Category: Voice

Point of view, dialogue, tone, character internals, and so on.

Sing Like No One’s Listening

r-avatarAn author needs a brand. (No, not social media or “platform.” That’s how you promote the brand; it’s not the brand itself.) This is about the work, about craft. And by brand, we mean more than genre + style, although that’s how a lot of your fans will sum it up — “Oh I love her stuff, it’s edgy scifi with this bleak sense of humor.” That’s not your brand. Neither are your characters, or your Big Ideas, or intricate plots, or deep themes. They’re elements of brand, but it’s more than the sum of those parts.

Your brand is your voice.

Cultivate your voice. Do it your way. Revision is a chance to make your voice more yours with every editing pass. Take out that stuff that doesn’t sound like you, and replace it with stuff that does. Own it.

Weigh all critique input against your voice. Your critiquers’ suggestions might be biased toward their own voices, unconsciously. They won’t set out to sabotage your voice; you need to keep an open mind. But, sometimes the “corrections” are actually mistakes. When you feel like someone really isn’t getting it, you’ll be tempted to try to appease them. Soon you’re trying to compromise with each reader, removing the impediments to their appreciation of your work. Don’t. When they don’t get what you’re doing, that’s a sign that you need to do it more, do it harder — do it so hard there’s no doubt you’re doing it on purpose. You’ll know you’re on track when instead of comments trying to “help” you with how you use language, you start getting comments about how your language makes them feel (good and bad).

Writing isn’t about serving up some mythical concoction that appeals to everybody. It’s about creating something meaningful for some, and that means it will be repellent to some. But it will find its audience and they will be passionate for it. That’s your tribe, and even if it’s small they’re your people. They’re the ones who are called by your voice.

Like Music To Your Ears

r-avatarFunny thing about writing a story that contains a lot of music: sometimes that means you can’t have any music playing while you’re writing it. The right background music can be very helpful, might even be inspiring, but there’s also a potential for the music in the writing cave to clash with the music in the writing. Another danger is that whatever you happen to have on while working on a scene will influence the flavor or even the outcome of that passage.

In the music novel, and now in son-of-same, the goal is to put awesome music in readers’ heads. The conceit is that the band in the story is awesome, that they’re every reader’s favorite band, which, if you’ve ever talked about music with anyone, you can see would be impossible. So comparing the story’s music to any specific real-world bands is off the table. It would backfire at least as often as it worked, no matter which paragons of rock and roll we used as comps.

So, how then to put the magic music in anybody’s head? We use two techniques in combination (in harmony, one might say).

The first and most important thing is to lavish description on the feeling that the music creates, rather than just on the music itself. The proper device for this is the specific feels of a specific character. Showing the sadness Jackie feels when she hears the song is infinitely stronger than saying that it’s a sad song.

The second thing is, when describing the music itself, use metaphor and poetic license. Get across the energy of the sound. Try to describe it without naming any instruments, without using any musical jargon. Pretend you have no knowledge of how that torrent of sonic mayhem was created, you just know it’s a fire-breathing lizard dancing through a forest of giant mushrooms.

Advance readers of the music novel have universally said they want the albums, want to go to the concerts, despite the fact that their personal tastes are wildly different. Sounds like success to us!

Less-Than-Perfect Telepathy

r-avatarWell, that was no fun. (But we’re feeling much better, now.)

For the new book, we’ve bestowed an odd trait on some of the characters, something that alters their subjective take on the world. As we’ve been mentioning a lot of late, the current priority is getting our ear in for the new cast. We want all the characters’ experiences to shine, but it’s crucial that this one odd trait be vivid, and that it be portrayed consistently. It’s a key piece of pseudoscience and needs to mesh with the flavor of the other speculative elements in the story world. We’re mad planners, and we like to know going in that all the edges are going to line up.

So after several conversations, and a few hours of image searches and other web research, we agreed on the basic parameters. A handful of provisional scenes were already in the can, but for a lack of that odd subjective flavor that we had just defined, so Kent went about retrofitting it.

