Finding Your Voice: How to Put Personality in Your Writing

Rating:
Summary: A Fresh Perspective
Review: I cannot CANNOT--say enough about this book! I'm an aspiring writer who had been circling for years--forever stumbling around in the dark searching for some missing ingredient. Les Edgerton provided that ingredient.

In his book, Finding Your Voice, Les throws a hand grenade into the marshes of dull writing. Not only does he give you permission to be yourself when you write, he SHOUTS that you must!
Many a non-published writer constructs barriers to getting published because of an ailment he tags as a "writerly" style. Such writing, he says, stems from trying to write like someone else, or by adhering to some "acceptable standard." All this expenditure of energy and effort not only kills creativity, it drowns out the writer's own voice. It's akin to attempting to draw something via tracing. Successful and effective writing-as in drawing a picture--occurs as the artist surrenders to the freedom of instinct and free-form.

"Voice" is rooted in individuality and PERSONALITY. He points out that readers aren't looking for Hemingway when they pick up your book -- they're looking for you! If they have a hankering for Hemingway, they'll seek out Hemingway. The reader who picks up your book wants to meet you, and they will do just that as you let go and allow your personality to permeate the pages. As a result, reader and writer take off on some joint venture. The experience is far more gratifying for the reader than reading mere dead words.

His book effortlessly exemplifies the very things he espouses. For instance, far from being obscure himself, Les exudes personality-HIS PERSONALITY-on every page. He's transparently friendly, intelligent, witty and totally likable. It seems possible to reach right through the pages and shake his hand. You know this man--he's a new friend.

Finding Your Voice is also a font of abundant and invaluable tidbits. For one thing, Les illuminates the techniques and usages that appeal to our culture today, and that invariably attract editors and agents.

His book is informative, entertaining, and freeing.

Get out there and get it!

Rating:
Summary: Some good parts, but a few sections are ENOUGH ALREADY
Review: My fingers hover over the rating scale... this book is a 3 in spots, a 5 in others.

Perhaps it's because I've been a published author, hundreds of times over. Maybe it's because I never imagined myself as a recycled Hemingway, Bob Woodward, or Mark Twain; I've always written like myself. However, I found the first section awfully tedious. The author keeps knocking you over the head with the reasons to find your OWN voice rather than write like an ersatz Big Name Author. Enough already, I got the point. The reader probably doesn't need to be convinced, if she's already picked up this book.

If I'd stopped after the first third of the book (and I was tempted to, I confess), this review would have gotten only 2 or 3 stars.

Edgerton makes up for it, though, when he gets specific. Fortunately, he does so often, with plenty of examples that show how to _use_ the rules you're read in other books. For example, instead of just saying that you shouldn't talk down to the reader, he provides the intro to one of his own short stories, then rewrites it with all the backstory that a less-experienced writer would be tempted to add. It works, because even the backstory-filled excerpt doesn't completely ... I found that compare-and-contrast analysis very helpful, and you probably will, too. (He has examples from plenty of writers, with all kinds of styles. Not just his own stuff, though he's certainly a good storyteller.)

The author also includes several exercises to help you "find your voice." I didn't feel that most of the exercises were necessary, but one intrigued me: identify the weakest part of your writing (plot, dialog, description, etc.), read several examples of that writing aspect done well, then write a "report" as if you were writing a college paper. I'm not sure if doing exercises like this will work for you -- they don't do much for me, since I usually have paying articles to write instead -- but his are certainly better than the typical [boring]ones.

Another strength is that Edgerton doesn't write only for fiction authors. I'm a non-fiction author and editor by trade (primarily articles but also some books) and much of his "voice" advice is helpful.

Finding Your Voice did sensitize me to several issues of writer voice, and at the end of the book I felt I'd learned something useful. I don't think that I'd put this book on a writer's Must Read shelf, but I'm glad I invested the time in reading it.

Rating:
Summary: Yethir! This book gave me my voith!
Review: Very encouraging stuff. While most of us (who write words, and that's every chicken in the coop, minus the rooster) are striving to sound "writerly" in our prose, we're totally losing our natural voices. We do our best to sound intelligent, sophisticated, like REAL writers. We want to write "right"-like Stephen King. Like Nancy Kress. Like that dude who wrote our Dick and Jane primers, even. Ever since we first heaved those tree trunk-sized pencils onto our shoulders in grade school, our teachers have been molding us to sound as textbook-ish as possible. Those of us who succeeded to please became apples in their eyes. But while we were writing up to them, we forgot how to write on par with our readers. You know: those real world folks who we hope will buy our stuff. Over the years, we've lost our personalities. We drop them the moment we sit down at the keyboard and fancy ourselves authors.

So, is this our fault?

Edgerton says, No way, Jesus. The trick is to shed that "beige" voice and rediscover our roots. And our roots are, yeah, nestled in our vocal cords. (I'm paraphrasing his advice, by the way, in MY VOICE.)

It's liberating to read Finding Your Voice . . . and pretty difficult to follow the advice. I mean, "Come off it, Lester," I thought. "I can't actually write naturally. Won't the fiction editors take one looksie and chuck my manuscript onto the slush pile?, thinking, 'He's not formal enough.'"

(Heh.) Well, maybe they still will. But no longer because I'm not writing like myself!

Probably the cruelest aspect of the book is how simple the instruction is. I almost felt like Edgerton was trying to sell me snake oil, a panacea for writers. But once you tell your Inner Critic Grammarian Creepo to shut the heck up, it really becomes that easy. I think this is the first time in my life I've ever written fiction with relaxed shoulders.

Use your voice, use your voice, use your voice, says our voice coach. The repetition doesn't get annoying. In fact, I needed Edgerton to tell me over and over for it to sink in.

Use my own voice? Really?

Yethir!

Oddly enough, after reading this review, you already have all the skills you need to "get it" and get it on paper naturally. Just use your voice, man. You don't need to buy his book anymore.

Well, maybe that's going a little too far. Every chapter is chock-ful of helpful words on how to achieve that voice you've been repressing for decades. I especially admired how he showed us examples of famous authors' writings and allowed us to match them up with an equal number of passages by the same authors-but without the bylines-just to show how we can identify a great writer simply by his voice: his choice of words and sentence constructions.

The guy is great. Les Edgerton is a rooster among hens. I've just ordered his short story collection Monday's Meal to see if he's truly as good as he sounds (if you'll forgive the accidental pun).

Finding Your Voice coughs up a nice array of exercises to help you find your voice. The book also shows you how to avoid falling too far into your voice (er, that's my take on it, not his way of putting it). In other words, you learn not to rely on clichés. He shows you how to find unique metaphors that come FROM YOU.

I suppose my only real complaint is that I felt the need to see his voice in action in actual fiction. I wanted to see his advice come to life. Of course, that's how he got me to order his book. The sly dog.

He's a fascinating man. I recommend buying Finding Your Voice.