Your writing voice

Whether we mean to or not, we all have a writing voice. Sometimes, it's just an extension of how we interact and speak to others. But when writing fiction in the first person, it can be the difference in fleshing out your characters and having ones that are stilted and one dimensional. One of my first writing efforts produced a novel that was edited by a English professor at a local university. It was perfect prose, but it was a disaster in showcasing the young boy that was narrating the story. I received a rejection letter from a publisher, who made several positive comments about the manuscript, but he turned it down. The main reason for the rejection was, as he put it, "It sounds as if a grandfather is narrating the story instead of a 12 year old, southern country boy." Well, I thought about that for a while, and I realized he was right. So I took the manuscript, and when I got through with it, no one would ever mistake it for a grandfather telling the story. It was full of gonnas, fixin', an'ts and all those southern phrases that young boys in the 1940s used. I sent it to August House; they liked it and published it. The novel is The Red Scarf, a nostalgic (1944 era) story about a young paperboy and his quest for a red scarf.

Currently, I'm polishing up a coming of age manuscript called Choices. It's told in the first person. The setting is the late 1950s at a major southern university. This time the person telling the story is a literate, professional person whose speech is blunt but somewhat profane.
It's a different voice, but one that helps a reader identify with and visualize the character. A short piece of Choice is in an earlier blog posting of mine.