V is for Voice

Voice is one of those aspects of writing that plays a big role in getting attention from agents and editors. If you've stopped to look at successful queries, you'll find that both the query letter and the ms have voice. It's the voice that grabs attention and cries out “read me”.

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I'm a pretty nice person (or so I like to think; others may call me on this). I believe strongly in helping others, I've signed the charter for compassion, and yet when I write, the characters whose voices come through most clearly are the nasty ones. The selfish ones rule the roost. Is it some hidden part of me that I try to squirrel away? If so, I hope it only comes out on paper. But it makes me stop to think.

Where does voice come from?

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Multiple perspectives

First, sorry for not having Marketing Monday feature this week. My scheduled author had to do some last-minute edits so that the ARC of her next book will be out on time. Hard to compete with that! I'll feature her in May, after the A to Z Challenge (since her initials don't fit with any of the Mondays in April).

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I didn't post on Monday because my life is about to enter a tail spin, and I really wanted to finish revising my WIP before that happens. So I was working. Really. Hard.

And now I'm trying to figure out the best way to proceed. You see, this novel has chapters from more than one character's point of view. The secondary character provides important information about what's happening in the story; information the MC can't provide. But for this approach to work, each character has to have a unique voice. Therein lies the challenge.
 
Now I have the storyline where I want it, and I plan to go through only the chapters from the MC's POV to check the voice in those. Then I'll do a second pass with the chapters from the secondary character's POV. Beyond that, I don't know how else to approach it.

Have you ever written from the POV of multiple characters? How did you ensure that the characters' voices were distinct?

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The Pasta Detectives

I have this wonderful writer friend who gave me The Pasta Detectives for my birthday. She writes youth novels. I'm writing (and rewriting) a youth novel. Or two. Or is it three? Wow, those simultaneous WIPs are getting confusing.

The Pasta Detectives by Andreas Steinhöfel (the English translation of Steinhöfel's German novel, Rico, Oskar und die Tiefferschatten, wonderfully translated by Chantal Wright) is the story of Rico, a child proddity detective and his child prodigy detective friend. Rico explains that being a child proddity is "a bit like being a child prodigy, but also like the opposite."

Told from Rico's point of view, the story opens a window into the brain of someone who thinks a lot but needs a lot of time to sort things out. If he thinks really hard about something, the "lottery balls" start up in his head, confusing him. But when Rico teams up with a new friend, Oskar, the two of them are able to solve the mystery of Mr. 2000.

The original was a bestseller in Germany. I can only assume that the voice Steinhöfer gives Rico is as perfect in German as it was in English. The translation certainly shines. Voiciness is essential to any good story, as Julie Hedlund recently wrote. Maybe it helps to find your voice when you have a distinctive character in mind and tell the story in the first person.

Two of the stories I'm writing are first person POV. I will have to go back to look at them closely to get a feel for the voiciness of each main character. But books like The Pasta Detectives provide a delightful opportunity to study how it's done.

Finding a voice: tasting hope

I kept coming across blogs by agents and editors talking about the importance of having a unique voice. I wondered what, exactly that meant. Seemed to me that most of the books I read these days are not told in particularly unique "voices" and I couldn't really think of any that set themselves apart. So I wondered, just what does a unique voice sound like?

Out of the blue, a friend of mine lent me a couple of her favorite YA novels, both by Meg Rosoff. I read the first page of How I Live Now and bam! I knew. A story told in first person, that of a teenage girl thrown into a new situation in a new country. She didn't tell the story as a writer telling the story, but as a girl might write it down to later recall the events. No quotation marks, limited punctuation, and a voice that stays true to itself throughout the book. A book that deals with current events by taking them in one potential (and rather frightening) direction and brings us through the aftermath through the eyes of the main character. It was truly an extraordinary read.

I also read Just In Case, and I am curious as to what inspired it. Don't want to spoil anything, but there is a fun play on words within the book, and I wondered whether that may have sparked the idea for the novel. I could see that happening. Have sent off an email, but don't know if I'll receive a response. But in the meantime, I am off to buy some of Meg Rosoff's more recent works, and I highly recommend them to others!