Any tips on drastically change your authorial voice? Everything I've written over the past few years has received almost unanimous negative feedback, but my editors say my writing is fine. I'm finally starting to wonder if there's just something about my voice that readers are reacting negatively to. I did start reading more, 3-4 books a week, various genres, POV's, etc. I thought for sure that would fix things. But every time I sit down to write, my same old voice comes out. Help!
I’m not even sure you properly diagnosed the problem. What specific negative feedback did you get? What specific positive feedback other than “fine”?
That's the thing: I haven't received specific positive feedback, so I suspect they're all being polite. Negative? Things like, "You use too many words," and "You're not giving enough backstory in the first chapter" and "I need to know more right up front."
Who are you getting feedback from? The three specific examples you cited, the first one may be decent feedback but the other two are probably bad advice. You should consider posting in our critique section or looking at sites like scribophile. Who are these editors? It’s an editors job to find faults, so if your editors aren’t they aren’t doing their job.
It is difficult to define exactly what literary "voice" is. It's a combination of style, vocabulary, technique that is as unique to your work as a fingerprint - you know when it resonates with you in the way that a wine glass knows when you rub it in just the right way, but it is hard to say quite why, and I don't think it's something that you can consciously alter.
I would second this. Whoever you're getting feedback from, I would probably stop listening to immediately. Likewise, if an editor is not finding specific faults, they're probably not trying hard enough... unless you're asking for free service. In that case, the minimal effort may be a reflection of their compensation. In any case, authorial voice is a combination of how you build sentences, use words, and convey ideas. It is as much about what you look at as it is how you think about what you look at. In fiction, this is heavily impacted by your tense and point of view. It's also loosely impacted by genre and convention, but that's a little less significant. You can definitely alter your writing voice, but your most powerful and authentic voice will be unique to you because it's how your mind handles information. One simple practice to develop your own voice is to take segments of other people's writing and rewrite them as your own. This will help you get a feel for how you like to relay information. Another exercise is to practice essentializing your message. Take a paragraph of writing, and strip it of all ornamentation and decoration. Get down to the absolute bare-bone ideas. Then put them in the order you feel flows most naturally to you. Flesh out the sentences in a way that you would. Then add some detail or change the wording until it rolls off the tongue. Play around with different sentence constructions. Hope this helps!
Voice to me is all about how you slant your words, word choice, sentence structure etc. The difference between Nabokov and Steinbeck. It's about establishing a tone or at least tapping into one. This sounds more like a pace problem. It could also be a preference problem. If you're wordy some reader don't like that especially in certain genres. I'm beginning to realize most readers want a 100 page thriller. A novella not a novel. There's not much you can do, with the exception of ensuring you're not repeating info. I found poetry helped limit my word count as it helped me to describe things more beautifully and more concisely. Poetry really helps you couple emotion to imagery. Pace is more difficult to figure out as it's knowing when to deliver the information at the right time. Also with the readers saying - I need to know more right up front - this can be a common problem that any writer can face as we can equate holding back details with suspense. One trick - always fulfill the who what where why when how - in the first chapter. Unless this is a thriller readers want to know where they are, who they are, what is going on, why it's happening, when and how. Leave the suspense by maybe holding back the ultimate why.
The response I get is that my novels are fast pace, and yet I feel like the story drags a bit, especially if there is travel involved. My latest book is about a warrior and each battle I struggled to make it interesting. We all try to refine our work but keep our voice as that's what makes us fresh and relevant. If you could post a chapter, I'm sure there are those here that could provide further help. By the way, I released an audio of one of my books and one review was THIS BOOK SUCKS! What can you do with that? I just thank God I have plenty of excellent reviews for the ebook.
Whenever authors of the 19th century wanted to shape their voice, they would memorize and rewrite sections of other authors' works. That a good exercise to fine-tune your phrasing and sentence structures. It expands your writing vocabulary. I mean that it gives you more choices when you build a paragraph. It's a rigorous technique. If you think about it logically, how can it be anything else? If it were easy, you wouldn't have questions about it. You'd already be able to write in a perfect voice and so would everyone else. While the modern approach to writing is "just write," as if that's enough in itself, you need to aim at an ideal. That's my opinion on this. I think the old techniques work better than the new ones. I think "just write" is so aimless that it leaves most people spinning their wheels. Yes, you do need to write, but you need to write with a directed purpose. I'll warn this though . . . sometimes a writer decides that weak writing is their "voice," and any critiques of that weak writing just don't understand their voice. Yes, their voice is on the page but it's lost in clutter. Or sometimes what's being said just isn't daring enough to have impact. That's all a different issue. You want to make your natural voice pure and be practiced with getting it on the page. There are writing instructors who talk about shaping your work with multiple voices. One of those voices is your natural speaking voice. (But see the previous short paragraph. Not every inner thought is your speaking voice.) Then you add other voices to shape your own. Those other voices speak in different ways: poetic, dreamlike rambling, terse, etc. They layer over your natural voice to build rhythms through the story. So in that sense, your natural "voice" is your speaking voice, and the other voices, which are also you, take different statures. It could also be that you're stuck in one voice, and even if it's done perfectly, it will become monotonous. That's beyond the scope of a forum post. I do know books you can check out if that interests you though.
