We interrupt our usual Herc-o-meter to bring you all up to speed on a couple of things. That, and work has been worky today, so I haven’t had a chance to do any of my writerly things yet.
First of all, thanks to Karen Mahoney for providing this link to Paperback Writer about living the writing life. Now of course, a lot of us have read these sort of things before. There’s even one of these as the front piece of my very own journal. Why continue to beat this dead horse?
Because of this very important contention: However you live your writing life, remember this: the only person who can make it better is you.
I want you all to stay happy out there, and if you’re not, find a way to make yourself so. If you can’t, get some serious help.
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Um…something else. I hope you’ll talk about it with me. So, I’ve recently been reading a lot. Because that’s what writers do. I’ve been using this reading to figure out what kind of writer I want to be and what kind of writer I am.
A few months ago, I suggested that heart was most important to me in a story. If story didn’t have a relationship and characters for me to latch onto, to identify with, I wasn’t going to read it. The same is true of my writing. I’m not going to write stories without relationships. You can’t count on me to be a world builder. If I feel my characters are sketches, I start over.
One of my fellow writers, Maggie Stiefvater, asked if the same characters showed up in my stories. Maybe in the first drafts. I am so into the characters that they start becoming radically different people in the rewrites, usually not the same people to me. Perhaps others can tell me where my characters are similar, but to me they are all very different. God to me is in the tiny details.
And something else I am learning. It is very hard for a writer to maintain a distinctive voice. I truly admire the writers that rise above and sound like their own men and women. The popularity of certain genres and certain writers mean that there will be a lot of published imitators. I work very hard at picking unique voices to read.
The last several anthologies I’ve read have that samey kind of taste, like someone’s left a strong white onion in the fridge, and it’s permeated everything. That Urban Fantasy Onion. That Speculative Fiction onion, or whatever. When you open an anthology, I always hope it will be more like opening a box of chocolates.
So, it seems that an important writing issue for me will be striving to stay true to a unique voice, whatever it is for the project that I’m working on. Who are the author’s you think have unique voices, and what makes them unique, IYO?
Catherine
