Without the right questions, how can you work on the right things? Serious novelists face two crucial questions: “Who is my audience?” and “How can I read my words as if someone else wrote them?”

The question of audience has a subset of questions beneath it. These can get you started:

~ Is this audience most entranced by plot? Voice? Originality? Romance? Insight?

~ How much inference would your audience prefer?

~ What can you glean from technique in novels intended for a similar audience?

~ Do you push the edge of the conventions and expectations for this genre?

~ Are you at peace with whether this audience makes your book hard or easy to sell?

Questions can also help you trick yourself into reading your words as a stranger would.  Try some of these:

~ Do you offer enough drama to advance the plot—on every page?

~ Do you have a reasonable amount of dialogue, and does it all contribute?

~ Do you add fact, detail, or politics for their own sake rather than the story’s?

~ Do you “tell” what you could “show”?

~ Do you try to “show” what you’re better off just explaining?

~ Do you rationalize about how good the sentence, paragraph, or scene really is?

~ Do you waste energy defending what you did instead of trying to do it better?

Marge Piercy said that “The real writer is one who really writes.” It’s equally true that the real writer is one who grapples with what’s really at stake—within the plot and outside it.

Tip: Want real results? Ask real questions.

Fiction and Figure Skating?

Perhaps. Unrelated as these seem, they’re alike in capacity to achieve excellence via more than one path. Skaters can rack up points for athleticism or artistry, while writers can magnetize readers with suspense, aesthetics, or other gifts.

If your aesthetics are glorious enough, you might get to compete in the Olympics even if other guys jump higher, quicker, more often, and with additional rotations. Put another way, you can make a few mistakes in an ambitious program or execute a less ambitious program with near-perfect exquisiteness. As a writer, you can have an ambitious scenario that leaves some room for weaknesses, or something simpler that you deliver perfectly.

Tip: If you’re great enough at one thing, you might not have to be great at everything.

This doesn’t mean that you should disregard your weaknesses (c’mon, you know what they are). Nor is it permission rationalize about those few painfully clumsy sentences or pages painfully free of tension (at least on the characters’ part).

It does mean that assessing your strengths and weakness will take you far—maybe all the way to the “gold,” whether skating or writing.

~ Say you want to start with your strengths. You’ll need detailed description. Picture the person who most loves your writing. If that’s not you, it might be your writing partner, mentor, spouse, or friend. From the perspective of this admirer, compose a short blurb raving about attributes. Don’t hold back! Such an original, charming, yet authentic voice. Such mastery of the long, flowing, embedded sentence. Such understanding of human psychology—not only of motivation but secrets, desires, and impetus for change.

~ Want to start with your weaknesses? A list will do; many writers excel at despising weaknesses rather than extolling strengths. Admit what you don’t like: parts of the plot are contrived; you start lots of scenes the same way; the dialogue goes on too long, or appreciating and adoring those present participles can prove annoying and maddening. Make a column of weaknesses. Match each one with an asset. You don’t get to quit until the number of strengths equals the number of tiny or terrible troubles. Play fair.

Writing is hard. On rough days some might compare it to Olympic competition. To keep going, you have to believe in yourself and your words. Being perfect is harder still. Isn’t it fabulous to know that you needn’t be perfect or excel at every single thing?  There’s more than one way to excellence. Athleticism or artistry—your choice.

The Identity of Story

How much can you change a story and have it be its genuine self? Classics like “The Great Gatsby” endure numerous iterations, emphasizing certain variables and eliminating or altering others. This latest Leonardo DiCaprio version preserves many of the most famous lines and states the original themes so blatantly that F. Scott would drink himself to death even faster if he had to hear these lines.

But, aside from the disparities between film and fiction, is this still Fitzgerald’s story? Nick Carraway has become someone else—a fiction of screenwriter imagination. And because every narrator impacts story so powerfully, the transformation of Nick changes everything.

His most famous lines come near the novel’s opening: “Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.” Fitzgerald assures us that this is a reliable narrator, an antidote to “careless” Tom, Daisy, Jordan, and even Gatsby. Nick’s the human embodiment of the eyes that oversee a landscape of shame. In the film, though, Nick becomes voyeur rather than conscience, less an outsider than someone intent on sampling insider privileges.

The end of the film resurrects Fitzgerald’s vision, as a morose Nick muses that no matter how much we hurl ourselves forward, we remain doomed to endless retreat. This ending resurrects the original, suggesting what gives story identity.

It’s not character names. It’s not quite plot. No. Readers sense story identity through three avenues:

Point of view.

~ Your narrator is your reader’s window into your story. This controls what readers see, how remote that feels, and whether the view is pristine or occluded. Nick Carraway is a very particular window into the worlds of Gatsby and the Buchanans. Does your narrator succeed in emphasizing or concealing what you intend?

