Keys Ways to Add Layers to Your Writer’s Voice

Jordan Dane
@JordanDane

Sorry about the late post today. I’ve had tons going on this week, including out of town relatives to entertain. Don’t feel sorry for me. It’s been plenty of fun, but I wanted to share my thoughts on beautiful writing. I’ve been enjoying Looking for Alaska by John Green and had to write about it. Thanks to Morgan Hubbard, my fellow blogmate here, for reminding me that I’ve always wanted to read this book.

Developing a strong author “voice” to make your work stand out in an editor’s or agent’s slush pile can be a challenge. It’s important to be so entrenched in your character’s head that you hear their voice in yours and can write it down without thinking too much, or editing yourself. I call this “free association.” As a reader, you can also experience a scene through the senses of the POV narrator and give that character an opinion of his/her surroundings to add setting description color as well as insight into the narrator to reflect on him or her. By making each word choice serve more than one purpose (to add color as well as insight into the character) can keep the pace moving without bogging down the narrative.

James Patterson talked about this at a Romance Writers of America conference in Reno in 2004 to a packed house of writers that filled two ballrooms. He said on the edge of his computer monitor, he has words that inspire him to remember the basics. BE THERE were the words he posted to remind him to put the reader into the scene by using their senses to trigger images from the words on the page.

When writing any scene, get the words down, but then go back and layer in other elements to enhance the voice of your narrator and make the reading experience more vivid for the reader. Ask yourself what your character would be seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and how something would feel when they touch it. Adding these elements can bring depth to the scene and draw the reader into the world you are creating, by triggering the “familiar” with them.

Below is an excerpt from John Green’s Looking for Alaska:

(Main character Pudge crushing on the beautiful yet enigmatic Alaska Young after he first meets her at boarding school.)

And now is as good a time as any to say that she was beautiful. In the dark beside me, she smelled of sweat and sunshine and vanilla, and on that thin-mooned night I could see little more than her silhouette except for when she smoked, when the burning cherry of the cigarette washed her face in pale red light. But even in the dark, I could see her eyes—fierce emeralds. She had the kind of eyes that predisposed you to supporting her every endeavor. And not just beautiful, but hot, too, with her breasts straining against her tight tank top, her curved legs swinging back and forth beneath the swing, flip-flops dangling from her electric-blue-painted toes. It was right then, between when I asked about the labyrinth and when she answered me, that I realized the importance of curves, of the thousand places where girls’ bodies ease from one place to another, from arc of the foot to ankle to calf, from calf to hip to waist to breast to neck to ski-slope nose to forehead to shoulder to the concave arch of the back to the butt to the etc. I’d noticed curves before, of course, but I had never quite apprehended their significance.

I loved this prose when I first read it and had to read it again. It captures a glimpse of the beautiful Alaska, as seen through Pudge’s eyes, in a lyrical voice that uses imagery very effectively. The pace doesn’t slow, but the reader gets snippets of pictures in their mind of a woman’s body in a sensual yet innocent way. You can smell the sweat of sunshine and vanilla, see the burning cherry of the cigarette wash across her face, and get glimpses of her flip-flopped electric blue painted toes and curve across her body as his eyes trail them. It's like he's seeing her, studying her, as a work of art. The way he looks at her gives insight into his nature, as well as share what he sees with the reader about Alaska. This paragraph is beautifully done without overdoing it.


Having given these examples, it’s important not to overwrite the setting/scene. In this excerpt, there is a laser focus on Alaska’s body without going into too much literal description. It’s presented in a way that gives the essence of her, to allow the reader to build their own image.  You can picture the student she is with glimpses of her flip flops and tank top, her painted toes, and the way she smokes, without having to endure a complete description of everything he sees. He's capturing her essence in a unique way that gives him a lyrical/literary voice.

Recently I read a book where the metaphors and similes stood out because they were not only unrelated to the other examples on the first few pages, but these comparisons did nothing to enhance the mood or give insight into the character or setting. It made the author appear like a student trying to impress the teacher, with not much thought going into the word choices and how they pertained to the story.

We are Visual Learners
Many people are visual learners, so using the senses (and/or metaphors and analogies) can bring in the visual using something familiar. These ideas can quickly suggest a setting without slowing the pace with too much word description. They give a quick snapshot of the scene in a way to trigger the reader’s mind and delve into their own experiences to make things more vivid. These images can also trigger emotions, such as comfort or fear, at the same time. In this excerpt from John Green, the words trigger memories of attraction and first loves. Adding these elements can not only bring color and distinction to the voice, but they can also layer in elements of emotion and visual triggers to enhance the voice. So let’s talk about metaphors and analogies.


