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.

I’ve been quiet on chat/Twitter/this here blog lately, for two significant reasons: one, I’m lazy; two, the lovely Helen Corcoran decided to grace me with her presence. After spending several days getting up early, feeding her silly, and dragging her all across town, I’m back to sitting around in my PJs and trying desperately to catch up on chores and missed sleep.

I love playing tour guide, but sometimes the line blurs between tourist and tour guide. When I took Helen to see places I’d never visited before, speaking another language, I knew anyone overseeing me would assume I were a tourist. I felt  like a tourist, too: obsessively planning my day, constantly checking the map, thinking of where to eat and which bus to take. One moment, I’d be standing in line for the Anne Frank House and be offered an English flyer; the next, I’d be dragging Helen past the house where I grew up so she could see the old, overgrown graveyard where I used to play as a kid.

Being so immersed in American culture–American friends; American books; American television–has given me a very foreign perspective of the city I grew up in. I see everything in a new light. I appreciate the history, the context. Buildings I passed every day suddenly represent so much more. Food I snacked on as a kid is suddenly unique. Little details–the lights fixed around the bridges, the bike-only tickets for trains–stand out in a way they never did before.

It means I can point out fascinating details to visiting friends, because I know it’ll be special to them, but it also means it’s not as much a part of everyday life as it used to be. The normalcy is gone. It may be a good thing: It makes me appreciate my city more. At the same time, I’m not American, I’m not foreign, I am–or should be–Dutch through and through. There’s a fine line between appreciation and feeling like a tourist in your home town.

When I bike to the supermarket, I’ll catch myself thinking about how smooth and flat the bike paths are, I’ll marvel at how natural biking comes to me, I’ll smile at a mother balancing heavy groceries on the handlebars and two kids perched on the rack. Five years ago, I’d just be cursing myself for not checking if I needed to get milk.

It’s an odd feeling to have, and I’m not sure I like it.

Is it just a part of growing older and looking at things differently? Have you ever felt similarly?

Generally, I consider my procrastination to be less “procrastinating” and more “downtime”, which is necessary sometimes.

I mean, a lot of the time.

Anyway, I’ve noticed a pattern in that I procrastinate a lot more when it comes to editing than drafting. I love drafting. For one, I only draft when I’m excited about a story, so it’s much easier to dig into it and keep going. For another–and I think this is a much bigger reason for my lack of procrastination–you can measure your progress in drafting so much easier.

When you draft, it’s all about the words. A thousand a day? Two thousand? Four thousand? Since I’m not the type to go back and edit (unless I get really stuck), this is easy to measure.

When you edit–that’s tougher. In advance, you can’t know how much time and effort a certain edit will take (though the more you edit, the more accurately you can predict this). So how do you measure progress? Number of problems fixed? Number of scenes added? Number of words removed? Number of pages edited? Number of hours put in? It’s much less clear-cut. For someone as addicted to productivity and progress as I am, it makes editing a real chore.

I think another big reason might be the pressure. When you draft, there’s nothing to screw up. You can go all out. You can finally bring your characters to life. It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be there, and you know that when you start writing you’ll come up with all sorts of fantastic new things. It’s exciting. It’s adventure. It’s discovery. If you screw up, no big deal–that’s what edits are for!

And then the edits actually need to happen and you realize–gulp. Now it does need to be good. There’s no more discovery, there’s no more freedom. You have a plan, there’s no room for deviation, and there’s actually a real, tangible book there that you might screw up with these fixes.

So when I’m getting ready to edit something… I tend to drag it out. Oh, I need to do more brainstorming first. Oh, maybe I need to do another readthrough. Oh, I’ll just fix this tiny thing here first. Maybe I should get another beta reader’s opinion before I dig in? And wait, I may need to abruptly switch projects soon, so then it’s really senseless to start on editing now, and oh look, something shiny!

Editing. I fail at it.

All of this is a very long-winded way of saying that one of my delightful CPs OKed my editing ideas for BLINK last night, which means I have no more excuse not to dig into edits. As in, now. Today.

Maybe this post will stop me from procrastinating?

What about you? Any major difference in how you approach drafting vs. editing?

I’m knee-deep in messy, messy edits right now, but I figure y’all don’t want to hear about that.

