Tag Archive for: Voice

You Make Me Want to be a Better Writer

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by Maria Geraci

There is one thing above all others that makes a writer’s work stand out. It’s not great grammar, or great story structure, or even a unique story line (because let’s face it, pretty much every story has been done before in some form or another).  What makes a writer stand out is voice. Voice is what makes you unique. It’s what sells your books.

I clearly  remember the day that I met my editor (Wendy McCurdy at Berkley) for the first time. It was at the RWA National convention in Washington DC. We had breakfast together and were talking about things in general, and then we began talking about my books. And at some point in the conversation she looked at me and said, “I really love your raunchy voice.” I must have looked a little stunned, because she smiled and said, “I mean that in a good way.”

I’ve thought about that comment a lot (as you can probably imagine.) I write fun, romantic women’s fiction (kind of a cross between chick lit and contemporary romance). The heroine in my first book (Bunco Babes Tell All) meets my hero when he catches her peeing in the bushes. In my second book (Bunco Babes Gone Wild) my heroine accidentally “flashes” my hero, and in my most recent book (The Boyfriend of the Month Club) in the very first opening scene, my heroine chips her tooth trying to open a shrink wrapped tampon. Huh. I think I get what Wendy was saying. Voice is not just about how you word things, it’s your unique look at the world. It’s the author’s “big picture.”

When I stumble across a really great book, one that I can’t put down, it’s usually because of the author’s voice. This always makes me sit up and take notice. I’m not just a reader, I’m also a student and a good book always teaches me something (bad books teach me something as well, but we won’t get into that today.)

I recently finished reading Eleanor Brown’s debut novel The Weird Sisters. The story is about three sisters who reunite in their home town (each with secrets of their own) when their mother is diagnosed with breast cancer. The hook? Their father is a Shakespearan scholar who recites The Bard pretty much every time he opens his mouth. But what makes the book special and memborable is Eleanor Brown’s voice. She creates such a unique world that you can’t help but feel it, smell it, live it. The book is told in first person plural (we) and is absolutely fabulous. I used my Kindle highlighter to note some of the lines that really stood out for me.

Here is just a tiny selection:

See, we love each other. We just don’t like each other very much.

She had gone from most favored nation to useless ally, from Cordelia to Ophelia.

Because despite his money and his looks and all the good-on-paper attributes he possessed, he was not a reader, and well, let’s just say this is the sort of nonsense up with which we will not put.

Can I just say, I really really love that last line? I’ve read it countless times now and each time it makes me smile more. Reading Eleanor Brown makes me want to be a better writer. It makes me want to hone my own voice and sharpen it until it becomes all me, with nothing held back. Just a stick that pokes at my reader’s emotions and makes them laugh or cry or startles them.

CREATING COMPELLING HEROINES II

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There is/was/has been no more insidious word in the English language to insinuate itself on sentences like a parasitic leech than the verb to be, and in particular the word WAS.

Take a moment and picture for me a was in your head; next, define the word was in the manner you might define any action/active verb and you cannot. Picture was now in your mind and tell me what you AREWAS seeing?

Do same for throw/threw/thrown or torch/torched. Jessica bolted from her seat RATHER THAN Jessica was about to maybe stand up as she was sipping her coffee. Meredyth torched up her language whenever Lucas Stonecoat entered her office. The man enraged her. These examples “fire off” mental imagery and are far more photographic and Strong in Voice than is this: Meredyth was (in the process of) thinking about perhaps torching up her language whenever she was confronted by Lucas’s presence in her office. Lucas, by the same token, was nervously thinking about maybe entering the room. If you wish to write Passively go write speeches for politicians and supreme court justices.

AND yes Fred, go to the head of the class. One style or Voice is the point, pointed, photogenic and active, while the second lacks control, hard to determine point, less than pointed or photogenic and entirely passive and riddled with WASes that often beget more Qualifying. A storyteller who peppers his tales with qualifiers and passives cuts his own throat and is easily the example to point to in an exercise for what not to do in fiction and dramatic writing.

However, proof always (always being an absolute) in the proverbial pudding, does Robert W. Walker practice what he preaches? Take a look at these examples taken all from works in progress:

From Psi Blue:

FBI Headquarters Secret Psychic Detection Lab modern day…

Special Agent Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa sat clothed in a virgin white terry robe, in the lotus position, electrodes attached and grounded to the open air copper pipe pyramid, which she’d designed to enhance her psychic projections and astral journeys. A small sterile white mat lie before her, and on the mat lay six items she’d been asked to “read”. The objects held a strange communion with her. She fingered each item, tossing several out of the pyramid, holding onto other items as she went.

From Flesh War:

In the Bay of Bengal, India modern day…

The side-wheeler Bristol Star of India chugged into thick fog that hinted at rich sea air, with just a suggestion of the stench of the disease in the mist over the bay. The disease island must be near, must be in the vicinity. Small, sad death boats, their bottoms filled with corpses had begun to emerge from the fog to drift by the Star’s bow. Angelica Hunter gasped at the sight and grabbed Eric’s arm for support.

