FINDING YOUR VOICE

By Terry Hayman, Guest Blogger

If there's one thing that almost every editor on a panel at a conference will claim they look for, it's voice. Specifically, they want to hear a distinctive, fresh new "voice" coming out of the manuscript they've just picked up from their slush pile. If it's got the voice, maybe they can fix the rest.

What is voice, exactly, someone in the audience always asks. And the more experienced editors (who've fielded this questions dozens of times before) will talk about an author's world view, their life experience, their word choices and sentence structures, the things that just happen when the author writes, that he or she really has little control over.

Used to drive me insane. Why?

Well, the message seemed to be - you can't develop a good voice. You either got it and editors snap it up (which happens, maddeningly enough, with some first-shot-out-of-the-gate novelists), or you don't.

This gets driven home when editors bring up, inevitably, Stephen King. Look, they say. If someone reads you a passage out of any of King's books, you know it's King. His voice is just that distinctive.

Now I know for damn sure that my writing voice isn't Stephen King distinctive. It's been called "commercial" and "spare" but I doubt even my mother could pick my prose out of a pile of stuff by other authors if she only had a brief passage to go by.

And yet...

About midway through last year, I finally started to recognize my own voice. It came when I recognized that, for all the different genres and story types I've written and sold over the years, my stories tended to bend in certain directions and take on certain tones. For short stories, I could generally carry a cynical, humorous, pompous, genteel, you-name-it tone from start to finish. But give me a longer work and it all became...me.

That is, I might love to read complex character analyses or tongue-in-cheek humor, but it's not generally how I approach the world. I tend to see it as made up of a never-ending struggle between good and evil, love and hate, hope and despair, and it's never an easy thing for the good to win out. Ever. Yet it usually still does in my stories. After a lot of pain and sweat and damage, my characters usually come out affirming family, love, hope, truth. Straight-up. I just don't do cynicism well.

What did this realization mean for my writing?

Only this - choices about what to write about got easier. I went to a workshop where we were all assigned a story to write about the trouble with heroes. About a third (?) of them would be slotted into a paying anthology produced by Tekno Books. The pressure was on. First thing that came to mind were the sort of comic hero-bashing tales that stand fairy tales on their heads. And from the talented group of writers I was with, we got some wonderfully original ones along those lines. As I knew we would. And I knew they'd all be better than anything I'd come up with in that vein.

So I instead wrote a kind of quiet, intense little domestic drama that felt real and personally scary to me. No humor at all. (Except in the actual writing of the thing which had me sticking my head into the still-buzzing workshop common room at 1:30 am and crying "Help me! I'm violating every copyright law in the book!")

My humorless little story (with copyright issues fixed) made the final cut. Not necessarily because of my voice, but maybe because at least I wasn't strangling it.

And who know, maybe someday someone will point out how you can just read a few pages of this particularly humorless, intense guy and just know who it is...