It has been an interesting month or so.  I’ve been working on a novel that is under a fairly tight deadline, and have a request from another editor for a novel that I have a pretty rough draft finished on, but needs a second pass to bring up voice.

And both of these books are complete voice novels.

For the writer who wrote the two original Men in Black novels back ten years ago, who wrote an entire Dixon Hill Trek novel, I thought it would not be a problem.  That will teach me to assume anything.

For a large part of the last five years, I’ve worked on taking voice out of my writing, making my prose invisible to the reader.  This came from working on James Patterson-like thrillers book after book and a ton of young adult books without voice.

So suddenly, I’m having to stuff voice back into my work, and wow has this been interesting, to say the least.  And, to be honest, it felt sort of freeing as well.  At least right up to the point where I handed Kris three chapters on the rewrite novel and she beat on it with a red pen and said the voice wasn’t there.

I had thought it was there.  But when a Hugo Award winning editor says it isn’t there, you sort of slink back to your office, sit in your chair staring at the screen, and wonder just what the hell voice is exactly.

Of course, that’s the writer doing that thinking.  As an editor and a teacher, I know what voice is, can even tell another writer how to bring up voice in a story.  But me, the writer, just sat there sort of disgusted with myself.  How, in a short five years, had I managed to take all my voice out of my novels so successfully?

So, I went back to basics.  I looked at other writers using strong voices, studied what they did.  Then I went back to focusing on the character and the details the character would see, and the ATTITUDE of the character while looking at every detail.  And I climbed inside that character’s head, planted myself firmly there, and wrote a new couple of first pages.

This time Kris read them, laughed (thank God) and handed them back to me.  “Got it.”

I went back to my trusty writing office, sat down at the computer and stared at the screen and asked myself “Got what?”  And “How did I just do that?”

I have written over ninety novels, been at this business full time for over twenty years, and it never gets boring.  From day one to now it has been just as fun, just as frightening, and just as full of unknowns every time I sit in front of a blank page.

So now I go back upstairs to work, pushing voice back to the surface of my writing every sentence, and with luck, making the voice strong enough to sell.

Cheers,  Dean

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