A Voice in a Crowd

By Melody Carlson, Author of Courting Mr. Emerson

Have you ever walked into a bookstore with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves stuffed with every imaginable title . . . and suddenly you wanted to give up? As a book writer, I’ve been overwhelmed like that many a time. I’ve honestly asked myself, why does the world need one more book? And why a book written by me? And yet, I’ve continued to write—for more than three decades now, publishing more than 250 books. What keeps me at it? And what makes me think I have anything new or different to offer the world of readers? I still ask myself that occasionally.

That’s when I remind myself that each writer is unique. Every writer has their own individual voice. Like a thumbprint, we’re all one-of-a-kind and not reproducible. Try as you might, you cannot convincingly duplicate the voice of a Nicolas Sparks, Barbara Kingsolver . . . Flannery O’Conner. Oh, you might imitate their style, setting, genre . . . but you’ll never fully capture their voice. Why would you even try? An attempt to emulate another writer usually results in a muddy replica that no one fully enjoys.

But I must confess that, as simple as the concept of distinct writer’s voice seems, it took time for me to fully grasp this phenomenon. Oh, I could recognize characteristic traits in the voices of other writers, but for some reason I couldn’t seem to ‘hear’ my own writing voice. Even after I’d published a number of novels, I questioned whether I even had a voice. Perhaps I was the one and only ‘voiceless’ writer. Not a title I relished.

Then one time, I wrote an anonymous letter of endorsement to a publishing associate (hoping to help a friend’s book into print). My publishing friend informed me that he knew I’d written that letter. When I questioned how he knew, he said he could clearly hear my voice. The incident made me laugh, both with relief and irony. So maybe I did have a voice after all. It helped me realize that, as a writer, it can be hard to ‘hear’ our own voices. Another good excuse for good editors, savvy critique groups and honest readers.

Besides having a voice to set us apart and make us unique, we all have our own stories to tell. Stories comprised of diverse backgrounds, unique challenges, individual experiences, not to mention our one-of-a-kind DNA. All of this contributes to making our writing truly distinctive. Just one more reason not to be concerned over the fact that there are so many writers, or that more than a million books get published around the world annually. So next time you feel overwhelmed in a big bookstore, just remember that no one has a voice quite like yours. You are in good company!

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Melody Carlson is the award-winning author of over two hundred books with sales of more than seven million, including many bestselling Christmas novellas, young adult titles, and contemporary romances. She received a Romantic Times Career Achievement Award in the inspirational market for her many books, including Finding Alice. She and her husband live in central Oregon. Learn more at www.melodycarlson.com.

Reading to Write

By Susan Reichert, Editor-in-Chief for Southern Writers Magazine 

Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood. One of the early influences in her life was the Bookmobile.

For those of you who don’t know what that is, it was a mobile library. A vehicle was designed to be used as a library, and held shelves with books and drove to areas that didn’t have a branch library and parked so readers could access the vehicle and check out books.

I feel very fortunate, that I only lived three to four blocks from the library, so I could walk there as a child, which I did every week. I would get five books the first of the week, and when I read those, then I would take them back, and get five more. Why five, that is all they would let you check out at one time. I did this all summer. I loved reading.

To me, writers must be readers. How else will we learn to write what we want to write.

Reading books on how to write is good, education courses in writing is good. But, reading the kind of books you want to write, is an education all to itself.

Barbara Kingsolver said, “I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written. I still do. I limit my exposure to the type of stuff I don’t want to write, and oh boy is the world ever loaded with that, mostly waiting behind some form of “on-off” switch. I’m enough of a biologist to know that whatever comes in will, in some form, come back out.”

Now, let me see, what books do I wish I had written? 

Barbara Kingsolver wrote The Poisonwood Bible, a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry everything they believe they’ll need but soon find all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.”

Make Your Setting Sing

By Lauren Faulkenberry

My favorite writers are those who transport me to new places. Their prose makes it seem effortless, but for us writers, it takes some serious attention to detail. I’m thinking of Ron Rash, Janet Fitch, Barbara Kingsolver. We’re told all the time as writers to devote time to sensory details when setting each scene, but with the fast pace of our technology-driven lives, how often do we pay attention to what we hear, smell, or feel against our skin?

Your setting is another character: it needs those details. So how do you work them in when you’re writing about a place unfamiliar to you?

1.      Plan a visit. Obviously this won’t be an option all the time, but if it’s possible, do it! Who doesn’t like a weekend getaway? It’s research, and you can write it off your taxes. When I wrote Bayou My Love, I drew on my weeklong trip to Louisiana. I’d been mostly in New Orleans, but spent a couple of days out on an old plantation and along the southernmost parts of the bayou. I was totally enamored with the natural beauty, smitten with the way the cypress trees swayed on the breeze, the way the egrets called to each other across the lagoons, the way the humidity felt as I breathed. Some simple notes I made proved invaluable down the road as I wrote my novel.   

2.      Use the Internet for photo reference, then to find particular details you can weave into your story. I sometimes use photos for a general sense of place, but more often I’m using photos to remind me of what kinds of details I need to pull into my scene. I used photos of river houses to describe structural details of the home I wanted my protagonist to remodel, and they helped me to use specific language to describe elements like hand carved newel posts, shutters that prop open at 45 degrees. Photos reminded me of which species of birds and trees were native, and how the water looked in the shade of the cypress.

Katie Rose Guest Pryal, author of the Hollywood Lights series, created a Pinterest board for her books where she saves photographs that inspire her setting. It’s all things L.A., and serves as the perfect compliment to her books.

3.      Go outside. This one’s easy. You can do it anywhere. Get yourself into nature, away from all the technology, and sit. Pay attention. Record. This is your exercise: sit in solitude and write down the sensory details that you absorb. Notice what scent is on the air.  Wood smoke from your neighbor’s house? Approaching rain? Honeysuckle? Notice the sounds you hear. Are there birds calling in the trees? (Which birds? Be specific.) Feel the breeze on your skin, the way it tickles your hair. Notice the thrumming of cicadas in the maple trees.

If you want to transport your reader to a different place, you have to seduce them. You have to do the hard work that makes their transition effortless, like falling into a dream. Sensory details achieve this: they are the fastest way to move your reader into new vivid world. Pay attention to what it feels like to be in a place, whether that’s in a garden maze, on a riverboat, or in the New Mexico desert. Take note of the elements that make that place unique, and use your specifics: don’t talk about birds and trees. Talk about magpies, chickadees, scrub jays, magnolias, hyacinths, and acacias. If you pay attention to the details you notice when you’re outdoors, and combine that with knowledge of the local flora, fauna, and urban components, you’ll paint a picture for your reader that not only draws them into your scene, but also draws on their own personal memories associated with that imagery. Then you’ve hooked your reader, and then you’ve shown you’ve got chops. 

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Lauren Faulkenberry divides her time between writing, teaching, and making artist books. Originally from South Carolina, she has worked as an archaeologist, an English teacher, and a ranger for the National Park Service. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Georgia College & State University, where she attended on fellowship, and earned her MFA  in Book Arts from the University of Alabama. She was a finalist for the Novello Festival Press First Novel Award, won the Family Circle short fiction contest for her story "Beneath Our Skin," and was nominated for an AWP Intro Award. She is author of the novel Bayou My Love, the novella Back to Bayou Sabine, and the children's book What Do Animals Do on the Weekend? She currently lives in Whittier, NC, where she is at work on her next novel. Her social media links are: twitter: @firebrandpress   www.laurenfaulkenberry.com   and Find Me On Facebook