Turned out that our agreement about the parameters was a bit of a mirage. Kent’s take went way out of bounds compared to what Jen had in mind. Of course, Kent had his reasons for doing things that way, and thought at the time that it was exactly what had been established.

This led to the conversations with no fun in them. It’s uncomfortable to be in disagreement over something you’re really invested in, and Jen and Kent don’t get a lot of practice disagreeing. (We like it that way, but it makes for extra friction when things do go south.) Both partners must seek what’s best for the fiction, and not give in for the sake of harmony. That would be false compromise, which not only hurts the quality of the writing but it also weakens the partnership over time. It’ll make you want to keep score, and you can’t keep score. You can’t carry baggage. You need to find the better answer, the thing that makes you both happy.

Which is what we did. Jen shifted to a different metaphor to articulate what she hoped to see on the page, and suddenly the vision clicked in Kent’s mind. We knew we couldn’t really say “That’s it!” until at least one scene existed incorporating the new idea, so Kent got right to work. Success!

What Color Is The Sky

r-avatarBy now, we have a fairly good handle on the background info, physical attributes, and overall personalities of all the major characters for the new novel. Jen has tracked down reference photos and filled in all the details on the character sheets. But there’s a big difference between knowing all about someone, and really knowing them.

We make use of multiple points of view in our novels, usually switching at chapter breaks and sometimes within a chapter as well. It’s third-person, but not omniscient. This goes well beyond just limiting the facts to those that the POV character could know and not letting any subjective details from the rest of the cast slip through. It’s important that each scene really convey what the world is like for that character. Being able to do that requires that we know them intimately, that they become real to us. And getting to know a bunch of people that well takes some time.

On this project, we’re making a conscious effort to mold our process around what we’ve learned on a few previous books. We really want to have the voices dialed in right from the beginning, because it sucks when you have a hundred pages of great material that’s riddled with a subtle, pervasive flaw. So we’re trying to avoid our past mistakes, like the time our readers didn’t feel connected to our protagonist (whom we absolutely loved and couldn’t get why anybody else could feel otherwise — we had neglected to put her feelings on the page) or the time we went back to the opening scene and discovered that that protagonist was behaving “out of character” (we got to know her properly only after the first part was written).

That’s not to say we had no successes, far from it. A particularly good move, which arose organically and then we recognized and formalized it, is the way we tend to divvy up scenes based on their viewpoints. This allows us to deepen our connections to certain characters, and also lets us each play to our strengths by adopting the characters that resonate with us more. There’s no rule that says “that’s a Kent character; Jen can’t write it,” and by the time we’re done there’s typically quite a bit of overlap, but as a guideline it works very well.

A few vignettes have been crafted for Son of Music Novel, things which might or might not get incorporated into the manuscript. Kent’s next project, now that there’s a bit of raw material and now that some psychoanalysis of the cast has been done, is to revise those maybe-apocryphal scenes so their POV characters’ personalities saturate them. This exercise will give us the benchmark for how the “real” scenes should feel once we begin composing the novel per se. We take a holistic view of getting the voices right. It spans all levels, from mechanicals to vocabulary to reasoning styles and even sensory inputs that are unique to each character. It’s a lot of up-front effort, but it will put us ahead of the game later on.

50 Shades of Bad Advice

r-avatarWe’ve been enjoying Jenny Trout’s 50 Shades recaps: all of the shadenfreude and none of the actual slogging through those books. (Thanks, Jenny!) And in the course of those recaps, something that’s always seemed frustratingly opaque has now started to make a lot more sense. While bad advice certainly begets bad writing, bad writing in turn begets bad advice.

The 50 Shades books are written in first person, present tense. And, they’re poor examples of craft. Correlation is not causation, but it’s painfully clear that in this case an inexperienced author got in over her head with the constraints of that mode. We look upon this and see that if someone had just told her not to do it like that, some of the problems could have been avoided.

Some of them, probably. But wouldn’t the world be a better place if, instead of blanket prohibitions, our newbie writers had guidance about how much additional work they give themselves when they choose a first-person viewpoint? (And how to tell if their particular first-person narrator is sufficiently compelling to carry an entire book.) How the use of present tense impacts plot development?

