Category: Voice

When Editing Goes Too Far

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measuring tape

Photo by Ciara McDonnell

I preach plenty about trimming the fat from writing. Strunk, White and Zinsser command it, and I’ve learned it firsthand from dealing with limited space in ads, radio commercials and billboards.

Efficient writing is better writing.

But this isn’t some professional writing secret. You’ll read it on all the forums, hear it at all the conferences and even in your local writers’ group. Cut, cut, cut. Maybe it’s the growing popularity of flash fiction, maybe it’s the waning attention spans of the masses, but whatever the cause, the fact remains:

Skinny writing is in.

We’re all shaking our pages till the adverbs fall out, beating the paragraphs till the parentheticals flee, ever striving for that low, low word count.

The red ink flows in our lust for trim prose.

And what are we seeing as a result? Leaner literature?

Or malnourished manuscripts?

Are we perpetuating a healthy word diet – or an editing disorder?

There is a point when the art becomes emaciated, with wording so simple you can’t differentiate the work of one author from another. Cut too deep, and the voice will bleed right out of your sentences.

Cutting words is one of those rules you have to learn first, to break later.

First you learn how to make each word count. How to construct clear thoughts. How not to waste your readers’ time.

But then you have to find your voice: that special way of writing you have (or your narrator has) that no one else has. And that voice may require a few “unnecessary” words.

Once you know the mechanics of writing efficiently, you can start learning the art of writing uniquely.

What happens if you don’t?

I took the red pen to the three wordiest excerpts from the 5 fantastic examples of voice I posted two years ago. Here’s how they came out.

Mr. Dickens: A Christmas Carol

There is no doubt Marley was dead. The clergyman, clerk, undertaker, and chief mourner all signed the register of his burial. Scrooge Signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

I don’t know what is particularly dead about a doornail; I might regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery. But our ancestors’ wisdom is in the simile; and I won’t disturb it, or the Country’s ruined.

WORDS CUT: 60

Mr. Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

In the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small yellow sun.

Orbiting this at about ninety-eight million miles is an insignificant blue-green planet whose primitive ape-descended life forms still think digital watches are cool.

This planet had a problem: most of its people were unhappy. Most of the suggested solutions for this problem involved the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

WORDS CUT: 48

Mr. Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

You don’t know about me, unless you read “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that doesn’t matter. Mr. Mark Twain made that book, and told the truth, mainly. He stretched some things, but everybody lies sometimes, except Tom’s Aunty Polly, Mary, and the Widow Douglas.

WORDS CUT: 55

Feel that? That something missing? How it seems rushed?

I could have cut even more: Dickens’s entire second paragraph; several of the adjectives from Adams’s piece. But honestly, would there be anything left?

Learn to write efficiently, by all means. But don’t cut so much that you lose yourself.

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Need help finding your voice? Sign up for Voice Week, November 4 – 8! You’ll have a chance to win a copy of Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief!

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measuring tape

Are you over-editing?

How to be Original

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Photo by WoodleyWonderWorks

Photo by WoodleyWonderWorks

You’ve been working on your novel for several years when you discover the latest uber popular YA book is exactly like yours. And you curse the author’s earlier timing because if you ever manage to publish yours, everyone will say you copied hers.

Then you think about it and realize your book is a mix between Out of the Silent Planet, Lord of the Flies, Ender’s Game, and The Elfin Ship. It’s the mess of words you’d discover on your carpet if your home library threw up.

Crap.

So you throw the idea out the window and sit down to your notebook, determined to come up with something truly new. But after a few hours, all you can think of is a bunch of ideas that have been done several times. For instance:

  • The chosen one
  • Anyone with super powers
  • Villain turns out to be hero’s father
  • Genius child is amazing at everything
  • Eccentric genius solves mysteries
  • Orphans
  • Forbidden love
  • People who see the unseen
  • Art and literature are outlawed
  • Everyday life is a lie
  • Last man on earth

And this is just a small sampling of the ideas that have passed from fresh to done to copied to trendy to cliché. The more you see of the world, art and literature, the more you’ll realize it is all the Same Old Thing. King Solomon said it best: ain’t nothing new under the sun.

He might’ve worded it differently.

Anyway, the point remains. There are no new story ideas. But that’s not such a bad thing. Some story arcs are timeless, so long as they’re driven by strong, interesting characters. Because, while of course we should take the plot road less traveled whenever possible, plot is not the key to being original.

Take it from my favorite writer:

No man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

– C.S. Lewis

Tell the truth. Tell what you know. Whether you’re actually writing your memoirs or a Martian adventure story, deep down you’re still writing from your own experience. So find the words to most clearly and vividly state what it feels like to be you.

