Voice is often said to be one of the most important skills you need to master as a writer. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen agents and editors say, “A strong voice is vital. Plot, pacing, character–we can work on those. But a voice is harder to fix.”

That said, voice is easy to overdo, and that’s something I don’t see advice on as often. I love, love, love a strong voice in a book, but I’ve read several novels I would’ve probably enjoyed more had the voice been toned down.

This seems to be most common in YA, where some authors try so hard to get the teen voice right that it ends up coming across as fake. It gets very tiring, very quickly when every other paragraph goes along the lines of, “Ugh, I totally hate this grade-A jackass, and what in the name of all that’s holy is up with his clothes? Seriously.”

Sometimes, less is more.

It happens in other ways as well, though. Sometimes if you want to achieve a certain rhythm or tone of ‘pretty prose,’ you end up repeating yourself. Sometimes if you want to try to be funny, you end up trying way too hard, or your sentences get so tangled that it’s hard to figure out what’s going on. (Cough, cough. That would be me.)

What it comes down to is this: Voice needs to inform the character and the tone. Voice needs to intrigue the reader. What voice should never do is detract from the story. If at any point voice gets in the way of clarity, emotion, or character development, you’ll snap the reader right out of that spell you’ve worked so hard to cast.

When editing low-budget indie flick Avengers, Joss Whedon purposefully went through and cut out a lot of his voice. He has a very distinct style as a writer, and didn’t think it would serve him well for this movie. Opinions on this seem to vary–I’ve seen complaints that him cutting out his voice made the movie dull and mainstream, while others lauded it as a good decision. He kept his voice, just streamlined it.

I have problems with some of Joss Whedon’s work, but I’m a nineties child: I grew up with Buffy, and grew to love Angel and Firefly as well. Still, I’m in the camp that says Whedon made the right choice to tone down his voice. These weren’t his characters. They have a history–both as comic characters, where they’ve existed for years, and as movie characters, where they were written by other writers. It’d be very jarring to suddenly have them talking in Whedon dialogue.

A similar thing can apply to your work. Often, it’s good to go all-out. Pour as much of you in the book as possible. Other times, your voice as an author may not serve the story you’re trying to tell, and you’ll want to reel yourself in a little. I think both skills are essential to developing as an author.

Once you learn to strike the right balance, the story wins.

When printing my MS in order to line edit, I’ll usually print double-sided. It’s not standard MS format, but hey, it’s just for me, and it saves paper.

When a scene is draggy, though, it helps to print it out single-sided. That allows you to spread the pages out next to each other and see a lot of things in one glance instead of endlessly scrolling in Word/Scrivener/insert program of your choice.

What I like to do is marking similar ‘types’ of narration in the sidelines. If you have a lot of exposition, you can see if you’re repeating yourself. If you have a lot of dialogue, see if you can condense it. If you have a lot of description, see if you need to lump it together more, or vice versa.

This kind of overview is nigh impossible to achieve on the computer, and makes it a lot easier to see what needs fixing, and how.

Bonus: it’ll give you no choice but to clean up your desk/table to make room for all those pages.

Current progress: page 320 / 320

Yeah, you read that right. Whoo!

Here’s another thing I’ve discovered in my endless quest to annihilate all words: set arbitrary goals.

This ties in with the previous tip: If you don’t cut, you don’t know what can be cut. By the time you start line editing, you’ll probably have read your manuscript half a dozen times already. Every sentence will look more necessary than it is. You can read a page twice and get away with only cutting a handful of words that stand out as useless. It’s only when you force yourself to take a better look that you notice the rest.

Try telling yourself this:

• I have to cut at least 15/25/30 words per page.
• When the last line of the paragraph is only two or three words long, cut that paragraph until those words fit on the previous line.
• When the last page in a chapter is only a few lines long, cut that chapter to get rid of that extra page.
• When a scene feels draggy but you can’t pinpoint why, tell yourself to go back and cut three paragraphs.

This is arbitrary, you might argue. What if you can’t get rid of those extra words or sentences? You’ll be cutting words for the sake of cutting words, not because it makes for better writing.