Metaphors
A metaphor is an implied comparison that brings two dissimilar things together and implies that the two things are alike or comparable. Metaphors can be used to describe a complicated concept or setting, to make it more easily understood or relatable. They can enhance the imagery by adding a familiar feeling, such as the lightness of taking flight when you describe being in love, or describing death as a candle that is snuffed out.

Examples:

• Ideas can mushroom

• Love has wings

• A brave man has the heart of a lion

Analogies
Just like a metaphor, an analogy makes a link between two dissimilar things, but implies there is a difference between the two things, while a metaphor treats them as the same.

Examples:

• A fish is to water, what a bird is to air

• A CEO is to a company, what a General is to an Army

• A mother giving birth to a child, is what an author would be to the creation of a novel

I wanted to include other excerpts that use a visual imagery well in terms of metaphors and similes. One of my favorite books is The Book Thief. The New York Times called The Book Thief life changing. They did not exaggerate. I hope you enjoy these:

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
“She was the book thief without the words. Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like rain.” The Book Thief by Markus Zusak 
 
“Upon her arrival, you could still see the bite marks of snow on her hands and the frosty blood on her fingers. Everything about her was undernourished. Wire-like shins. Coat hanger arms. She did not produce it easily, but when it came, she had a starving smile.” The Book Thief by Markus Zusak


If you are a reader - what are some of your favorite and memorable lines from books you’ve read that enhanced the mood, setting, or characters? If you are a writer – do you have any tricks to share on adding layers of a unique voice to your work?

Hivemind

This is a story about bees and coincidences and the hivemind.

When I pulled in the driveway  an old man was crouched over the giant section of tree that had fallen in our yard. I could just see his profile, hooked nose, thinning hair, ratty t-shirt tucked into pants a size or two too big. As I got out of the car I could hear him talking, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. On the thin blades of grass by his feet was a metal contraption that was shaped like a genie lamp with a bellows on the end. He picked it up, held it over the trunk, and worked the handle until a small grey puff drifted out . 

I hurried to where he stood. This had to be the Bee man who’d come to save the insects in the fallen section of tree. It was so heavy, 600 or 700 pounds I guessed, that it cracked the cement driveway when it fell. Now the tree hummed with disturbed bees. A narrow channel of honey trickled down the drive; a cluster of  bees was busy licking it clean. Do bees have tongues? I didn’t know, but I aimed to find out. 

When the old man saw me he nodded his head and told me to back away while he cut a window in the wood. The bees would likely come swarming out fierce and angry, intent on stinging. The smoke made my eyes water. I backed away. I noticed that a few bees had attached themselves to him. One crawled on the brim of his hat, two clung to the back of his t-shirt and another sidled up his bare arm.

As he cut open the wood, a sweet incense-like smell wafted out. I wasn’t sure if it came from the bee comb or was the natural perfume of the tree. Inside the tree glistened with golden honey comb and the sound of the bees grew louder. Thousands of bees, bodies on top of bodies, crawled over the surface of the comb, one buzzing, shifting mass. Suddenly I itched all over. Just by observing them, I could feel bees crawling through my hair, on my neck, in my bra. 

Of course there weren’t any real bees on me at all. But the power of suggestion was strong. At that moment I had a small aha. I pictured the human mind like the inside of a hive, thick and buzzing with ideas. I looked at all those bees working together on a common task and communicating in a mysterious way. I thought of the term hivemind. There are several definitions but this one from the Urban Dictionary caught my attention: “Hivemind is when two or more people come to the same thought at the same time…”

You know how it works. You come up with your next book idea, maybe even write the manuscript and then discover several other writers have been having very similar thoughts. An editor told me recently that he took home three manuscripts over the weekend and that all three had something to do with unusual telepathic connections. If you’re very lucky you’re at the top of the hive. Memes move through the culture.  A scientist comes up with an invention and that same month several similar inventions appear. I don’t know how, but hivemind seems to happen in every creative field.

I do know the Bee man’s going to make an appearance in one of my books. I’m fully expecting bees to be the next big trend. So I’m stating it here, first. 

I invited Screenwriter over to see the spectacle and he’s already started on a horror script involving bees. He sent a friend get to film footage last night. But here’s the weirdest thing, the hivemind moment…SciFi guy was on vacation across the country when the bee situation began in my yard. He didn’t know anything about it.  He went to bed one night and heard…buzzing. Several bee hives were hanging inside the window of the room where he was sleeping.  Twilight Zone music please.

