Category Archives: Narrative Voice

Most of us have heard the adage “You have to write a million words…” in some shape or form. Sometimes that million is what finally makes your writing good, sometimes it’s what makes you a “real writer”, and sometimes it’s what you have to do to find your artistic voice. The last one I actually agree with. I know when I first started writing I was trying too hard to write like my favorite grand masters of sci-fi and fantasy. I had yet to discover who I am as a writer and then become comfortable with that identity. I felt more comfortable and confident trying to emulate someone else.

Somewhere along the line I heard the “all serious professional writers have to have a blog” advice so like any dutiful newbie I started a blog — which I actually still post to occasionally. I did my best to come up with interesting topics and share anything that I’d learned in my journey so far…and I did get a decent amount of hits. After about a year of this I had a moment of enlightenment. I realized that when I let go of pretentiousness and let my words be MY WORDS there was a certain way I tended to phrase things and a certain tone and humor that my posts had in common. The biggest realization was that I didn’t hate it. It needed some polish and refinement perhaps but it didn’t suck.

That’s when I thought back to the “million words to find your voice” adage. Nowhere in the adage does it say that all of those million words have to be fiction. Between the blog, a novel and a handful of short stories I probably wrote close to a million words during that year. In that time I learned to relax and let the words come out; and since I was blogging as me and only me it was easier to allow the words to sound like a conversation I’d have with a friend.

Fast forward to 2014. I’d applied my voice to my fiction for a while and had become comfortable doing that but I hadn’t received any professional feedback so I still didn’t know if I was any good. I wrote five short stories in six weeks for an anthology workshop early that year. At the workshop we received critiques from six esteemed editors. Most of them said they wouldn’t have bought any of the stories because of plot or pacing problems but my voice was never a problem. In fact one of them loved my voice and complemented me on it more than once. Well, craft and structure are relatively easy to fix. That just takes study and practice. I can do that! Voice on the other hand is much harder because your personality is much more fixed.

So if you feel that you haven’t found your voice or your writing group comments that your writing doesn’t sound like you then give this a try. You don’t have to do a public blog like I did. You can keep a diary (digital or physical) and write whatever you want in it. If you want to write about your journey to becoming an amazing writer, do it. If you want to write about the struggles of being a writer while working a full-time day job, do it. If you want to philosophize about unicorn poop, do it. It doesn’t matter what the subject is. What matters is that you say what you want to say the way you would say if you were having a conversation with a friend.

Relax and be yourself.

The Semi-True Story

October 29, 2015

mary

Character Craft & Skills Horror Mary Pletsch Narrative Voice POV The Writing Life World-building No Comments

I gave a copy of Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Aberrant to my parents with a proviso attached: it’s not autobiographical.

The assumption would be easy enough to make. My contribution to Fossil Lake, the short story “Mishipishu: The Ghost Story of Penny Jaye Prufrock,” is set at a summer camp for kids. The name of the camp in the story, Camp Zaagaigan (the Algonquin word for “lake”) is fictional; so is Lake Mishipishu (I actually checked on the maps and found a Mishibishu Lake…) My parents, however, would be able to name the real camp and the real lake after they read the story: from the cabin line to that infamous H-dock, the layout of Camp Zaagaigan mirrors its real-world counterpart, and they drove me there often enough to recognize it.

From there it’s just one step further to wondering how much more of the story is real.

I’m often asked whether the characters in my story are “me,” or whether the events are “real,” and all I can ever say is that I write semi-true stories. Semi-true in that I’ve never been able to take a person, event, or revelation and transcribe it into fiction word-for-word. As a writer friend of mine says, real life doesn’t have to make sense, but fiction does. Even if I’m starting with something “inspired by a true story,” in order to make event or character coherent, I have to add things here, or take things away that might have happened in real life, but don’t add anything useful to the tale I’m telling. Sometimes changes to the story make it more dramatic, more compelling, or more satisfying; and so the events “inspired by a true story” move ever farther away from a faithful reflection of reality. After all, I’m writing fiction—I’m not required to report on reality. I’m required to tell an engaging and powerful tale.

And semi-true in that I do my best to write characters who feel real: who behave in realistic ways, who are recognizable and relatable, who are emotionally honest. When I write them, I put myself in their position and see the world through their eyes; and yes, to an extent, I feel what they feel, and try to express that emotion in the words I’m writing. Often this emotional connection is informed by my own real-world experiences. I do know what being bullied feels like. I do know what doing something I know is against the rules feels like. I don’t know what it feels like to drown, but I do know what it feels like to not be able to breathe, so I write about that…and imagine one step farther, based on research and my own ideas. These characters aren’t me, but they have pieces of my emotions inside them.