From Cuba Blue:

Off the coast of Havana, Cuba modern day…

The coast of Havana’s clear-blue tropical sea heard the mechanical cry of screeching rust-encrusted gears that suddenly slammed to a standstill. Several nautical miles north of Canal del Entrada, Cuba, the whining pulley ratcheted once, then twice with biting and chomping, then stopped again on the dimly-lit shrimp trawler Sanabella II. The unexpected stillness stopped all activity aboard ship and save for the screeching hungry seagulls, the deafening quiet reigned. Wide-eyed, the men, frozen in position, stared first at the choked-off windlass and then at one another afraid to breathe, afraid to hope. Fishing had been wretchedly poor.

From City for Ransom:

Chicago, Illinois, June 1, 1893…3AM

The newly formed and lettered sign tore at its chain moorings where it dangled over the modest brownstone house, the shingle reading Dr. James Phineas Tewes, Phrenological and Magnetic Examiner until a lightning strike hit it, turning it into an unrecognizable charred mess.

Across town to the sound of thunder, lightning, wind, rain, and the clock tolling 5AM, Alastair Ransom climbed from bed, unable to sleep, his skin afire with malarial fever. He dosed himself with a hefty tumbler of quinine and Kentucky whiskey. He imagined strangling Dr. Caine McKinnette for having run out of his supply of quinine and antimony. He breathed in deeply, imagining the pleasure of his hands around the good doctor’s throat. Then once more what really troubled him began invading his night: the awful, bloody murder case that had fallen into his lap the day before.

THESE ARE ALL examples of opening with the verve of strong verbs, the conscious choice of few to no qualifiers, no WASes please! And active voice. Any elementary or high school grammar text is worth revisiting to rekindle these notions into fire in a writer’s gut. It’s the little things that make a female lead compelling. Revisit Passive vs. Active Voice, the handful of pages devoted to Qualifiers vs. Absolutes (voice), and while at it, look up sentence combining for the 4 types of sentences— Simple, Compound, Complex, and Compound Complex. Imagine it, what Shakespeare utilized we all have to work with—shapes already formed, voice choice, to qualify or not to qualify, to BE or not to BE, and whether tis nobler in the mind to use a hammer blow of a two word sentence like Jesus wept, OR rather to compound it, complex it or compound complex it as in the following.

Jesus wept. (pow, zap, bang, zoom! Singe/first base)
Jesus wept, and others watched. (rings different bell in compound set)

In his sixteenth year on the planet, Jesus wept. (complex adds fragmentary)
Jesus, in his sixteenth year on the planet, wept. (introduction or interrupting fragment(ary) and we ring another kind of bell)

Now the homer of a sentence, the big boy: Compound Complex….

In his sixteenth year, Jesus wept, while from afar, others curiously watched.

(intro. Frag) S + V (intro. Frag) S + V

Each choice we make as in each choice ONE makes, as in difference between the chummy we as opposed to the formal one goes into the building blocks of the stone wall we can call our Voice for this story or this novel. Every little choice becomes a major decision, and it is for this reason many people cannot write ‘worth a flip’ because why, Fred?

Yes, a ‘lotta lotta’ people don’t do well in decision-making, and writing is really about making a thousand decisions per sentence, per paragraph, per scene, per chapter. Some stories beg to be told in a formal voice in a particular setting with specific characters, while others demand an informal voice in an entirely different setting with a host of other goals.

Not all your stories need take on the same voice, but within that single story or novel, your ONE consistent is that you be consistent and true to the voice you choose.

This essay has just slipped into the YOU approach, friendly and personalized. In multiple viewpoint novels as I do, each HEAD you speak from, each HEAD you get into and SENSE and SEE from must need have its own internal/infernal logic and consistent mindset or ‘psychology’. In other words: VOICE–the most important element of your story…..especially if you hope to make it uniquely feminine, sir…or uniquely male, madam.

Robert W. Walker

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Robert W. Walker is the author of over forty novels with a record eight series heroes and heroines. His most enduring female lead is Dr. Jessica Coran of the Instinct Series and Meredyth Sanger of the Edge Series. In 2006 City for Ransom began a dual male/female lead with Dr. Jane Tewes who doubles as Dr. James Phineas Tewes in this pre-forensics 1893 Chicago setting. The sequel, Shadows in the White City won the coveted Lovey Award for best historical novel of 2007. City of the Absent followed in 2008.. Coming in 2009 Dead On from Five Star Books

“Write to your opposite” is Walker’s watchword as “this forces you into a worthwhile writing challenge. So set your stories in exotic places you’ve never been with exotic characters you’ve never known.. You’ll surprise yourself.” Robert’s website is chock full with advice and examples. Visit for the fun of it or for the lessons to be had at http://www.robertwwalkerbooks.com/

CREATING COMPELLING HEROINES or Making the Perils of Pauline Routine

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The Voice or one’s female-lead detective or PI in crime fiction–above all elements– must be consistent, just as your choice of words, control of weak qualifiers, control on adverbs and adjectives, down to your grammatical skill all impact on VOICE, the final product, your lead character’s VOICE controls the novel and reassures the reader even as it lulls him or her into “becoming” the leading lady.