My Brain, On Fear

I am a great believer in dreams.  Being a shrink, I guess you'd say it's in the job description.  I don't hold much stock in dreams as prognosticators of the future or omens.  The work our brains do whilst dreaming is both necessary and highly individualistic, and by and large, I look forward to dreaming more than I do sleeping.  (By the way, those who, like me, moan about just having to sleep because it's such a time sink and complete waste when you could be doing something much more important, like working?  Consider this: a new hypothesis suggests that while your brain is feverishly filing away the day's information, it is also restoring your brain cells to a sort of baseline set point.  Without this activity, argue UW-Madison researchers Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli, your brain would be unable to encode new information.  You'd not only run out of storage capacity; your cells would pretty much crump because, as hard as they work during sleep, they must work even harder to soak up and react to all the stimuli you throw at them during any given day.)

So, okay, fair enough: I'm convinced, although I didn't need a scientist to tell me I ought to sleep.  It's the time I mind.  On the other hand, without sleep, I wouldn't dream quite so much.  So I guess it evens out.  (NEWS FLASH: Go without sleep long enough, and you'll get breakthrough REM whether you like it or not.  It's unpleasant, sometimes scary, but your brain is only trying to save itself, bub.  So forget the all-nighters already.  Your mother was right.  Get some shut-eye and dream the way your brain was meant to.) 

All this is by way of prelude to the dream I had last night or, much more likely because it is still so vivid, in my last REM cycle this morning.  (Oh, Ilsa, you can make everything so science-y.)  Like I said, I pay attention to dreams; my husband pays attention to his, too, mainly because he figures I'll interpret them in a way that makes sense.  Usually, I do, but only because I've known him a long time.  (And it's the same with a patient.  Anyone who tries to tell you what your dreams mean without getting to know you very well and for a really long time--in relative terms, that's about three, four months of intense talking--is full of it.  You'd get more out of a Magic 8 ball.)

My dream this morning felt very long and probably lasted less than thirty seconds.  I remember only the pertinent stuff: I'm in a marriage that isn't working with a person (I won't say what sex, but that was interesting, too) I'd never have married in a million years.  I was uncomfortable and knew it.  We're in a house that I'd never have chosen in my life, and it's a primitive thing.  We have to grow our own food, make our own furniture . . . I remember taking a carving tool or an axe to a chair, I think; I say that because I remember that the back was a hollowed oval.  I was making a mess of that chair, whittling off big ol' chunks and thinking, This doesn't look remotely right; this isn't going to work.  In the dream--right before I woke myself up--I thought, There has to be an easier way.  Why can't I go live somewhere I've been before, where I'm way more comfortable?

I can think of two possible interpretations for this dream.  There might be more, but it's the same thing when you say the right thing to a patient at the right time: everyone calms down.  They know you're right, and you know it.  The tension bleeds away; there's that little mental ding.

So this baby's got two dings.  One . . . I can't talk about just yet.  I'd like to; I know exactly what's going on here and in fact, I was going to blog about it.  But I have to wait.  Stay tuned, and in two weeks, I'll tell you because it's an interesting topic and interesting times and we might all have to deal with this sooner or later.

The second, I can. 

Freud said that the house in a dream represents the dreamer.  For me, I'd say he's right; just ask me about the doozy of an ooky nightmare I had right before my first visit with my training analyst: Creep City.  But I will also admit that I might be primed to believe that way.  I'd read The Interpretation of Dreams well before I stared at the acoustical tile of my analyst's ceiling for several years.  So if that's what the great man said, that's what I thought was true.  In part, I think we all know that Freud was a product of his times.  Not everything he said was right, but then again, not everything he said was wrong either.  My guess is people put a lot of stock in their houses; a house is the face the public sees. We make all sorts of assumptions about people on the basis not only of where they live and how but what their house looks like.  Think about it a second, and you'll see the truth of that.  Houses are clothes, on a larger scale.

But I also think that if cars were something I really grooved on--and I sometimes moon over a classic muscle car until someone shakes me--I might dream of being in a car I would honestly never drive.  It just all depends on the person.

So, the dream that I think I've got figured: it's really kind of straightforward.  I'm now in the middle of writing something in a style and way I've never done, ever.  I'm pushed way out of my comfort zone.  This thing is a huge challenge--but I also put myself there, deliberately.  I did it in the way I ended one book because that would force me to try something I've always thought I just might not be able to pull off--and working on this book now--horror/historical/sf--is the strangest thing because my brain is fighting itself.  I'm always holding myself off at a little bit of a distance, looking at the shape of thing, listening to syntax, trying to use the right language and slang.  My critical brain is active when, normally--or after a certain point when the characters are talking, and I've butt out--it's absolutely operating way in the background and so quietly, I only understand it's there when I get up, walk away from the book for a second--and then do a head slap because, DOH!  Ilsa, you idiot, you need to write it this way.