The goal here isn’t to cut words, but to see if you can. If you go into a scene with a specific goal as opposed to “see what stands out at me as unnecessary,” you’ll be a lot more critical. I’ve cut tons of words this way from scenes that I was sure were 100% edited, done, all words necessary.

Once you’ve set a goal and re-read the page five times looking for ways to achieve that goal, and there’s no tiny voice in the back of your mind whispering, Do you need all the emotional cues? You know, you’re kind of repeating yourself with that paragraph. then yeah, please do move on to the next page before shredding your work to pieces unnecessarily.

Most of the time, though, you’ll probably spot a couple of new ways to trim. And, if you’re anything like me, it’ll be embarrassingly obvious. *g*

Current progress: page 134 / 334.

I’ve actually edited more than 134 pages; this is how much was left after all my cuts. *cracks knuckles*

Since I’m knee-deep in line edits, I thought I’d share my method and why it works for me. Although I work entirely digitally up to this point, line editing is definitely where you’ll want to print your book and go at it with a red pen.

Reason number one: The words will look different on the page.

Reason number two: You can get away from the computer, which helps against distractions.

Reason number three: Your changes are less final, so it’s easier to be ruthless. After all, you’re not actually incorporating the changes into your file yet. You know you’ll get a second chance of considering your changes.

That last reason is the biggest for me. If your goal is to cut, be vicious. I recommend not just looking at sentences and thinking of how you can rephrase it or remove words, but actually doing it. It’s easy to stick to sounding out sentences in your mind, or to think, “No, this word is essential.” Don’t fall into that trap. Take out your fat red pen, slash through any dubious words, and re-read the paragraph. It may work better than you think.

If not? Underline your change with a green pen to remind yourself to ignore it when you’re entering your edits on the computer. You may be surprised at how rarely the green pen will come into play, though.

You can find this advice anywhere writing advice is found, and it’s damn solid advice at that: don’t sit around and wait for responses, be it from beta readers, agents, or editors. Spend that time writing another book.

This is a good idea for several reasons:

• It’ll keep you busy, so you’re less hung up on waiting.
• You’ll need to write other books anyway, whether the current WIP works out or not.
• You’re improving your skills as a writer.

I’d like to add another reason–namely, emotional distance. You need a new project to fall in love with. (If you’re not in love with whatever you’re writing, you may be writing the wrong thing.)

If you love whatever you’re working on, you’re less invested in the old project. It makes it easier to deal with waiting (so much waiting) and rejections won’t hurt as much. After all, you’re looking forward to the day when your shiny new project can go into the world. You’re giddy thinking of people’s reactions to it. Your day is filled with thoughts of how to fix X plot problem or strengthen Y’s characterization instead of how long such-and-such agent is taking.

And if a rejection comes in for the old book, it’ll still sting, but you’ll think, Well, my new project is better, anyway.

You have something else to pin your hopes on, and that makes all the difference.

In chatting with a friend about query letters the other day, I finally put into words something that’s been bothering me for a while: namely, a lot of writers’ obsessive focus on query letters. I see phrases like successful query letters and the query that got so-and-so their agent tossed around all the time. They bother me.

Don’t get me wrong. I love reading those queries–but because they tell me about the book, not because of the letter itself.

Yes, query letters are hugely important. They’re an agent’s first look at you and your work. But query letters need to accomplish two things, and two things only:

Show the agent you’re a professional. This is done through the way you approach your query letter–Is it well-written? Is it the right length? Formatted normally? Is the information presented in the right way, and is all this information relevant? Rhetorical questions? Publishing credits are an optional bonus.
Make the agent want to read your book. The most professional query letter around isn’t going to make an agent request your book if it doesn’t sound like something they want to read.

Here’s a tip: Part two is more important than part one. If you mess up in one or two areas on the professionalism front, it’s usually not a deal-breaker. If the included pages blow the agent’s mind, they may overlook a query that’s a little too long, or a bio that includes a full sentence about your cat, or weirdly spaced formatting.

That doesn’t mean it’s not important to get the query letter right. If you have a great book, you want as many good agents as possible to read it, to improve the odds of finding someone you click with who loves your book. You want to be on your best behavior. Please–obsess over queries, analyze them, research them, write a dozen drafts and get them critted. Agents will thank you for it. You’ll thank yourself for it.

