I sure got busy around here the last week. Trying to finish up one novel while firing off some chapters and a synopsis for an editor who wants to see those. And getting ready for the upcoming Market Your Work professional workshop here starting Saturday. So a great kind of busy.

When I was talking about voice in the last post, I was talking more about a type of voice called “character voice” for lack of a better term. It is also very much author voice, just focused through a character.

Authors, especially beginning writers and younger professionals, can’t hear their own voices. And, to be honest, shouldn’t worry about it.

However, let me give you a few hints about getting more of your author voice into a story or book. Hint #1. Write very, very fast. White heat kind of writing. What that does is get your critical, high school English teacher voice out of your head and allows your own voice to spring to life. When writing fast, you are writing from a creative side of your mind, and the voice just comes. You can’t see it, but it is there.

Then, don’t rewrite except to fix typos and missed words. Don’t let that English teacher at your voice, at your words. The more you rewrite from the critical side of your brain, the more you cut out what makes your words, your sentences, your story unique.

Two suggestions no one will follow, but just thought I’d toss them out there for kicks.

A writer who has been around a while, who has studied this business for twenty to thirty years, can see voice, and have often learned how to control it. Not all authors, but some. I am one of those, and it came from me having to mimic an actor’s voice, syntax, structure, and pacing of of a sentence in work-for-hire. I had to write in words so that you fans would hear in your head Captain Kirk’s voice, or Captain Picard’s voice, or Data’s voice, or Will Smith’s voice. I couldn’t let Dean Smith’s voice come through. That would have been bad.

Trust me, doing that is hard to do, as many writers who thought writing work-for-hire was easy have discovered from the fans. So my training over so many books, plus working to get my own voice out of thrillers and write invisible prose taught me how to have my Dean voice when I wanted it and how to turn it off.

I also learned to control voice from doing ghost books for other authors. I’ve done a number of those and had to mimic the author’s voice to the point where no one would know that author didn’t do the book. Oh, man is that tough, but again it taught me to control voice. (And I get hired by New York publisher’s every-so-often to use this skill.)

So suddenly I have one of my own voice books to write, where my voice and over-the-top character voice had to be in there or the book just wouldn’t work. From invisible prose in the last thriller I wrote to heavy voice prose.

Talk about a sharp turn. <g> But what fun and what a challenge it has been.

Character and author voice is wonderful in many, many authors today. Meg Cabot is one of the best working. In his nonfiction, Dave Berry.

Invisible voice. The best is, of course, Stephen King. A master. The top of the top, the best writer working in the English language.

No voice, not invisible, not anything, is Clive Cussler. He’s a master story teller, but he drives other writers nuts with his writing. He just writes what needs to be there for the story and nothing more. Readers find it invisible for the most part, most writers have trouble with it. I am sure Clive doesn’t much care.  (Some day I would love to work on a book with Clive.  That would be a blast.)
So, if you are trying to learn how to be a published writer, go try to write Will Smith voice. You have a ton of examples where he plays Will Smith. Men in Black, Independence Day, the new upcoming super-hero movie.   Listen, type, listen, type.  Focus on the structure, the pacing, the type of humor, the quips, and so on.  His voice is the same in many of his movies and it is what has made him a super star. And if you can write it, you can use it for other characters in your own fiction and will have that skill in your tool box.

So, what is voice exactly? It is a thousand choices of details, combined with how the writer thinks, combined with how the character thinks, to make a character and a story come alive in a reader’s mind.

Read a chapter of a James Patterson thriller, then read a few chapters of a Meg Cabot book, and you tell me you can’t see what voice is. And what invisible prose is.

And tell me, those of you who know me, that you can’t hear my voice, my speaking voice, my “Dean voice”  in these posts. <g>

Cheers,   Dean

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