MONSTERS was a tad like this.  What with all the storylines and characters, it took me some time to build up a head of steam.  I think I wrote something like . . . a hundred pages?  one-fifty? . . . that ended up being shredded and I had to start all over again.  There are literally hundreds of pages on the cutting floor here.  Thankfully, my memory seems to be short, but the husband tells me I fretted about that book up to the last keystroke, wondering if I was getting it right.  I do know that every POV shift, every new chapter,  each scene felt like the beginning of the next uphill run--and there was no downhill, it seemed, ever.  I knew when I was done that it was fine and more than fine--and even, my editor made a few suggestions that ended up putting back some of the pages I'd slaughtered.

This book is similar; it feels much harder probably because it is, and I'm not known for easy formulas anyway.  The thing is a challenge; the concept is way out there.  So my dream-brain is screaming for me to cut it out; give it a rest; give it up and do something familiar. 

Now, I won't say that even the familiar is "easy."  As I remind anyone who turns his nose up at work-for-hire in other universes: Look, bub, every word, every line, each story was original.  So what if the book featured Kirk and Spock or Seven of Nine?  There was nothing easy about it and I did it all from scratch.

So this dream is about my worry that I'll fail.  I get that.  What is so funny about my dream is that I believe that I will fail with every new book; that the book I just finished is the best I could possibly do and I can't ever do half as well again.  In some ways, that's correct because I write the very best book I can at that moment; I don't do halfsies.  Who, in their right mind, would?  That's why I can't answer questions about what I'd change about a book if I could go back and do it again.  I can't ever do that book again in quite that way because I will never be the writer who did that book back then. 

So, great.  I know what's bugging me; well, that is, I've told you part of it, and I'll tell you the rest in two weeks.  The insight doesn't make me feel much easier.  There is nothing magical about this, no aha moment.   A correct and honest interpretation won't make my anxiety go away.   It's like Tiger Woods, I guess: it's about grinding it out, baby. 

In the end, I think this New Yorker cartoon sums it up best (and apologies for the shadows):

 

 

Stop by again in a couple weeks for Part Two.  Interesting times.

Ramblings Over Cups of Coffee

This post was thrown together as I was enjoying my morning coffee. (I fancy my evening coffee as well, but that is dedicated to working novel wonders.) Some have said that I am too young for coffee. My perpetual argument is that "I cannot be measured using your mere mortal instruments, the way you cut up time into days and years. My existence is much more vast, it cannot be measured in time." Yes, I am a melodramatic teenage girl. And I apologize for myself, those who came before, and those who will come after forever and ever.

Sitting there in my Starbucks, stealing the only table that has a perfect view of the entire establishment, I people watched from behind my laptop. The way people interact is all the more fascinating when you have your headphones in. This gave me the freedom of adding my own imagination as to why, which I mightily abused. Those poor, poor souls had no idea.

My first victim was a young woman in a pantsuit with frantic eyes that gave off the feeling of being very, very late. A young woman must have ordered five or six coffees. I assumed she was an assistant, or possibly just the newest employee to a company. That, is far too boring for my palette, so an elaborate story was created for her coffee adventure. Sure, she must have been new to a company, but a company that is researching the white trails left in the sky by aircrafts. Are they toying with us, just telling us its a byproduct of the plane; or are they experimenting? Possibly with the weather? That must be why she is in a hurry. She is in charge of fueling the minds of those who are attempting to make it snow in the deserts of Nevada during July. Anything's possible, right?

Once she had gone, I focused on a group of much younger people. Four, two girls and two boys. They all had a hue of orange to their skin and expensive looking jeans. They were jawing about someone cheating on this person, blah blah blah. Their english had been very poor, though it appeared to be their first and only language. I suppose they are from my alleged peer group, or could they really be the result of more government experimentation. Could our country be breeding more and more conforming minds through  their way of "natural" selection? Quite possibly.

When the spray-tanned zombies made their exit, being hyped up by four shots of expresso each, my sights were directed towards someone who looked like they were in the people watching business as well. He came off as an average college student, but then again, average in not interesting enough. This mind of mine is set on conspiracy theories today, so I figured the government was at it again. This fellow is quite obviously is doing research for his home planet with the permission of the government. Being disguised as a young human, he can easily get his job done; in exchange for staying incognito so it does not create a fuss amongst society.

Yes, this was all in good fun. No, I am only a little crazy. Your judgement is not welcomed warmly, but welcomed nonetheless. Happy Saturday; I hope you never go people watching without being open minded enough to create something out of nothing. Remember though; it is good to be open minded, but do not let your brains fall out.