The sound of the bell your narration and dialogue rings in the reader’s head must be unique, believable, likeable, even loveable, and if you cannot make it ‘sing’ then at least make it ‘clear’. The difference between confusing readers, andor sounding wishy-washy, or sounding like ‘unto one who is awash in political mish-mash’ (like someone who cannot commit) as opposed to an assured, authentic, absolute voice (like someone who is committed) is in one’s authorial voice. And this compelling voice relies on absolutes over qualifiers in the narrative. This is even truer of the feminine lead written by a male author!

To pull off the so-called “impossible” –getting into the head of the opposite sex and understanding from this point of view, surprisingly enough, surrounds elemental, fundamental reliance on a “woman of substance” in the VOICE. If you are a female author struggling with how to get into the psyche and ‘mindset’ of a male lead, just reverse what I say here.

VOICE in dramatic, commercial fiction in particular relies heavily on strong Active Voice over weak passive voice. These basic grammatical decisions (word choice, exorcising qualifiers for absolutes, using active verbs over passives and cripplingly slow helping verbs, and exorcising the verb to be) are the crucibles about which E.B. White wrote in The Elements of Style and supported by the fine book Writing Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern. Style comes out of extremely small elements you choose to make work for you–or items you fail to utilize. As small as the choice difference between say the word before and ago, maybe and perhaps, this is “shaping” voice. This “becomes you”–BECOMES your style. If you choose a folksy or shoddy or simplistic or complex or formal or informal voice, your reader will know it from the outset and is normally willing to follow it so long as this voice remains consistent and consistently believable. So is VOICE the single most important element of your story? Absolutely, and yet it is created of all the other elements and choices you choose to make from setting to dialect to no dialect to the difference between between and betwixt, leaped and leapt.

All good writing relies on the reader ‘falling for’ your narrative voice, the point of view speaker, the mind you set your reader down into comfortably or awkwardly. If it is an ill fit, little wonder as an author is a trick cyclist on the unicycle juggling twenty four plates in the air, spinning each ‘choice and decision and element’ at the end of long sticks. Each plate, each stick, each prop is an important element, but they all culminate in the overall effect your story has on the reader’s ear and mind’s eye.

If I had said the writer is LIKE a trick cyclist rather than stating it as a fact, it rings a different bell, sends a different and less powerful impact. The use of LIKE and AS is terribly overdone in some “voices” in female-lead crime fiction. The use of passives, especially the WAS verb—a major killer of action and visualization—also riddles most fiction and especially in the first person narrative along with the personal pronoun references to the narrator: I, me, my, mine, myself, often using the personal pronoun three and four times in a given sentence.

What a reader hears and pictures comes about as result of our giving him a believable SOUND in his head—the author’s voice, or the narrative voice (not always the same) or the character’s voice, along with providing Kodak moments in the reader’s head that look, feel, taste, smell, and sound like images. The human brain sorts its mail via images, so it behooves us to use verbs that carry the weight of an image. We call this simile and metaphor and extended metaphor, but the absolute is even more powerful than these. Absolute detail, as in a Name is a photo in the mind, as a Number is an instamatic shot in the mind.

Metaphorical language then and Verb Choice then create style and voice; and if we choose verbs that fire off shots of photographic moments as in SLAM, divorced, cuddled, crammed, leapt, jarred, frightened over the weak helping verbs as in the door WAS slamming, they were thinking about maybe getting a divorce, had been cuddled, was cramming, was about to leap, was feeling a bit frightened, we REDUCE the photo or blur it considerably.

We clip ourselves at the knees when we overuse ly words and qualifiers in which sentence the strong verb is relegated to a murmur somewhere along the line of thought. Most assuredly helping and passive voice verbs such as was SLOW the action and the firing of the photo in the brain of the reader if it gets there at all. Strong female VOICE carries the day in crime fiction with female leads. The ‘secret’ to creating strong voice, male or female is the same!

(Check back tomorrow for Part II)

Robert Walker

_________________
Robert W. Walker is the author of over forty novels with a record eight series heroes and heroines. His most enduring female lead is Dr. Jessica Coran of the Instinct Series and Meredyth Sanger of the Edge Series. In 2006 City for Ransom began a dual male/female lead with Dr. Jane Tewes who doubles as Dr. James Phineas Tewes in this pre-forensics 1893 Chicago setting. The sequel, Shadows in the White City won the coveted Lovey Award for best historical novel of 2007. City of the Absent followed in 2008.. Coming in 2009 Dead On from Five Star Books
“Write to your opposite” is Walker’s watchword as “this forces you into a worthwhile writing challenge. So set your stories in exotic places you’ve never been with exotic characters you’ve never known.. You’ll surprise yourself.” Robert’s website is chock full with advice and examples. Visit for the fun of it or for the lessons to be had at http://www.robertwwalkerbooks.com/