‘An ability with
words is nice, but it's not a voice.’
Meg Rosoff (2011)
Back in early
December I posted on ‘Writing and the Lost Art of Patience’: the need to pause
between finishing one project and taking the time to discover the next one. At
the end of November, I had begun working on a new fiction novel – a Young Adult
fantasy. I knew this would be quite different to my first two novels, The Glimpse Duet, written in the third person with one main point of view and several
alternating points of view. Not only was I entering the domain of fantasy
rather than dystopia, I was also writing in first person for the first time,
and felt quite conscious of the impact this could have on the voice and style
of the work.
About a hundred and twenty pages into this first draft I had an
epiphany about some of the attitudes and feel of my main character and I
started from scratch again with a strong sense of ‘capturing’ a unique and
specific ‘voice’, which wove like a thread into the atmosphere of the work and
story world. I began redrafting, with the uplifting sense that I was making a
personal breakthrough. But by around the hundred and twenty page mark, I began
floundering. Again! My
level of interest dropped off, the shiny feel of something new and special had
slipped away and I was in throws of doubt with a lurking sense that something
was wrong with my story.
Around this time, I attended a SCBWI writer’s
conference. During workshops on pitching, I found myself struggling to write a
dazzling pitch for my YA fantasy. Or more honestly, anything remotely good at
all. Summing it up in a line or a paragraph seemed almost impossible. To work
within the frame of what we were being asked to do, I began altering the basic
story structure to come up with a simpler concept, resulting in another light-bulb moment. Followed by
panic.
I’d been grappling with aspects of my fantasy story that weren’t working
but I was also reluctant to let go of all my previous hard work. Inspired (and
scared) I allowed myself one week to start over and pursue the new idea. I wrote furiously to get as much down as I could,
desperate to see if it could really stand up to the long haul, or if it would frazzle and splutter out
like previous efforts. Now, less than two months later, I’m sitting with an
80,000 word draft and I’m almost finished. After months of writing and throwing
away hundreds of pages, I have a first draft! (*throws confetti*) And I’ve
never written so fast in my life.
But
what does this have to do with voice?
Your 'voice'
lies somewhere between your conscious and subconscious mind. Finding that place
is a challenging exercise in self-confrontation.
Over the years, as I’ve written and thrown
away hundred of thousands of words, I’ve often wondered about the way so many
authors advocate scribbling down a first draft as fast as possible, with little
prior plotting. It’s an approach that, from experience, I know can run you hard
and fast into walls. But I also think it’s a powerful way of reaching that
strange and wonderful place where the story seems to flow out of nowhere, where
the writer hovers between thinking and feeling, the rational and emotional, the
conscious and subconscious. There’s nothing more magical than running after a
story, trying to keep up with it, rather than pulling it along behind you.
Writing like this gives your characters the freedom to take you to unexpected
places, to tell the story their way, to tap into something that isn’t logical
but lies beyond analytical or rational thinking.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I don’t believe voice is something you
can ‘learn’ like plotting or syntax. It’s something you find through the
journey of writing to discover the story only you can tell in the way that only
you can tell it. It’s a culmination of how your characters live through and
learn from their experiences, how they perceive the world, how they act and
react, how they think and speak, and how your own sensibilities and deepest
experiences ripple beneath the pages to create themes and subtext that
sometimes as the author, you’re not even fully conscious you’re doing.
In life, finding a
voice is speaking and living the truth. Each of you is an original. Each of you
has a distinctive voice. When you find it, your story will be told. You will be
heard ~ John Grisham
So if you're looking for your voice as a writer, my advice is to take risks, write what excites you, what
sets your pulse racing, what scares or obsesses you, what you’re grappling with
or haunted by. Write and write and write, and somewhere along the line, you
won’t have to find your voice, your voice will find you.
Photos from the March 2013 SCBWI Paris conference.