With writers so vastly outnumbering editors, we really need to up our game. We need to see the cause-and-effect of bad advice accurately and break the cycle. Telling novices, “Yeah, don’t do that,” isn’t helping them.

You Think Italicized? You Should See the Other Guy!

r-avatarIt’s easy to decide when to put speech in quotation marks. For us, it’s much less obvious when to put characters’ thoughts in italics. You’re probably saying right now, “Direct thoughts go in italics, and indirect thoughts don’t.” Duh.

Helpful as that is (and here’s a great writeup on the direct/indirect thing), it still leaves Rune Skelley at loose ends. One of the telltales for direct thought is viewpoint. We write in a very tight third-person, deliberately blurring the distinction between the POV character and the narrator. With that line blurred, we have a judgement call about when something should get italicized.

If that sounds like it’s a problem of our own creation, that’s only because it is. We do it on purpose, and we do it to ourselves. And before you ask, it’s not that we just haven’t realized it should be in first person. We’d typically end up with eight or ten first-person narrators, and that’s not how we roll.

So, okay, you think this is how it needs to be, and it makes the decision hard. Fine, it’s hard. Just make the decision and move on. Well, you’ve just gotten to the heart of the matter. (Thanks!) Making the decision.

This is one way that working with a partner becomes more complicated. A soloist author needs to fret (maybe) about where to draw the in/direct line, and then just go forth and make it happen. Whereas for us, in addition to the fretting, there’s debate and sometimes disagreement. We struggle to agree on where the line should be drawn, and then we struggle over where it actually winds up. Mostly, this problem is Kent’s fault. He admits it (that’s the first step, so maybe he’s not beyond help). He really dislikes the appearance of italicized text, and finds it very distracting. He also wants to point out that, unlike quotation marks, italics are used for multiple things — foreign words, titles, emphasis, excerpted text — all of which come up in Rune Skelley’s fiction often enough to make it an issue. Jen has a far less complicated relationship with oblique letterforms and is a paragon of patience. She just wishes we could settle on a technique and stick to it.

Ya Gotta Start Somewhere

r-avatarNovels #4 and #5 presented us with an unaccustomed obstacle: getting to know a new cast. Over the course of writing and revising the trilogy, we became intimately familiar with the minds and personalities of those characters. We were used to having the characters’ voices be second nature, so the need to readjust took us entirely by surprise.

This is a particular issue for Rune Skelley novels, because we use a very tight third-person viewpoint. Nothing is presented that the POV character doesn’t know, and that character’s worldview informs choices of adjectives and phrasing. The narration adopts the dialect of the viewpoint character.

Beginning the new books was like impersonating a total stranger, at first. It was a dilemma, because to write the scenes we needed to know the characters, and to get to know them we had to spend time with them, i.e., write the scenes. Which brings us to the title of this post. Ya gotta start somewhere.

With Novel #5, the science novel, we started at the beginning, and it wasn’t too long before the new characters became as real to us as the previous cast. Of course, the parts written earliest had the least character voice, but that’s what revision is for. The opening scenes got some retooling to let the POV character, the protagonist, shine through.

Mostly.

There are still a few pockets of “author voice” in the narration. (Kent’s supposed to deal with them tonight, so maybe by the time you read this they’ll be gone.) These mini info-dumps escaped our scrutiny until Jen hit the line edits. They have natural camouflage, because they sound comfortably familiar to us. They sound like Kent.

One of the hardest things for a writer to do is step back far enough to see the work honestly. Beta readers or critiquers are invaluable, but having someone else direct you to the troublesome paragraph is only useful if you can then see the problem, see through its camouflage. Working with a partner helps tremendously, because there’s an extra set of eyes.

Sweating the Small Stuff

r-avatarWes Anderson says details are what the world is made of, and his logic is difficult to dispute. They’re certainly the constituent particles of a story, and also of the manuscript that conveys it. Subtle changes of phrasing have a strong impact on the flavor and fluidity of prose. Little things matter.

Consider:

It was clear that no one else knew the secret.