~ Voice.

Storytellers bewitch via authenticity combined with charm, humor, or majesty. But a genuine personality that’s long-winded, passive, and effete bewitches no one. Is your voice not just unique but one that readers want to hear long after the story ends?

~ Theme.

Plot is only a vehicle for delivering vision, and you can’t reduce any theme worth its weight in plot to a platitude. Do your themes embody a vision that’s yours alone?

Tip: Love and respect your story enough to protect its inherent integrity.

Vision and Voice

These two words have a tighter connection than just appealing alliteration. Here’s the thing: If you really know exactly what you want to say, you’ll have exactly the words to say it. Unsure? Any or all of the following might undermine that passage:

·         Cliché

·         “Telling”

·         Ungainly sentences

·         Imprecise language

·         Mixed metaphor

·         Repetition of words or ideas  

Happily, there’s no need to glare at your laptop, fearing that you’re stuck with this tenth-rate paragraph because the concept’s a bit woozy. Revision can rescue the words, the sentences, and the incomplete picture they never quite articulate.

These strategies help you contemplate your laptop neutrally, if not downright cheerfully.

v  Brainstorm a bit.

Jot down crazy possibilities for how to develop this moment. Something on your list might not be crazy at
all. You only need one “something.”

v  Shake things up.

Maybe you can’t write the scene because it doesn’t interest you. Turn it inside out to eliminate the

predictability problem.

v  Use the concrete world.

 “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams said. He was right.

v  Eliminate something.

 The constraint of substituting for a missing character or scene or device can force an explosion of

 creativity.

v  Develop a minor character.

 “Less is usually more,” but not always, especially if a minor character resonates with either the antagonist
 or protagonist.

v  Introduce a new source of tension.

 Cornered characters are always more fun to follow, not to mention more fun for novelists to write.

v  Revise.

 Continue methodically reworking the passage until it gets clear. But revisit it, rather than staring and
staring, hoping for a solution. Remarkable how clarity generates exactly the right words.

High school teachers, including yours truly, sometimes assign separate grades for “content” and “presentation.” Here’s a secret: these supposed opposites more closely resemble a circle than divisive components.

Tip: Vision enhances voice, which enhances vision. Circles are beautiful things.

Not at All yet Completely New

At a Mount Holyoke College commencement speech, Pulitzer Prize winner Anna Quindlen warned that “Every story has already been told. Once you’ve read ‘Anna Karenina,’ ‘Bleak House,’ ‘The Sound and the Fury,’ ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and ‘A Wrinkle in Time,’ you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel.” Now that’s discouraging! But then she added this: “Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.”

How true. And it isn’t just that each writer has an individual voice. Unless that voice captivates—and instantly—then we’ve heard it before, and it’s yesterday’s news.

Writing about death, dragons, and denial? Nothing new there. But watch what D. L. Burnett does in this passage from “In the Kingdom of the Dragons”:

“Death wasn’t as easy as Gaspotine the Dark expected. He tried denying it, choosing to believe this a fever-induced nightmare. Or perhaps he’d stayed in the Continuum too long and exhausted his flesh. Shortly he’d return to his Cavern of Diamonds, strong and virile.

The Niede, a primordial instinct like hunger and thirst but ninety-three times worse, demanded his spirit rejoin his body. He tried again and again until he’d lost half his mist.

He must really be dead.

Gaspotine thrashed his tail. The tip flew off. Shocked, he froze. These deteriorations had never happened before. But then he’d never died before, either.

Code decreed another Dragon must devour his remains, easing his spirit’s permanent transition into the Continuum, preventing him from returning to dead flesh. Tallasha the Resplendent had done that, but without diminishing the Niede.

Dragons shouldn’t die, especially the greatest current rider, Gaspotine the Dark.”

By creating a new world for us, Burnett offers insight into our own world. Imagine a Continuum where we survive after we’ve died, where we can ride silver waves and see the future. Imagine the lifeless body struggling to merge with the surviving spirit. Imagine feeling yourself too powerful—too special—for death to claim?

These are a dragon’s feelings. But how many humans have experienced them? More than empathy entices here (and empathy for dragons is pretty special): It’s the voice. Snappy sentences set off long ones; strong verbs like “thrashed,” “flew,” “froze,” and “devour” propel this forward.

The other strength here is harnessing the external to convey feelings. This wouldn’t work if Gaspotine whined about weakness, frustration, and anger. Instead, Burnett supplies the concreteness of “fever,” “Diamonds,” “hunger,” “thirst,” and the specificity of “ninety-three.” Those images lay a foundation for the shocking cannibalism of the Code and grip of “the Niede.” Burnett’s voice creates this new world—and our empathy for this tormented dragon.

Tip: It’s not necessarily your job to offer something “new.” It’s your job to use your voice to make whatever you describe feel completely new.