So no, I was never bullied at that summer camp you sent me to, Mom and Dad. No, I never snuck out of the cabin after hours. No, I was never a suicidal twelve-year-old, and no, I’ve never lost sight of the line between reality and imagination.

…or at least, I’ve always found it again in time.

About Mary:

Mary Pletsch is a glider pilot, toy collector and graduate of the University of Huron College, the Royal Military College of Canada and Dalhousie University. She is the author of several previously published short stories in a variety of genres, including science fiction, steampunk, fantasy and horror. She currently lives in New Brunswick with Dylan Blacquiere and their four cats.

Writing Emotional Dark Fiction: A Letter to My Estranged Father

October 19, 2015

fictorians

Guest Posts Narrative Voice 1 Comment

Guest Post by Matthew Warner

Dear Dad,

I never told you the details of my one-week stint in a psychiatric unit while in college. You frankly don’t deserve them, but they’re good fodder for this column about how to write emotional dark fiction.

I’m too old to care that this is too personal of a thing to share publicly. I own my skeletons, unlike you. It’s what gives the stories I tell an emotional engine. Characters who connect with readers on a gut level are more compelling than any supernatural horror I can imagine.

Your fecal screed to me of 2003 — the last time you ever spoke to me — sits in my craw. You couldn’t understand why I was so angry with you for cheating on Mom and divorcing her, so you attributed my reaction to mental illness. You wrote, “The mental breakdown that you had in college was when the bull should have been taken by the horns. But, like always, it was brushed under the rug to ‘go away.’ . . . It is clear that when you were medicated during the incident at JMU, the change in your personality was obvious and positive.”

Yeah. A short-term prescription for Navane, an antipsychotic, is what fixed my wagon. What a wonder drug.

You believe that in 1993, I had a psychotic episode, rooted in mental health issues I inherited from your own father. (Of course, you never said you suffer from any issues yourself. I guess manic depression is a recessive gene, huh?)

Here’s what really happened. I was having a hard time adjusting to university life. I felt like an outsider. I was always lonely, desperate to fill the romantic void. I had deep feelings of social inadequacy that dated back to being bullied in elementary school. The things that gave my life shape — my studies, my writing, my piano playing — weren’t enough. Religion might have filled that void, but I was too turned off by the ugly Christian fundamentalism I encountered on campus.

Worst of all, I was terribly anxious of contracting a sexually transmitted disease. Although I couldn’t establish a long-term romance with anyone, I sometimes lured women into the sack. But I would stupidly not use protection, and then I would spend months driving myself down chasms of fear about whether I’d contracted AIDS. I couldn’t tell you about any of this. How could I? You were so judgmental.

You know what? I hadn’t grown up yet. I had issues. I didn’t exit puberty until age twenty-five, just in time for you to leave Mom for your aerobics partner. That’s my excuse.

Shortly before my twentieth birthday, a friend and I went skiing in Canada during spring break. We smoked a little weed and hit the slopes. One day, he brought out some psychedelic mushrooms, which I’d never had before. “These are really good,” he said as I ate them, not revealing that they were laced with amphetamine. Soon, I was not only skiing down the slopes, I was damn near doing cartwheels down them.

When we got home, I came down with bronchitis. And I didn’t take good care of myself. I kept attending classes and not resting. I became sicker.

Finally, I fainted during a music rehearsal at the Methodist youth fellowship. I fell backward off the piano bench and gave myself a concussion on the floor. The paramedics took me across the street to Rockingham Memorial Hospital. They did a blood test, and guess what they found? They assumed I was a drug addict. The ER doctors said they wanted me to get some “mild” counseling, and they would pursue legal channels if I refused. Next thing I knew, I was in the fifth floor psychiatric unit.

During the next week, the concussion and bronchitis improved, and as I came off the heavy medications they gave me, I started to feel like my old self. But something else positive happened during those thrice-daily group therapy sessions with people who’d attempted suicide or who were recovering from overdoses. I seized the opportunity to talk about my problems. I opened up about my anxieties and insecurities. I had private talks with a psychiatrist, who helped me browbeat myself into behaving more responsibly. Over the subsequent months, I may not have transformed into a happy, bushy tailed college boy, but I became a slightly more self-accepting one.

You never considered the possibility I may have taken a step toward maturity. Instead, this episode went onto your scoreboard, detailed in your letter, for Reasons Why Matt Is An Ungrateful Mentally-Ill Son And I’m A Good Father.

We have issues to work out, you and I. If you’re brave enough to read my new collection from Thunderstorm Books and Cemetery Dance Publications, DOMINOES IN TIME, you might appreciate how complex and passionate my feelings are about you. When a writer taps dark emotions, it makes for better dark fiction.