As opposed to…

It was clear no one else knew the secret.

Or, more to Ernest’s liking:

No one else knew.

Which one is best? The only honest answer to that is the unhelpful “it depends,” but a reliable guideline is to use the fewest words that support the message. Arguably, that something’s clear can go unstated. So, the first two drafts might be burdened with superfluous observation. But the ultra-terse third variant might throw readers for a POV loop because it feels like direct thought. Cultivate a strong sense of the style and voice you’re working in, and pick your cuts accordingly.

When it’s time to stomp the weasels, you’re faced with such choices over and over. Every sentence could potentially be a different sentence. In fact, many alternate selves haunt each one. And these are important choices.

How you tell it is every bit as important as the tale. Stomping weasels with a partner will show you whether you’re in sync about the how of your storytelling. You’ll be lulled into thinking the process is purely mechanical, but certain blatantly extraneous words will be sacrosanct in your partner’s sight. And your partner will blithely suggest trimming your favorite verbiage.

Don’t be too eager to appease each other when these disputes arise. Talk them through, and read the passages aloud. These snags are clues to the nuances of how we each interpret language, and exploring them will help you converge on a voice that truly reflects you both.

Reinventing The Wheel

r-avatarOur process is now firmly established and fairly predictable. But every book is different. And when you forget, they remind you. Just when you think you know what to expect, it’s back to the drawing board.

The later stages of revision, for us, include deweaseling and line editing. Both are fine-grained views of the text, and we’ve discussed the possibility of combining them so we can save ourselves one whole pass through the manuscript. So far, at least, we feel it’s worth the additional time to do it in two passes because they’re really not all that similar, mentally. It’s beneficial to look at every sentence several times, in different lighting.

When we went through this process with the Music Novel we trimmed out a significant percentage of the words. Now, we’re going through it with the Science Novel and finding that those results are inapplicable. There are fewer weasel words in it to begin with, apparently. The line editing is also much more challenging, and it’s leading to more… negotiations than last time.

All authors see changes in their style over time. More practice should mean cleaner, crisper writing at each stage. When two people write together, their combined experience is reflected in the manuscript. What Kent and Jen have found is that they can each now “do the voice” whereas in the early days they had to go over each other’s work to bring it into line. Interesting that this maturation seems to be leading to new difficulties during revision.

Overall, though, it’s a huge win. We might be finding issues in our workflow that weren’t there before, but we’re also getting from concept to completed draft to polished manuscript with much less effort and in far fewer iterations. Working well as a team has a lot to do with that.

Granularity

r-avatarWe completed the read-through on the music novel, and we also took care of all the minor notes we came up with along the way. Now it’s time for everyone’s favorite game: stomp the weasels! The object is to make sure we’re not overusing the words we have learned that we have a tendency to overuse. We have a list of about three dozen(!) words, which are symptomatic of passive voice, wishy-washiness, and general wordiness.

Scrivener, our writing tool of choice, has some very nifty search capabilities that are making us more productive this time around. In the past, we’ve literally color-coded our entire text by doing find/paste, which is as tedious as it sounds. Scrivener saves us that hassle. For example, we can use its regex feature to quickly highlight all the -ly words, and with just a few tweaks to the regular expression we can tell it to omit things like “jelly” or “only”. We love it!

This is an interesting phase of our process, because it’s pretty much the only time when we work off the same monitor. Rather than splitting it up and each of us de-weaseling half of the book, we look at it together and discuss which instances of “that” should be removed. Sometimes it’s not as simple as keep/kill a particular word; sometimes we find whole sentences that can come out or need to be reworded. The level of magnification at this stage is much greater than on the read-through, so it calls our attention to different aspects of the text.

We’re still in the early part of this (very large) manuscript, but so far we’re quite happy to see that we have fewer weasels lurking on each page than with our earlier efforts. On the other hand, we were sort of counting on making a meaningful dent in the word count in the course of culling those weasels, which it seems might not really happen. But it is giving us an even tighter, leaner book. There are fewer weasels, but still too many. Fortunately we have our special boots for this very job.