But at some point, you have to let it go. When you’re freaking out over whether the title of the book goes before or after the pitch, or whether you should use “YA” or “young adult” as the genre, or whether you should or shouldn’t mention that you’re a librarian when it takes up a whopping two or three extra words in your bio, when you’re pondering whether to round up to the nearest thousand words or the nearest five thousand, or whether your word count should be written with a comma or a K or or or…

Let it go.

There is no such thing as a query that gets you an agent. Novels do that. If you want to see a successful query letter, don’t just look at queries that resulted in representation–you can look at any queries that resulted in requests.

That’s the sole purpose of a query letter: To make the agent want to see more of your manuscript. After that, the best query letter in the world isn’t going to help you.

Put that energy in your novel, instead.

If you’re starting out as a writer, one of the best things to do is follow a lot of agent blogs. Tons of great agents keep blogs, Twitter accounts, hang out on forums, and do regular interviews. They’re a wealth of information and keeping an eye on them is possibly the best way to see what happens behind the scenes and prepare yourself for life as a professional writer.

These agents are accessible to us, and we’re grateful–and as a result it’s easy to fall into the trap of labeling them your dream agent.

There’s nothing wrong with ranking certain agents higher than others because they seem to like your genre/style, because they really get the business, or because they’re just plain nice. What is wrong, though, is if you focus only on knowledge and enthusiasm and forget to take other things into account. How happy are their clients? How are the agent’s sales?

I’ve seen people declare “X is my dream agent! Have you read her blog?!” while X had only been on the block for a month and her blog, while friendly and informative, could have been written by any well-informed author just as easily.

On one memorable occasion, shortly after a well-known author went into agenting, a querying writer declared him a fantastic agent. To my knowledge, the author and agent had never interacted. This is a problem.

An even bigger problem? When I say “shortly”, I mean that the agent had been an agent for no more than three days.

The agent disappeared from the face of the earth not long after. I don’t think he sold a single book.

Don’t get me wrong, newer agents are fantastic opportunities for authors. Heck, I signed with one. New agents are actively looking for clients, can dedicate more time to their authors, and may be more willing to take risks. Keep in mind, though, not to idolize someone solely because they’re nice or because you see them around the blogosphere all the time. Ask yourself: Are you confusing promising and approachable for being a good agent?

This is your career at stake. Be judicious. Be cautious. Be selective.

For the first time, I’m participating in the Goodreads reading challenge; my goal is to read sixty books in 2012. In trying to get a head start, I’ve read five books so far and I’m merrily devouring a sixth.

All this reading has made me notice something that most of us do subconsciously on some level, but it’s still good to make yourself aware of: ways to define and underline characterization.

The best ways to accomplish this still lie in voice, action, opinions, decisions, dialogue, etc., but there are ways to weave characterization into your narrative that will make your characters immensely more vivid. This works especially well for non-PoV characters, who–outside of dialogue–don’t have the benefit of voice to show off their personality or traits.

In fact, I sort of characterized myself in the first paragraph of this post: I’m merrily devouring a sixth.

This tells you a lot about me. It tells you I’m probably in a good mood both at the time of writing this and when reading the book; it tells you how quickly I’m reading this book, it tells you I’m the type to get excited about reading.

Using strong verbs or well-placed adjectives/adverbs is a great way to spice up your writing, but you can use them for more than that. If you want to show character through your regular narrative–descriptions, getting-from-here-to-there parts, otherwise insignificant actions–you have several options, equally valid. Which one you want to use depends on several factors.

Word Choice

Kelly climbed over the fence.

Kelly clambered over the fence.

Kelly leaped over the fence.

Kelly shot over the fence.

Kelly glid over the fence.

Is your character straight-forward? A little clumsy? Athletic? Determined? Mysterious? Try to look at their actions and which word best showcases their traits.

Earlier, I said I devoured a book. This has eager connotations. I could also have said I inhaled the book, which would make me seem more thoughtful, while still going through the pages quickly. What if I’d simply read it? Or worked my way through? Raced through? Skimmed it? Studied it?