Succeed (it isn’t easy) and one of two things will happen: Either readers will say, with astonished wide eyes, that they never looked at it that way before. Or readers will say, breathless with excitement and tight-throated with tears, that they’d thought until this moment they were the only one who felt that way.

Either way, you have accomplished something incredible.

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How to write in an other-worldly voice

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The robot bares his soul on paper. Photo by Mirko Schaefer.

Last week we talked about how to craft an authentic voice by listening to the voices around you and in media. But what if your character is a type of person you can’t find in any of those places? What if they’re from the future, of which we know little, or from the ancient past, before there was a written language to record how they spoke? What if they are not even human—an alien, an angel, a robot dinosaur?

What if you want a voice just as unique as the character? A voice that will blow your readers’ minds?

Here are some steps to help you create one.

NOTE: this is a list of ideas, not a checklist. All will not work for your character, and there are probably additional methods you will need. This is simply a starting point. Choose wisely, but don’t be afraid to experiment!

 

First – a few questions to get you in the mindset:

Is the narrator intimately familiar with the modern human world? Would he be able to use and understand our weird human idioms and expressions?

Imagine a day in the life of this character. What does he spend most of his time doing? How does this effect what he thinks and talks about?

If this character doesn’t speak English, whatever you write is a translation. Ask yourself what his native language is like, compared to English. Is it as descriptive? Is it more rigid? Is it simpler, or more complicated? Are there some concepts in his language that can’t be translated to English at all?

Are there human or earthly concepts he cannot understand? Does he understand gender? Light and dark? The passage of time? Physical space?

Will this story be like describing color to a man born blind, and if so, who is the blind man—the character, or the reader?

 

Now, some fun things to try:

  • Remove all idioms and clichés – or get them intentionally wrong
  • Remove any pop culture references
  • Make up pop culture references
  • Occasionally try, then fail, to describe something, then explain that human words are inadequate
  • Replace common words with words you make up, or words from an obscure human language: especially replace words that are measurements, such as in time (minutes, hours, years), distances (feet, meters) as well as days of the week, etc.
  • Change the spelling of words – think of Olde English, or 1337 (leet)
  • Remove common words like articles (a, an, the), like in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
  • Cut words down to their roots, eliminating ings and eds and the like
  • Eliminate punctuation, using only line- and paragraph-breaks to differentiate between phrases and sentences
  • Use all the senses except sight in your descriptions
  • Describe from a sixth sense, like telepathy – bonus points if you can make up a sense nobody has thought of before
  • Don’t use adjectives
  • Don’t use pronouns
  • Write normally, then remove every fifth word and see what happens
  • Describe events at a molecular level
  • Describe events as if watching from miles away

 

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What wacky voice ideas do you have? Spill them in the comments!

 

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Other posts to help you prepare for Voice Week:

When I announced the first Voice Week

How to find your voice – explained in 5 different voices

5 fantastic examples of voice

How last year’s Voice Week went

How to craft an authentic voice through research

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How to write like someone you’re not – and still sound authentic

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This might be a little too obvious. [Photo by Emil]

 As a copywriter, I might be selling waterproof work boots to truckers one day, and giving makeup tips to fashionistas another. Maybe both in the same day. But if I’m not familiar with my audience, I have to get familiar before I write anything. You may have the same problem.

Say you’re writing about a character who is wildly unlike yourself. Maybe they’re an extreme version of some part of yourself (as all characters tend to be), but their background and lifestyle demands a manner of speaking completely different from anything you know. How do you master a voice that’s not your own?

Start by writing down everything you know about the character whose voice you need to create. Personality traits, occupation, hobbies. Then, prepare to research. You must immerse yourself in the voice you seek to emulate, much like living in a different country to learn the language. Here’s how:

 

Online communities

My number one resource for getting into the heads of my audience is the Internet. You can find a blog or forum for just about any group of people – I have stumbled across communities for everything from anorexics to Satanists, to Jews who love bacon (those all purely by accident). Look up social websites centered around your narrator’s profession, hobbies, even medical or psychological conditions. Do this by Googling your subject with words like blog, forum, community, online support group, tips, terminology, handbook, dictionary (i.e. “spoon-collector’s forum” etc.). Take it a step further by asking yourself what products your character would buy, then find the Facebook page of a company that sells said product, and read the fan comments. Google the definitions of terms you don’t know. Bookmark the sites you find and reference them frequently.

