Give Your Book a Voice…
It sounds crazy I know..but it is important that your book can stand on its own, it needs a personality. What will your book “sound like” and “feel like”to your readers? Hot and steamy? Cold and factual? Information overload? Warm and fuzzy? Something for your soul? It is important before you get too deep into writing your book, to establish the voice of the book. I get asked by authors-to- be if I can read their manuscript or rough draft for them. I can tell from the first chapter if this book has a voice. It is usually the first problem that I find when reading a rough draft.
Think of Ernest Hemingway’s book The Sun Also Rises. What do you “hear” in your mind as you remember passages from this book? The voice of this book is told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose. A voice can be created by what you write and it can also be created by what you don’t say. If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader (if the writer is good enough) will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.
Give your book a voice, bring it alive to all of us readers.
Have an inspired weekend,
Kimberly Wechsler
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