Instead, I was curious to hear what you guys thought about the plot device of side characters withholding information from the narrator. I’ve been on a reading binge this past month, and that situation came up more than once, and it bothered me a lot more than I expected.

Not always, of course. When done right, there’s a lot of narrative tension in a situation like this. People around your character have information they’re trying to find out — heck, that happens in almost

No, when it bothers me is when I can't figure out why those people are being so secretive. I need to know and understand their motives. Otherwise this just seems like a cheap plot device. Sometimes it’s easy: They’re the villain! Other times, it’s never explained in the book and no reason I can come up with fits.

Another common trope is when the character is ostensibly on the main character’s side, but they’re being weirdly cryptic — and sometimes the MC won’t even press further! If the person sitting across from you has information that could save people’s lives, it’s really not the time for politeness. And again, explain why the character is so cryptic.

Basically, your character needs to be asking the same questions the reader is. And if they’re not getting answers? There had better be a good reason for it. Otherwise, the tension feels fake.

Am I the only one bothered by this plot device? Do share!

In preparation for my next book, I’ve been plotting, which lead me to thinking about how I plot. This will be my sixth book, though the seventh one I’ve plotted, and I’ve had mainly the same process throughout.

Though I’m big on outlining, I don’t outline by chapter or scene, but by major event/turning point. “They discover X problem; they try to solve it using ABC method; this backfires, complicating the problem and forcing them to do Y. This leads to Z, which propels them towards the climax, where the following happens…”

Usually, the climax is plotted out in more detail than the rest. I need to know I can resolve something in a satisfactory way before I start writing. I’m okay with semi-pantsing parts of the middle, but only as long as I know where everything will lead. That also helps me set things up properly, establish bits of world-building that turn out to be essential, etc.

I do try to avoid pantsing too much–at least beforehand. When I have those events, I try to think of how I can fill them in. A big part of this process is asking myself questions: Where would this event take place? Who would be present? Exactly *how* do they discover this bit of information? Does someone tell them or can they put the pieces together themselves? The latter is preferable; which pieces would they need and how could they go about getting it, given their current situation? Roughly how would this unfold if I think of it in scenes?

What I rarely do, though, is plot out the character development in that same way. I’ll have a rough idea of how my characters develop, how they feel about each other and how that changes (kissing! It changes into kissing!), and what their main internal conflicts are, but I don’t figure out how that translates into scenes. I try to keep it in mind when I plot out stuff, making sure they wouldn’t do anything that’s painfully out of character, but that’s it. The rest of the characterization only gets sorted out properly as I write.

In my outline, major turning point A may lead into dramatic show-down B, but while writing turning point A I might realize that my character needs to respond to this in some way. They need to have a breakdown or confront their rival or take a drastic action I hadn’t anticipated. I don’t plot by scene or chapter because I want to allow myself that freedom. So while I follow the outline, I pants in-between those planned bits.

A lot of other pantsing comes in as I write, too. I’ll realize that I need to introduce another character to make a certain scene work, but that character would interfere with future scenes. Or my characters know more than they should, so I need to change the outline to reflect that. I’ll realize I need to set up a certain event better, which requires a whole new scene or plotline. Or that the character who shows up early in the book and then disappears for the rest of it needs a pay-off of some sort.

That, or I’ll discover giant plot-holes, or rework my ending, or realize I should delete a character, or…

Whenever something like that comes up, I’ll take a step away from the manuscript, grab my outline, and hash it out until it works. This may take an hour, this may take a week. It also takes many panicky Tweets, but the exact number varies. Then something clicks, I figure it out, and return to the writing part of the program.

It’s sort of comfortable to have this process hashed out. I know what to expect. That doesn’t make it all puppies and rainbows–I have a million breakdowns while actually writing–but I know to expect that, too.

In a way I’m looking forward to it: it means I’m making progress.

You know how, when you complain about something online, things magically sort themselves out within the hour? (If not, you need to do more complaining. It works!)

Apparently it’s like that the other way around, as well. Boast about something online and it blows up in your face. Case in point: my post about how taking things to pen & paper solves every plot problem.