Books

Probably the most obvious way to familiarize yourself with a voice is to find a book narrated by a character who is like yours, or at least one that has a lot of dialogue by a character like yours. Type out a few pages of the narrative/dialogue to help give your fingers and your brain a feel for the flow of the language. Reach outside fiction, too – read the memoir of a real person who is similar to your character. If you’re writing period fiction, read something that was actually written during the time period in question.

 

Movies & TV

Can’t think of a book that has your character type? Try thinking of a movie or TV show that does. Find some quotes from that character on IMDB – and again, type them out to get a feel for the voice.

 

People watching / eavesdropping

Find a public place where you’re likely to find the type of people you’re writing about. If you’re writing about a college student, hang out in a coffee shop by the closest college campus. If you’re writing about a factory worker, eat lunch at a diner close to a factory, or check out a nearby bar at happy hour. If you’re writing about children, offer to baby-sit your sister’s kids, or hang out at the playground of your local park (just bring a friend with you so people don’t think you’re a creeper). Shop at stores your character is likely to shop at. Visit a church or synagogue they might frequent. Listen to snippets of conversation around you, and surreptitiously write them in a notebook.

 

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Where do you find the voices of your characters? Tell me in the comments!

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Yikici’s Character & Voice Experiment

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If you already know what’s going on, skip to “My Entry.” Otherwise, read on!

This piece is part of a game devised by Voice Week writer Yikici. Yikici had a theory that if you gave two writers the same character sketch and told them to write some dialogue for that character–without letting either writer see what the other had written–that their pieces would still be similar; the voice of the character would shine through.

She tested this by providing setting, background, and situation, then having her participating writers create two characters, and write a 200-300 word dialogue between them. Each writer would then send the character sketches to another participant, who would write another dialogue based on the same characters. She graciously invited me to join in on the last round–and I didn’t even have to write character sketches!

Yikici gave us this:

Setting:  A small quiet village approx 200 miles from the nearest city adorned with thatched cottages and surrounded by vast empty fields.  Not much happens here, except for their festival –the festival of colour, this happens once a year; tourists and families from afar visit, no one misses this event.  This is the highlight of the year for the villagers; they prepare for this the whole year.

The Dialogue Prompts:

  • No children live in the village.
  • A child hides in a barn and stays after the festivities.
  • Your character(s) interacts with the child.
  • The child has a secret.
  • Add a surprise of your own -in keeping with your character(s) profile.

I got character sketches from veteran InMonster Billie Jo. Click here to see the character sketches and the dialogue she wrote.

Yikici will be posting her thoughts, contrasts, and comparisons over the next couple of weeks. Catch up, keep up and offer your own opinions on her blog.

My Entry:

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“Need any help?”

Hank looked up from packing up his unsold wooden animals to see the redheaded festival organiser bouncing on her heels.

“Haven’t you been here since dawn? You should go home. Get some rest.”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly sleep for the next twelve hours, at least. I just get so excited about the festival. And being in charge this year, it’s even worse!” she laughed. “What do you call that?”

“An Iberian Lynx.”

“Beautiful. How do you think it went?”

“What?”

“The festival of course. Was it as magical as ever?”

Hank sighed. “What flower is this that greets the morn, its hues from Heaven so freshly born? With burning star and flaming band it kindles all the sunset land.”

She gaped at him. “Did you write that?”

“It’s Oliver Wendell Holmes.”

“Oh. Your name is…Hank, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m Lucy Hale.”

“Honored to make your acquaintance, Miss Hale.”

“So it went well then? The festival?”

“Beautifully.”

She smiled—she had a beautiful smile—and insisted on helping him carry the packed crates to his wagon in the barn. He was just turning to retrieve his horse when Lucy grabbed his arm.

“What’s that?”

Hank followed her gaze to a shadowed hole, from whence came a rustling noise.

“Probably just a rat…” he said, but just then, a much larger shape emerged.

It was a little boy.

The boy froze, as surprised to see them as they were to see him.

“Is…” Lucy whispered, “Is that…?”

“It’s a child,” Hank supplied. Lucy had probably never seen one.

The boy dashed for the door, but Hank was quicker, getting a hold of both the boy’s arms.

“Hey, now,” he said gently. “I won’t hurt you.”

Lucy knelt and inspected the boy’s face and fingers with wonder. “He’s so small!”

“Children generally are, yes. Where did you come from?” he asked the boy.

The boy glared at him and held his mouth shut.

“What are we going to do? Should we turn him in?”

“We can’t. Don’t you know what they’ll do to him?”

“But it isn’t his fault. Surely someone can make them see reason. My father—”

“No one can make them see reason.”

“But surely—”

“Believe me. I know.”

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