When you still have little to go on with a character, the perfect word can help them crystallize in the reader’s mind; with established characters, it’ll help keep them vivid.

This method works well because of how invisible it is. It rarely takes up extra space, it doesn’t draw much attention to itself, and it doesn’t impede the pacing in any way.

Adverbs

Cheerily, Nathan stirred his soup.

Thoughtfully, Nathan stirred his soup.

Rapidly, Nathan stirred his soup.

This method is probably the trickiest. Adverbs and adjectives aren’t exactly well-loved, and for good reason. They’re easily overused, and often count as telling instead of showing. Instead of saying that Nathan cheerfully stirred his soup, you can show him smiling, show his spoon clanking off the bowl, etc. In a lot of cases, that’ll be better.

Sometimes you want the adverb, though. It’s effective. It gets the job done, in and out, often without affecting your pacing or drawing attention to itself.

Aside from the risk of telling, there’s the risk of voice–that is to say, if your PoV character is distraught over the loss of their cat, they may not use words like ‘cheerily’ to describe someone. They may not even notice those kinds of details in the first place. Make sure the observation works on every level.

All of this makes the adverb method risky, but it’s also a golden opportunity–you get to show character twice. Your descriptions will reflect on both your PoV character and the observed character.

A subtle difference between this and method #1 is that adverbs often don’t directly show character, but rather mood or intention. The reader will instead infer character from how they feel about the activity. This works best when the adverb contradicts the action.

After all, if Curtis is diligently studying for a test, it’ll tell you something about him, for sure–but it’ll tell you way more if he’s excitedly studying for a test. If he makes the bed, he can do it quickly or he can do it angrily. Surprise your reader. If your adverb doesn’t completely change the way your reader looks at the action, the adverb may not be necessary at all.

Action

Alisha gingerly climbed the fence.

Alisha curled her fingers into the wire mesh of the fence, her hands spaced roughly a foot apart. She pulled at the fence as if it’d give way, and when it didn’t, her arms slackened again. With narrowed eyes, she glanced up, assessing the height. She placed the toe of one shoe in an opening…

This is showing versus telling, akin to Nathan stirring his soup. You can insert all kinds of lovely details into these sorts of descriptions, and–if the character is a secondary character being studied by your PoV character–great observations that will reflect on both characters. What sorts of things does your PoV character notice? How do they feel about it? (A carefully placed adverb here may work wonders.)

In general, this is a fantastic way to show character. However, take care to only use it when the observations are relevant. Don’t place undue importance on something totally insignificant unless it reflects on your PoV character somehow, eg. they’re feeling introspective; they’re obsessing over the secondary character; that seemingly insignificant action is actually a metaphor or somehow poignant…

Otherwise, it risks confusing your readers–wait, why are we getting three paragraphs on Nathan stirring his soup?–and bogging down the pacing. This method works best when you need some breathing room in your narrative.

One word of caution: Contradictions in characters make the world go ’round, but it’s often not a good idea when introducing minor characters. If you have a character being fastidious in one scene, but inexplicably sloppy in the next one, readers may have a hard time getting a mental grasp of that character. Instead, why not have two or three examples of them being neat? Then when the character is suddenly sloppy in the next scene, it’s clear to readers that it’s a break in routine that will likely be explained soon, rather than the author being inconsistent.

I think all of the above methods have their place. Your gut will probably help you choose, but it never hurts to be conscious of why that method works. By taking a look at your PoV character, your sentence flow, your pacing, and what you’re hoping to accomplish, you’ll be able to justify why your chosen method works best for your purposes–or why it doesn’t, and why a different approach may be needed.

Any additional thoughts are more than welcome

In the past I’ve frequently and loudly proclaimed my love of outlining. Over my years of assessing my own stories and beta reading other people’s, though, I’ve come to notice a bad habit that I suspect comes as a side effect of outlining: rushing through the emotional beats.

What happens, I think, is that authors will plan several scenes and tick off the boxes as they write. For example, a dramatic show-down needs to happen for the plot to move forward. You need scene A before you can move into scene B.

