NOT YOUR USUAL SUSPECTS

A group blog featuring an international array of killer mystery, suspense, and romantic suspense writers. With premises and story lines different from your run-of-the-mill whodunits, we tend to write outside the box. We blog several times a week on all topics relating to romantic suspense and mystery, our writing, and our readers. We welcome all comments and often have guest bloggers. All our authors can be contacted separately, too, using their own social media links.

We find our genre delightfully, dangerously, and deliciously exciting - join us here, if you do too!

NOTE: the blog is currently dormant but please enjoy the posts we're keeping online.


Julie Moffet . Cathy Perkins . Jean Harrington . Daryl Anderson . Nico Rosso . Maureen A Miller . Sandy Parks . Lisa Q Mathews . Sharon Calvin . Lynne Connolly . Janis Patterson . Vanessa Keir . Tonya Kappes . Julie Rowe . Joni M Fisher . Leslie Langtry

Friday, October 5, 2012

Do You Hear Voices?

            We don’t usually have trouble recognizing a gorgeous singing voice.  Operatic tenor, Luciano Pavrotti, for example, or Frank Sinatra with his inimitable bel canto phrasing, or Judy Garland who tore the heart out of us while she reached for her rainbow.
And in fiction when the writing leaps off the page, we often say “I love her/his voice.”  But what does a voice in fiction mean?  After all, writing is silent.  Or is it?
Legendary agent Donald Maass said, and this is a paraphrase, that a writer’s voice is expressed in the personality of his central character.  If you think about this, it makes sense.  Dull character/dull voice.  But if a character is striking, the author’s voice, or style if you will, leaps off the page. 
Rita Henuber in her terrific blog of July 1, “Be a Successful Hooker,” touched on this topic when she wrote--another paraphrase coming up--Whom would you rather read about?  A woman making out her grocery list, or a woman yanking a naked guy out of the shower?  I’m going for the woman and the naked guy.  I’m going for personality.
Of course, creating a compelling voice is easier said than done.  My pet theory is that “voice,” or as Maass claims, a character people want to turn pages for, is the result of Fearless Fiction.  You have to write without worry about Big Brother breathing down your neck and passing judgment on everything your characters say, do and feel.  Despite, in other words, what your potential reviewer, crit partner, agent, editor, or grandmother (God rest her soul) might think.  You simply can’t afford to care.  Not at this developmental stage.
  Take that woman who’s yanking the guy out of the shower; say she changes her mind.  Instead, she stays in there, soaps him down even if the neighbors, metaphorically speaking, are peeking in the window.  She’s a writer of Fearless Fiction who knows the rules, fully understands what is “correct” but is also not intimidated by rules:  One word paragraphs are fine.  Ditto for fragments.  Four letter words too.  The list goes on; the point being that honesty comes before rules or public opinion.
When an author is courageous enough to write without fear of criticism or of being “incorrect,” personality bursts through the words.  Not that the subject matter has to be salacious, or sensational, or apocalyptic, but it has to ring true.  Without the author’s willingness to “let it all hang out,” writing is timid and tends to result in little more than grocery lists.  And what grocery list has a striking voice?  Personally I’d rather watch—and listen--to somebody singing in the shower.

4 comments:

Elise Warner said...

Great blog, Jean. If our characters speak to our readers, the reader will identify will them. Sinatra,Garland and Mercer made the lyric they sang ring true.

Rita said...

Great post Kathy and thanks for the compliment. You’ve done an excellent job of explaining voice. Voice is the reason you can tell 50 authors to write a shower scene and you’ll get 50 different stories. We all have different life experiences causing us to see the story differently

Anne Marie Becker said...

Interesting points about voice, Jean. Sometimes I have to smother my inner critic because she wants to edit the personality out of things (for the sake of making the WIP what other people might want). Thanks for the reminder to be true to myself.

Jean Harrington said...

Rita, I sense a contest in your comment. The first fifty people to write a one page shower scene get a chance to be judged by two fab Carina authors. First place winner gets a free electronic book by both authors; runner up gets one book. You game?

Fifty shower scenes should be fun to read, especially the ones with the dropped bars of soap. Maybe Elise and Anne Marie would judge too. (It's the tail end of a complex week; the strain is showing.)

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