Bull, er, ... riding

I forgot to mention when I first posted this, so I'm adding it now: Best-selling author James Scott Bell is teaching a Writers Digest webinar tomorrow, Thursday, February 7, titled "How to Make a Career Out of E-Books." The cost is $79. Jim is a great teacher, so if you're giving any thought to indie publishing, this will be a worthwile workshop.

Carpe Annum. I love our theme this year. It makes me feel empowered. Ooooh-rah! as my marine corps husband would say. Yes, he was discharged in 1972, but remember, once a marine, always a marine. I met him when he was home on boot leave, and he taught me that saying right from the beginning -- along with how to spit shine my boots. Ah, young love.

I actually got a jump-start on our theme and seized the year in 2012, when I took the publishing bull by the horns and released Unraveled. It was a small bull, with wee little horns, and he hasn't given me much of a ride -- yet -- but I'm happy to be in the saddle. Oh wait, they don't saddle bulls. But you get the idea.

I was tired of sitting on a manuscript I had complete faith in, because "CBA doesn't like missionary stories." That's what I was told. That in itself kind of threw me for a loop, but what bothered me most was that I do not consider Unraveled a missionary story, any more than I consider Secretariat a western. Yeah, there's a horse in Secretariat but that's where the similarities between it and a western end.

Similarly, Unraveled uses a short-term missions trip as a vehicle to carry the main issues, which are how we react to a personal crisis of faith, and confronting truth in our own lives when we'd rather just not. At least that's how I see the story. It's certainly what I meant to convey when I wrote it. But, alas, I was the only one who saw beyond the missionary element. And by the way, My Hands Came Away Red by Lisa McKay is one of the finest CBA novels I've ever read, and it's most definitely a missionary story.

And so, since I had faith in me, I went for it. And I'm doing it again. I have just re-released Every Good & Perfect Gift and Lying on Sunday, which NavPress took out of print when they decided their fiction experiment wasn't working out for them. As I look on my bookshelves I see Mary DeMuth's Watching the Tree Limbs and Wishing on Dandelions, and Tosca Lee's remarkable Demon and Havah, all published by NavPress. Well, I for one am glad NavPress experimented, and I'll leave it at that.

So I'm here to present Every Good & Perfect Gift and Lying on Sunday in their stunning new covers, designed by our own Katy Popa's Cotton Bond Studio. Tada!!! They're available at Amazon, in both print and Kindle version for the first time. The Kindle books, along with Unraveled, are available at a special price for a limited time. I'd really appreciate you helping me get the word out. If you haven't read them, I hope you will. And if you have, I'd be grateful if you'd post a review on Amazon.

As I navigate myself through the world of indie publishing, I'm still on the fence about whether or not to pursue a traditional publisher for my future novels. One thing I know, I'm not going to spin my wheels any longer. I believe in my work, and if the comments I receive from readers is any indication, others do too. I'd like the little splash I'm making to turn into a tidal wave, and I'm doing all I can to get the ripple started. As I've mentioned before, if you're in a book club contact me for a special offer.

What about you? Have you considered self publishing? Why would you or would you not?

What Did You Say?

The book club I participate in just read Havah by Tosca Lee for our January selection. It's a remarkable novel about Adam and Eve, before and after the fall, from Eve's perspective. Tosca did an amazing job of filling in the gaps and telling a story of how it might have been to be the mother of all mankind. We all enjoyed the book, and gave it an A, but early in our discussion my daughter Mindy said, "I ended up loving the book, but it took me a while to get into it because I couldn't find her voice." Sometimes we just don't click with a story but we're not sure why, so I'm glad Mindy was able to identify the problem, and then to continue reading until she did find the character's voice, because ultimately she really enjoyed the novel.
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Voice is such a vital element of fiction. Without it a story can be flat and one dimensional. We may see the words, but they don't come to life in our heads and hearts. As readers, we all bring something of ourselves to a character's voice. I may hear Harper Lee's "Scout" differently than you hear her, but there's no question that we'll hear her voice, because it's written with such texture and clarity. I could already hear Scout's voice by paragraph two of To Kill a Mockingbird when she said, "I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out. I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson."

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Who couldn't love a girl who talked like that? Who couldn't wait to hear the whole story? There's a wonderful cadence to her voice, and certainly an accent. And my very favorite "voice" is going to have a southern accent. Maybe it's my family roots (I'm California born and bred but my parents and grandparents were from the South) but I can get lost in a southern accent and forget entirely to come up for air. If you ever watched Ken Burns' Civil War series, I fell in love with author and historian Shelby Foote, who I could have listened to for hours on end, even if he was merely reading the dictionary. That's just me. So while we all bring something different to a reading experience, we as authors have to give our readers something to work with, and that's where cadence, word choice, sentence structure, etc., come into play.

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We agree that some writers books can be hard to understand, way too subjective, conflicting, and even elitest, but there are some exceptional ones we recommend (see our Resources page), as our Roundtable discussion this week bears out. Elizabeth George, in Write Away, says, "The narrative voice of your novel is the point-of-view character's defining way of speaking and thinking. Mind you, I'm not referring to the point-of-view character's style of dialogue, however. I'm referring to the tone that comes through the narrative itself ..." Case in point, the excerpt I used from To Kill a Mockingbird above is not a passage of dialogue; rather it's narrative. But it's as entertaining as dialogue thanks to Scout's distinctive voice.

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In The Help by Kathryn Stockett, it takes only a few chapters to be able to identify the three POV characters, even without the chapter headings, by their voice alone, because Ms. Stockett has given each her own distinct characteristics. Elizabeth George says voice comes from background, education or lack thereof, position in society, distinctive use of language, vocabulary, tone and "most important ... attitude. More than anything that you can do to illustrate voice for your reader, the character's attitude will differentiate one character from another."

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Jim Scott Bell, in Plot & Structure, says, "No two characters should sound exactly alike ... the words they use should tell us something about who they are." Think of the people you know. Most of the time you don't have to ask who's calling if they fail to identify themselves on the telephone. You know them by their voice. Characters should be as easily identifiable a good deal of the time. To accomplish this, you have to know your characters. They must be distinctive in your mind if they're to be distinctive to your readers. I've learned over time the value of writing character profiles before I begin writing a novel. Some writers create profiles of a character's life from cradle to grave, that go on for pages, even for minor characters. I have no doubt there's great benefit to that, but my profiles tend to be leaner, which allows me the great pleasure of learning new things about a character as I go along, but that new thing should enhance what I already know about that character, and not detract from it.

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Here's an exercise for you: Write a half-page passage that includes dialogue and narrative from a POV character. Don't use attributes or character description. Then write a similar passage for an entirely different character. Maybe someone of the opposite sex, twenty years younger or older, or who comes from a different part of the country or world. Ask someone to read the two passages and tell you what they know about the each person. How close are they to describing the character you created?

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What favorite fictional character springs to mind when you think of voice? Have you read anything lately that lacked voice, and if so, how did that impact your reading experience? (You don't have to name names.)