It’s dangerous, though, to get too caught up in that plan. Authors may completely forget to address the emotional fall-out from scene A in their eagerness to tackle scene B. We’ll be too focused on connecting the dots, and not focused enough on the scene-to-scene emotional continuity.

Let the story flow.

We need to make sure to address the consequences of scene A either before or, better yet, during scene B. These consequences can be emotional — for instance, if your MC’s sister ends up in the hospital in scene A, you need to address that in your next scene. Would your character feel guilty, concerned, angry, scared? Show us.

Even if you do have your character feel those emotions at the end of scene A, if scene B picks up as though nothing had happened, you’ll leave your reader wondering why your character’s reaction changed so suddenly. Is this reaction a defense mechanism? Did she stop caring? What was the point of that, then? What’s going on?

Similarly, characters may rotate through emotions far too quickly in scenes. In real life, emotions tend to linger. Having your character do a one-eighty too often risks giving your reader emotional whiplash — which may pull them out of the scene.

Continuity is just as important on a plot level. If a character encounters a mystery, keep it fresh on the reader’s minds. As writers, we’re taught to focus only on scenes that move the plot forward, but that introduces the risk of introducing a plot point and then shoving it in the background until it becomes relevant. This leaves the reader hanging: Maybe what happened wasn’t such a big deal after all? Should I still be worried? I thought it was important, but now it’s like the characters have forgotten about it.

Make sure the connective tissue is sound. The tighter you weave in emotions and plot cues, the easier you’ll carry your reader along for the ride.

I still love outlines. You’ll have to pry them out of my cold, dead hands… but I still have to keep in mind, sometimes, not to rush through them. Sometimes that means tweaking a sentence here and there — a casual reminder of a plot event; a tight smile instead of a grin; wondering quietly how X is doing. Sometimes it means inserting an extra scene for breathing room. It can be a pain if you just want to get this event over with already, but it’s always worth it.

So what do you think? Is this a problem mainly outliners face, or do pantsers fall prey to it just as often?

Most of you will probably already have seen Rachel Aaron’s post “How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day”; if you haven’t, I recommend checking it out, because what she says is spot-on.

I’m a big believer in “as long as the job gets done”; fast writer, slow writer, pantser, outliner, scheduler, slacker. There is no right way to write.

That said, if you want to try writing faster to see if that works for you, I’d definitely give her method a try.

I do have a tiny addition of my own. See, for the most part, I subconsciously used Rachel’s exact approach during my first NaNoWriMo, leading to my famous (ahem) five-day win/ten-day novel/the book that got me my agent. I had lots of time available, I got super excited, and I planned like the wind.

The one thing I did differently was that I didn’t plan everything at the start of the day, necessarily. I never wrote for several hours straight. I’d write for one hour, using NaNo chatroom word wars (but Twitter or Gchat would work just as well), then spend the next hour doing chores around the house, tinkering with the scene I’d just written, and think about my next scene in-depth.

During the one-hour word wars, I’d write about 2000-3000 words. During the hours in-between, I’d write maybe 200 words, but mostly I was hashing out the details and fueling the enthusiasm for my next scene. And for me, it worked. In future revision rounds, I added major subplots, cut scenes, took out over thirty thousand words, changed the book to YA, but the overall structure of the book remained pretty much identical to that first draft.

I love writing fast. I’ve never been able to match my FAE PRINT speeds, sticking to 2000-6000 words a day, but there’s nothing like being so caught up in your story that you don’t even have the time to start doubting yourself. Writing begets writing. You get caught up in this whirl-wind of creation and by the time insecurities should be creeping in you’ve long passed The End and it’s time to take a step back and plot out edits. All of a sudden, in the time it might normally take to finish a video game (at a normal-ish pace) or work your way through a TV series, you’ve added another novel to your name and you get to show your CPs something shiny.

Yeah, I’m totally in the mood to write another novel now. Hah! Rachel’s post reminded me that I really need to try another two-week novel sometime.

There’s one particular trick in that post I look forward to using: spicing up even the less interesting scenes to make them exciting. Of course you try to avoid boring scenes at all costs, but I’ve rarely actually sat down to brainstorm ways to rack up the tension on a scene-by-scene basis.

And man, do I look forward to giving that a try now.