… you can guess what I’ve spent the entire weekend wailing over. Plots have rarely given me this much trouble before. When they do, it’s usually just one problem: right now, it’s a collection of them. And they’re significant, core problems, not just superficialities. (Well, some are. But those aren’t the ones I’m stressing out over.)

Which means my mission for today is: grab a hammer, shatter the plot, and piece it back together into something new, shiny, and awesome. Glittery glue optional.

But here’s what I really like about running into problems like these (yes, I’m a nerd, shut up): how much I learn. I run into different problems each book, and solving them gives me ammo to tackle the next book with. I also learn about the kinds of storylines I favor and how to twist those into something new — and I learn that, yes, I’m getting better at this whole writing thing with every project. All the problems I’m spotting with this book? I doubt I’d have noticed them a year ago.

I mean, it’s a little hard to keep all that in mind when seething over how there are way too many characters but none of them can be cut zomg, book, you suck!!… but, y’know, it’s there.

And that’s a good thing to remember.

Back to the grindstone!

They aren’t, actually. Many of them are quite nice. (Some are too nice.) I think I’d enjoy knowing them IRL, for the most part, although they’d probably just think me kinda weird.

But here’s one of the things I like to do when creating a character: I wonder what other people would think of them.

Her mother? Grandmother? Brother?

Her best friend since kindergarten? Her significant other? Her ex?

That neighbor kid she never really talks to?

All of those will shed a different light on her personality. My favourite one to figure out, though, is what her worst enemy would think. I take my character and look objectively at her flaws and attitude — and then I focus on loathing her with a passion.

Suddenly, characters I liked before are self-centered and annoying and try way, way too hard. And, wow, she’s not nearly as funny or cool as everyone else thinks she is. And why is he so shut-off the entire time? Does he think he’s better than us?

I think taking this approach helps a ton in making your character three-dimensional and real, as well as avoiding the dreaded Mary Sue syndrome.

You can take this a step further by turning the situation around. Take all of the above characters and ask the same questions about them. What’s everyone’s opinion on that ex-boyfriend — and why do those opinions differ from your character’s opinion on him? What does she see that others don’t? How is her opinion skewed?

Whenever I’m stuck on a character, these questions inevitably help break through that mental block.

Yesterday’s discussion made me ponder some other things: who gets to decide what is or isn’t hurtful or offensive?

My thoughts on this are excruciatingly simple. Members of the affected group get to decide that. If you’re outside that group, you don’t get to dictate what those people should and should not be feeling. That doesn’t mean your opinion is worth zilch, or that you can never say anything about a group you don’t belong to, and it certainly means that you can’t write about them. You might even do it awesomely, in which case, rock on with your bad self.

All it means is that, in the event of a disagreement, I’m likely to attach more value to the opinion of members within the affected group. After all, they have experiences with the issue that you don’t. If I had a math problem, I’d sooner listen to a mathematician than a high schooler; if I wanted help writing a male character, I’d ask a male friend instead of a female friend. To me, that seems entirely reasonable.

However, a lot of the time, these disagreements are between members of the group themselves. Different personalities, different experiences, and intersectionality all come into play, shedding light on the issue from different angles. That’s when you can have a discussion you can actually get something out of.

To harken this back to yesterday’s topic: if a rape survivor complains about being triggered or offended by a book, I think that’s important and something that needs to be respected. Though I disagree with the removal of the books from Bitch Media’s list for the reasons outlined yesterday, I was rather disturbed by how some blogs talked about the people who complained or those who removed the books.

Most of the time, when books are censored or challenged, the people complaining aren’t members of the affected group. From what I understand, this time, they are. Bitch Media tried to respect that. It’s not at all out of bounds for a feminist site to want to avoid recommending books they consider un-feminist. It’s not censorship. It’s saying, “Reader input has made me reconsider my opinion of this book, and now I no longer feel comfortable recommending it as explicitly feminist.” Wanting to fix your perceived mistakes is commendable.

As I mentioned yesterday, I just don’t think they went about it the right way. For one, they should have read the books before creating the list. For another, opinions on how feminist these books are or aren’t differ enough that the books aren’t out of place on the list. From what I’ve read, this is not remotely a clear-cut issue. Many people from the affected groups got something worthwhile out of these books, so I think the list’s creators were very short-sighted in removing them the way they did. Clearly, this was not a case of “rape survivors find these books offensive/hurtful/triggering”; some rape survivors did, and some found them empowering and insightful. A trigger label would have warned those who preferred to avoid this and still left the recommendation there for the many other people who might have gotten something useful out of it.

