I sing for you
When I say pipes, I mean your voice. No, not the one you use to warble in the shower and make small beagles howl in protest…your literary voice. Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of potentially terrific manuscripts except they lack voice. Rather than the rich usage of deliciously placed verbs and nouns, the writing is flat and lifeless – reminiscent of my last attempt at baking.
Editors aren’t looking for stories where anyone could have written them, but stories that have a distinct flair, stories that suck you in because the writing is so compelling. It’s a fair bet that no one would pay to hear me sing because I sound like a drowning wildebeest. But people will pay to hear Luciano Pavarotti because he’s got a set of pipes that make me bark like a dog.
But this idea of voice is elusive and many writers don’t understand what we mean by voice. So I dug into my tackle box and decided it might be time to dust off some applicable posts. Happy reading.
Voice is that quality which makes somebody pick up a book from which the cover has been removed and instantly know who wrote it.
C.J. Cherryh, for example, has an incredible voice…to the point where I only read her stuff when on vacation because it’s so *insidious*.
I think I might have been a bit fortunate there. When I first came across the concept, two of my favourite authors were Robert Heinlein and Jack Vance – two SF authors with incredibly distinct voices. All the way from sentence level up to themes.