I’m lucky to work
with so many authors at Stories for Children Publishing and the World of Ink
Network. I learn so much from them and I find it helps my personal writing. Not
many authors get to sit on both sides of the writing desk like me, and so when
I get the chance to share some great advice I learn from an author I’m working
with like Maggie Lyons, I’m happy to post it here.
Maggie Lyons is one
of the few authors I have had the chance to see grow as a writer. She was born
in Wales and brought up in England before gravitating west to Virginia’s coast.
She zigzagged her way through a motley variety of careers from orchestral
management to law-firm media relations to academic editing. Writing and editing
nonfiction for adults brought plenty of satisfaction but nothing like the magic
she discovered in writing fiction and nonfiction for children. Several of her
articles, poetry, and a chapter book have been published in the children’s
magazines Stories for Children Magazine
and knowonder!
Maggie is very
talented but is always looking to grow as a writer and when we started chatting
about the different types of voices authors have when it comes to writing, her
comments inspired me. I asked her to share some of those thoughts with you
today.
How Do You Find Your Writing Voice?
with
Author Maggie Lyons
I’m still in the process of finding my
writing voice. Finding is the key
word here. I can’t force my writing voice to shoot up like a hothouse plant. I
can’t learn it like a foreign language. It’s not merely about writing
techniques—asyndetons, paraprosdokians, zeugmas, and that fun bunch of language
tricks. It’s not about narrating in first person, third person, or even second
person. I have to let it appear in its own good time. That’s because a writer’s
voice grows from experience. It represents everything the writer has absorbed
and synthesized over time. It’s about what the writer chooses to write about and
how the writer expresses the results of that choice. It’s about how fictional characters
express themselves and the approach a writer takes to reach the target readership.
In the words of literary agent Rachelle Gardner: “Your writer’s voice is the expression of you on the
page. It’s that
simple—and that complicated. Your voice is all about honesty. It’s the
unfettered, nonderivative, unique conglomeration of your thoughts, feelings, passions, dreams, beliefs, fears and
attitudes, coming through in every word you write. Voice is all about your originality and having the courage to express it.” (http://www.rachellegardner.com/2008/06/the-writers-voice/):
The online researcher is presented with a
plethora of advice for writers intent on finding their writing voice. Some say
that finding your voice is about finding out who you really are—which may be an
unnerving experience, so the idea of courage pops up frequently. “Don’t be
nervous,” Henry Miller advised. Jeff Goins claims that being afraid means
“you’re on the right track … Fear is good”
(http://goinswriter.com/writing-voice/). Writer Holly Lisle insists that “Voice
is bleeding onto the page, and it can be a powerful, frightening, naked
experience” (http://hollylisle.com/ten-steps-to-finding-your-writing-voice/).
Is all this suffering really necessary?
I have not bled all over the pages of my
manuscript. I have not consciously sought out the inner, “real” me, and
therefore have not challenged myself to a battle with fear. I have written
“joyously” as Henry Miller once advised. Does that mean my book does not have
voice?
Others say it is not and never could be
about your authentic self because, as Steven Pressfield puts it, voice is
“artificial” (http://www.stevenpressfield.com/2009/08/the-writers-voice). It’s
something the writer has crafted to convey a particular impression. Put another
way, writers must follow the dictates of their material, a classic example
being J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye
with its angst-driven teen narrator, Holden Caulfield.
But isn’t this a chicken and egg situation?
My writing voice was driven by the characters and the situations they found
themselves in. Yet the plot, settings, characters, dialogue, actions, and
thoughts are still products of my imagination, even when my characters take
control. Isn’t that also what people mean when they say the writer’s voice represents
what the writer is all about, or am I believing too many impossible things
before breakfast, to misquote Lewis Carroll?
Conscious of my readership, as we writers
should be, I crafted story, characters, dialogue, and narrative style in a way
I hoped my middle-grade readers could relate to. That has to affect the
writer’s voice too and, along with the dictates of the material, can change the
writer’s voice from book to book. This is totally obvious when the narrative is
written in the first person, but voice can be customized in a third-person narrative
just as readily. Jerry Spinelli voice riproars its way through his middle-grade
landmark Maniac Magee but treads softly
and fearfully in his heart-aching Wringer.
Yet, both books are recognizably Spinelli’s. His voice doesn’t lose its flesh
and blood. It simply changes its outfit. That has to be the mark of a real
writer’s voice that even a bad editor can’t obliterate.
_____________
Maggie Lyons hopes her stories encourage reluctant young readers
to turn a page or two.
Her middle-grade adventure story Vin and the Dorky Duet is available as
an e-book at MuseItUp Publishing’s bookstore (MuseItYoung section: http://tinyurl.com/bms7oba),
on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008AK7ALE,
and as a paperback at Halo Publishing International at http://halopublishing.com/bookstore/Maggie-Lyons,
and on Amazon at http://tinyurl.com/9g5oc3c.
Her middle-grade adventure story Dewi and the Seeds of Doom will be
released by as an e-book by MuseItUp Publishing in October and Halo Publishing
International will release the paperback.
More information at:
www.maggielyons.yolasite.com, and
You can find out more about Maggie Lyons and her book through her World of Ink
Author/Book Tour at http://tinyurl.com/9t24kgy
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