That said? The list was nothing more than the opinion of a few people online. They merely reconsidered their opinion on whether or not to recommend a book — there’s no censorship or banning involved anywhere. They might not have responded ideally, and we should certainly discuss the situation and the attitudes that came into play, but I don’t think they deserve anywhere near the amount of scorn they’ve received.

I suspect I’m very likely to have missed some important point, here, so feel free to comment and tell me I’m wrong.

I think most people reading this blog will have heard about the Bitch Media debacle by now. In short, they made a list of recommended books for feminist readers, some people complained about some of the books, and they replaced those books with others. Many angry blog posts ensued.

I found myself commenting on some friends’ blogs with these thoughts, and figured they might be better here.

I believe that acknowledging and respecting triggers is important. I believe that safe spaces are important, as well. The real world is ugly, yes, but if you know that topic X will trigger you, you’re damn well justified in avoiding it. Your mental well-being takes priority. Always.

That said, I also believe that you should be able to discuss and write about all kinds of sensitive topics in an honest, unflinching way. You can’t tiptoe or avoid around delicate topics, nor should you have to. They need to be discussed and dissected at length or we’ll make no progress at all.

However, safe spaces and frank discussion can work together. Like S. Jae-Jones said, that’s why trigger warnings exist; a simple parenthetical note would’ve sufficed. While I applaud their good intentions, there’s no sense in singling out some potential triggers while leaving others. People are triggered by different things in different ways. Either make it a completely safe list — in which case it would also be a very, very short list* — or stick with what you had and give people the information they need to choose for themselves..

Reasonable? Yay? Nay? I welcome discussion!

* Nothing wrong with having a list of ‘safe’ books. It’d just attract a different audience.

Hi, my name is Corinne, and I’m an outliner. And a pantser.

I apply this approach to both writing and life in general: I plan obsessively, then kinda wait to see how things pan out. This week, I made a list of things to do in January, and which project to prepare for to work on in February, and then what I’d work on in March after I finish the February project — and I basically already know half these things won’t happen.

Either something else will crop up, which I’m OK with. (For example, in August, I’d planned to work on a graphic novel project. Instead, I wrote 2/3rds of Heirs.) Since I’m not currently on deadline, I’m happy with productivity where I can get it.

That means I’m less happy about the other kind of plan-derailing: doing nothing whatsoever.

I mean, it’s fun, and I really do want to get the hang of those challenges in Batman: Arkham Asylum, but spending weeks lounging on the couch is not really too great when you have approximately a dozen projects all wanting your attention. The thing is, sometimes couch-lounging is what you need to do in order to be productive later on. So I’ve grown to accept that part of the process, too. I’ll work and work and work until my brain says, “TV TIME!” and then I let myself slack off until I get antsy again. Pushing it rarely works for me.

The same kind of applies to writing. I can’t start a book before I have a thorough idea of what will happen: I need to know all the characters involved, all the plot twists and major events, and the ending. I’m totally baffled and impressed by people who can write entire novels off nothing more than a vague idea. (TELL ME HOW TO DO THAT. Um, please.)

But, yeah, things’ll crop up. Usually, at least half the plot events will go different from how I expected, several more will randomly appear, and I’ll need to reconsider the ending half a dozen times until I find one that works.

And sometimes, the book just says, “HALT.” That’s usually a good sign I need to stop and reconsider my outline.

The reason I want outlines for both life and books is the same: I want to know what’s coming. Yes, I’m a little obsessive, but it works for me. I’m actually more excited and more motivated when I know what I’m working towards. I use my outlines/to-do lists as “goals” of a sort — I love ticking things off and seeing how far I’ve gotten, and how close I am to achieving item X on the list.

Without flexibility, though, it wouldn’t work.

My methods aren’t ideal, and I may have to reconsider them when I have to deal with deadlines, but they work for now.

What about you? Plotting? Pantsing? How do you handle sudden detours?