Romance, Suspense, Mystery Author
My friend Kristie sent me the link to this video and can I just say how much I loved it?! Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love
If you can take the time to watch it, I am sure you will be thankful for her inspiration.
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Failure really isn’t terrible if you can say to yourself, “Hey, I know I’m gonna be successful at what I want to do someday.” Failure doesn’t become a big hangup then because it’s only temporary.
–Jerry Della Femina
Man, this guy must’ve read my mind or pulled it from a writer’s creed or something. 🙂 Isn’t that what every writer says to themselves after they receive their 50th or 100th or 250th rejection? Honestly, this is what I said to myself on my path to becoming a published author and I continue to keep plodding away and learning from every “failure” that comes my way.
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I’m not an expert, but I’m willing to share some of the things that have helped me on my road to becoming a published author.
Today we’re going to focus on–Find your voice
One January, I went to a one-day writing seminar in Provo. I took my 4 month old baby boy with me because it was a small class and I had a moment of *insanity/mommy wants to break her parole from being housebound with a baby and pursue her writing career*
My baby was supposed to be good. Instead my husband ended up having to come and get him halfway through. This was after he’d pooped through his diaper and down my leg and I’d tried to wash out my pants and use the blow dryer in the bathroom. I told you it was insanity!
Anyway, what does all this have to do with voice? I’m a gettin’ there!
We did several writing exercises and one of them was on voice. I don’t remember a lot of fine details about that class, but I do remember the impression made that it was important to find your own unique writing voice.
You can’t imitate someone’s writing style or voice because it will come off sounding phony. Think of your favorite books of all time. What was it about those books that sang to you?
I’m guessing it was the incredibly potent voice of a character–the way the character seemed to be sitting right beside you as you read about their travails. The strength of the voice in a novel can make or break it. In literary novels, voice is usually the number one factor that creates the story.
So how do you find your own voice?
By writing.
Write in first person, third person, present-tense, past-tense. Find your style and find how you can best identify with your character.
When do you find the most joy in your writing?
Have you analyzed your writing? Do all of your characters sound the same? Do any of your characters haunt you while you’re telling their story?
Your voice should be so real that your story leaps from the page and connects with readers.
*Try some free-writing exercises. Write about a girl chasing butterflies. Write a page about a boy climbing onto the roof of a school.
Examine your writing. What do you see? What do you hear? Does your writing speak to you, and if not, why?
After that crazy day, when I returned home from the class and took care of my family and rocked my baby and got ready for bed, something happened.
I was tired. I got in bed and closed my eyes and began to relax and a sentence came into my mind.
Sometimes the wind sings through the trees like it has a soul of its own.
My eyes opened. I jumped out of bed, grabbed my DANA and wrote down the first line. I savored that first line. Where had it come from? Then I wrote the first page.
And I felt it!
I felt like I had found my voice. The words were singing to me and I continued to work on that novel for the rest of the year. The first few chapters won a first place and second place award and I continued to write.
I loved writing a literary inspirational romance called, “Wind Song.” I loved it because I found my voice and my voice flowed onto the pages until the words sang a story that touched my heart.
I hope that you can find your voice. Practice. Listen. Write. Cultivate your voice. Dig for it. And let it sing.
I offer a mentoring service for aspiring writers and would love to have you join me! I have many other tips that will help you. Sign up on the wait list here for the new online training: Write the Novel in You in 90 Days! This guide can help you to write your novel from start to finish in 90 Days.
I also offer a personal coaching service, so if you’re ready to take the next step in your writing, go HERE.
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I love my writer’s group–Authors Incognito! They are always so helpful when I’m stuck in a rut. I can ask them any question and get some great suggestions. One of my friends, Janice, posted these helpful classic metaphors today–sometimes it’s so hard to feel inspired when it comes to metaphors. I hope these help bring inspiration to your day! And if you don’t know I’m speaking tongue in cheek after reading the examples below, then you might be a little dense, like a large brick of moldy cheese.
1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
6. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
7. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
8. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
9. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
10. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
11. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
12. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
13. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
14. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.
15. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
16. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
17. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
18. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
19. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
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I just received an email with some wonderful writing tips. There are a lot of books out there to help an aspiring writer become great. Have you ever wondered what to read in order to have a successful writing career? It’s true, a writer education can help give you a leg up in the publishing world.
I loved this quote from Eschler Editing:
“As Larry Brooks said, “An anesthesiologist has to do only one thing well: Put the patient under without killing him. But she has to know about five hundred things to do it successfully. It is the same with the writer.'”
It can definitely take a while to learn those “five hundred” (ish) things, but there are resources that can help you learn the tricks of the trade. You can head over to this blog post for some great recipes for success:
Nightstand Recipes for Success
Happy Reading!
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For today’s post, I’m happy to welcome a guest blogger, author David Vandagriff.
David and I belong to a writing group called LDStorymakers and he’s always posting insightful information for writers. I loved what he had to say about Ebooks and he agreed to share with my readers. Enjoy!
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I have a copy of Pride and Prejudice downloaded from three different sources – Amazon, Apple’s iBookstore and Google’s eBookstore – available for reading on my computer and my iPhone and (Amazon version) my Kindle e-reader – and I paid nothing for any of my copies of this classic work now in the public domain.
Access to classic literature has never been easier. Fifteen years ago if I wanted to read Pride and Prejudice, I had to buy it from a physical bookstore or drive to the library and hope a copy was available to check out.
Now, if I have any sort of computer no matter how old or inexpensive plus Internet access, within 30 seconds thanks to something like these suddenlink packages, I can begin reading Pride and Prejudice, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, and every other literary classic in the public domain at no charge. Being able to sell digital downloads like ebooks, music, software, plus other digital merchandise is amazing in this day and age, there are more and more e-commerce websites popping up.
An English teacher in all but the most low-income schools can assign a class to read the first paragraph of David Copperfield:
“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.”
and compare it with the first paragraph of Moby Dick:
“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.”
To compare the ways in which two major novelists began books showing young men making their way in a difficult world (both written from the first person point of view). If any of the students are intrigued by the first paragraphs, they can read the rest of either book. In fact, the English teacher can do the same thing with the first paragraphs of another dozen classic novels during the year without worrying about whether the students will have access to those books.
I know that copies of such books have been available for some time via computer, but the small-form ereader is, I think, a far better way to read a novel than a desktop computer and probably a laptop as well. In a family with one computer and many children, a personal ereader will be an increasingly less-expensive way of allowing each child to comfortably read material from the internet.
I believe ebooks easily available via sophisticated online bookstores at no cost may lead to a greater familiarity with the classics for a larger group of people than ever before.
When I was young, I was a voracious reader and my family almost always lived quite a distance from a library. I would have loved having access to an almost infinite number of interesting books right in my home.
David P. Vandagriff
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*What do you think? Do you agree with David? I’ve been reluctant to jump on the Ebook band-wagon, but his points here are very persuasive. What do you like about Ebooks? Are you an Ebook reader?
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