Voice Envy

Not long ago, I started sending out queries for Lost in a Heartbeat. I didn’t expect a lot of agents to jump on it since it deals with a tough issue. It really isn’t for everyone. Fortunately, among the form rejections were two personalized ones. The agents liked the concept (yay!), but my voice was an issue. Groan.

I also entered last month's Miss Snark’s First Victim Secret Agent Contest (see her blog for more info on future ones). The Secret Agent was intrigued with my first 250 words, but thought the voice was bland. Talk about a left hook to the ego. Luckily, one of my brilliant crit partners had also read the entries. She told me the ones that grabbed her attention were the ones written in a chick lit voice. She was envious because that wasn’t her natural voice—it was mine.

Now the thing is, I'm jealous of her voice. I also love the voices of Sarah Dessen, Alyson Noel, Lisa McMann, and Richelle Mead. The trouble is I love their voices so much I lost sight of my own. It wasn’t like I was trying to emulate them. Now that would have been a huge disaster. But my Voice Envy had seriously hurt me.

Finding your voice is tricky, especially when you’re a new writer. It’s so easy to want to write like someone else. But even when you’ve established your voice, it so easy to let Voice Envy sway you. Sometimes it works. And sometimes the results are disastrous—as I’ve proven.

For more information on finding your voice, check out the blogs of Mary Kole (agent with Andrea Brown Literary Agency), Elana Johnson (contributor of the Query Tracker Blog), and Christine Fonseca for their brilliant insight.

Has anyone else struggled to find and keep their voice? Or is there an author whose voice you envy? Just beware of that nasty old Voice Envy. You never know when it might strike.

So I’ve learned my lesson. I’m now storing my voice in a safe place so I don’t lose it next time. Somewhere safe from Voice Envy.

The Snowball Effect

I was recently editing Lost in a Heartbeat for voice when I came to the following flashback:

“So where’s your boyfriend?” he asked.

“How do you know I have one?” I did, of course, but Liam wasn’t there. There were only a few weeks left of summer vacation then he’d be leaving for college, so I didn’t think there was anything wrong flirting with this guy. Neither relationship was going to go anywhere, either way.

But I realized the main character, Calleigh, wasn’t the kind of girl to flirt with another guy when she had a boyfriend. Even if the boyfriend was going away to college and she'd no intention of having a long distance relationship. So I tweaked it:

“So where’s your boyfriend?” he asked.

“What makes you think I have one?” Liam and I had broken up only a few days before that. Or rather, I had dumped a Blue Raspberry Slurpee on his lap after Alejandra told me the latest gossip. He’d been caught getting all hot and steamy with a junior varsity cheerleader at a party just the week before. We hadn’t officially broken up, but I figured the Slurpee incident pretty much said it all.

Great except for one problem. Yep, you guessed it. It caused a snowball effect. Other sections then had to be rewritten because of this one little change.

Yes, it was a lot of work, but it was worth it. The result was a domino effect that started with Liam cheating on Calleigh, and which resulted in the story problem. Now you see why I love editing. *grins*

Has this happened to you? Has one little change in your novel led to a snowball effect that you were excited about? One you never expected when you wrote your first draft—or edited your fifth?

Give Your Manuscript a Voice

Last week, I talked about the mysterious voice. This week I’m referring to a different voice. The one linked to your computer. H.L Dyer from the Query Tracker blog posted two weeks ago a suggestion on how to use your computer's voice when editing your novel (or term paper). It was a brilliant suggestion that I couldn’t wait to share with you.

According to the comments that were generated by the post, there’re several ways of doing this, including downloading programs. If you want to learn more about those, or if you use an Apple instead of a PC, then check out the post. Otherwise, here are the step-by-step instructions for giving your manuscript or term paper a computer-generated voice. I’ll warn you now, it’s not perfect. Sometimes the pronunciation is off, but it’s good enough for our purpose.

1. Copy the pages you want to use from Word.


2. Go to ACCESSORIES in the start-up menu.


3. Click on NOTEPAD and paste your Word document there.


4. Under ACCESSORIES, open the EASE OF ACCESS folder then click on NARRATOR. This will open the ‘text to voice’ function on your computer.


5. To listen to your document, press the INSERT key and F7 at the same time. Anna will start reading your assignment.

To edit, I prefer to read from a hard copy of my document and follow along with Anna. When I notice an awkward sentence, typo, missing or extra word, etc., I highlight it and continue through the document until it’s finished. I then go back and edit those highlighted parts.

Now why go to all this effort when you could easily read it out loud? Well, because your eyes and brain love to play tricks on you and it’s easy to miss those errors. I find I tend to read what isn’t necessarily on my page, but what I think should be there. This is especially true if I’ve read my manuscript out loud several times. My brain becomes programmed to read it a certain way regardless if I’ve made changes to it.

You can also save your document as a PDF file then used the read along feature associated with the program. I tried it and hated it. It made a mess of my manuscript, especially since it had problems pronouncing words with contractions (e.g. don’t).

Give the above method a try. It’s definitely worth the effort.