Maybe, Dad, you’ll understand how my stay in the psychiatric unit informed the story “At Death We’ll Not Part.” Maybe you’ll see how your divorcing Mom influenced “Second Wind.”

And hell, maybe you’ll grow up, too.

“Of all that is written, I love only what a man has written with his blood.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Visit Matthew Warner at matthewwarner.com.

Using What Scares You

October 8, 2015

Leigh Galbreath

Action & Adventure Conflict Craft & Skills Fantasy Genres Horror Leigh Galbreath Narrative Voice Romance & Erotica Science Fiction Self-Awareness Social Combat Subtle Confict The Writing Process No Comments

I went to a publishing conference in New York some years ago, and an agent said that a great author is a great storyteller. You can have all the craft and technique in the world, but if you aren’t a good storyteller, you won’t become a true success. Alternately, you can have the worst craft and know nothing of technique and be the next huge star of the publishing world. Yet, she could not define what made a good storyteller, like it’s some nebulous thing that cannot be truly understood. She was in the “you can’t learn it, you just have to be born with it” camp, a believer in which I am not.

But what is good storytelling if it’s not the expert use of craft and technique? I’ve been puzzling over it for years and I think I finally figured out a rather large component—a good storyteller is one who can tap into emotion with every word.

We humans, above all else, are creatures of emotion. We like to think we are creatures of intellect and reason and morality, but these things are constructs we’ve created to put limitations and controls over the nasty, hind-brain, instinctual animal side that is human emotion. Emotion motivates us in pretty much everything we do. Our desire to feel happiness, love, safety, pleasure all shape our choices. Our desire to not feel pain, sorrow, grief, all push us to move in a particular direction, even if it’s subconsciouly. Every choice we make is rooted in our emotional health, or lack thereof. Our need to feel one emotion over another.

The crazy thing is, everyone human being past, present, or future feels the same emotions. Emotion is the one, true universal language. It is the one thing we all as a species, share, and no emotion is more familiar to us all than fear. Writing our fear, more than any other emotion, can truly raise a writer’s prose to new heights.

There’s two ways of writing what frightens us, and both are equally beneficial. The first is the obvious definition—if we want our audience to fear something, start with what we, ourselves, are the most afraid of. J.K. Rowling once said that she decided to put giant spiders in the Forbidden Forest in Harry Potter and Chamber of Secrets because she herself was afraid of spiders. Similarly, Peter Jackson’s rendering of Shelob in the Return of the King was built off his personal arachnophobia. Think of it as a mind hack. It’s easier to write what we know, how we personally feel about a particular thing or situation when we write about something that makes us feel the emotion we want to invoke. It’s easy to make spiders terrifying if the author is terrified of the creepy bastards, but harder to make a horse frightening if they make the author all warm and fuzzy on the inside.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a monster. It can be a fear of rejection, a fear of success, a fear of fear itself. It’s making the fear personal that’s the key, no matter what genre or sub-genre we are writing. Every genre deals with some sort of fear, and the more we make that fear our own, the easier it is to make the reader feel it with us.

The second way of looking at writing what one fears isn’t so obvious, and it’s something we all face at one point or another. It’s taking on those scenes that make us cringe. You know those scenes, the ones that make us uncomfortable or leave us at a loss. Wether its fight scenes or sex scenes or scenes of moral uncertainty, we all have a scene somewhere that tempts us to just skip it and have it happen off screen. After all, the worst fear of any writer is that an important, necessary scene will suck and bring the whole piece down.

But nine times out of ten, that seemingly impossible scene will become one of the more powerful moments in a story. Dan Wells once said that a scene in I Am Not a Serial Killer, where the protagonist draws a knife on his mother, was an especially difficult scene to write, but the final product is one of the most emotionally impactful moments in the book. Alternately, I have a friend who kept skipping over scenes where people were fighting (verbally or physically) because he wasn’t comfortable with violence, but it left his work lacking conflict and the story suffered because of it.

Part of why this is so effective, I think, is that the struggle to get the scene written and fear that it won’t work makes us slow down and take a long, hard look at what we’re doing, much more so than a scene that just plops itself down on the page. Difficult scenes force us to pull out all the stops, to dig deep and give it our all, thereby forcing us to put our best work on the page because anything less would just prolong the torture. Also, fear is conflict, and whether it’s felt by the character or just subconsciously by the author, it puts an edge, an undercurrent in the scene that can lift it above simple prose. It’s always the scenes I didn’t want to write, the ones that kick my ass, that I always end up the most satisfied with, and I think it’s because of the fear. If I wasn’t afraid of what I was writing, the writing would not be as good. Period.

Use the fear, share it. It won’t be easy, but more likely than not, your readers will feel it, and what they feel is what will stay with the reader long after they finish the story.