DS & Surgery

Tomorrow’s the big day! Our son is going in to have his sinuses drained. Specifically his sphenoid sinuses. He’s advanced to chronic sinus disease (triggered by allergies) and this is the first surgery he’s going to remember having. He’s worried, but resigned. It’s a day surgery, so we hope to have him home again tomorrow night.

Hopefully this will help with his migraine issues as well, since the pressure build up seems to trigger them on a near-constant basis. Thank goodness his neurologist gave us a new prescription before Christmas break that finally gave him some relief and returned his personality and energy levels.

We’ll be contacting people and updating information once we get home tomorrow.

A Writer’s Style & Voice

This is one of those topics where I can’t claim any expertise. In fact, I’m not sure very many people could. A writer’s style and voice are very subjective things. What appeals to one person may turn another completely off reading past the first page. Then, you also can’t confuse the author’s voice with the voice of their narrators.

Ok. I can see your eyes glazing over already. How about I define these words instead of just throwing them around.

Style

Wikipedia defines writing style as “the manner in which a writer addresses a matter. A style reveals the writer’s personality or voice. It is the result of the choices the writer makes in syntactical structures, diction, and figures of thought.”

So style is how you handle the mechanics of writing. It includes all the punctuation, the types of sentence structures you favor, your experience and education in life that forms your word choices.

Holly Lisle has a great article titled “Ten Steps to Finding your Writing Voice” that discusses the differences between style and voice on her web pages. In the article, she says the best way writers have to sell themselves is to put themselves on the page.

This is what is known in the writing business as developing your voice. Voice isn’t merely style. Style would be easy by comparison. Style is watching your use of adjectives and doing a few flashy things with alliteration. Style without voice is hollow.

– Holly Lisle, “Ten Steps to Finding your Writing Voice”

So, a piece of writing can be technically perfect, yet it just sits there on the page, dead. What can you do to liven it up? Infuse it with your voice. When you’re telling your friends a good story that has them laughing and maybe even crying right along with you, would a transcription of your anecdote be technically perfect and lifeless on the page?

Probably not. What’s different? Should anything be different?

Voice

The difference is voice and many would argue that your speaking voice and your writing voice are essentially the same, and if they’re not, you’re being inauthentic. (Remember, this is authorial voice, not a character or narrator’s voice.) I’m not sure if I believe the inauthentic part, but it may be that you’re not confident about what you’re writing yet.

Let’s go back to Holly Lisle’s article on steps to develop your voice a minute and see what she says about voice and why style without voice is destined to flop lifelessly on the page.

Voice is style, plus theme, plus personal observations, plus passion, plus belief, plus desire. Voice is bleeding onto the page, and it can be a powerful, frightening, naked experience.

– Holly Lisle, “Ten Steps to Finding your Writing Voice”

Voice, then, is all the author’s technical style along with all their choice of themes, emotions, and personal truths that colors their writing and show through in every book of theirs that makes it possible to pick out a snippet from the middle and read it aloud and the people familiar with that author will just know who wrote it, in the same way that great musicians can play the same piece of music on the same instrument and sound completely different.

Developing Voice

Why can’t anyone agree what “style” and “voice” are? “I’ll know it when I hear/read/see it” is a common response when agents and acquiring editors are asked what they’re looking for. What’s an unpubbed author to do? The problem with all arts is that they’re subjective. There are a few objective and quantitative aspects to them, but for the most part they’re all about what emotions the piece of art evokes from its audience and are completely qualitative (where quality is in the eye of the beholder).

How can less experienced writers improve and develop their voice? Holly Lisle’s article covers many techniques and exercises for doing so, but the most common suggestions I’ve seen are:

• Read everything you can get your hands on, especially the classics
• Write. Write. Write. And then, write some more.
• Record yourself telling a story. Record yourself reading your writing. Compare, contrast. Keep what works.
• Write. Write. Write. And then, write some more.
• Don’t be afraid to take risks and give yourself permission to write an awful first draft. You may end up keeping more than you thought without revising the life out of it before the story is completely on the page.

 

I’ve been told I have a nice Regency voice. Do I consciously employ a certain voice when I write? Not really. I try to throw in a few archaic phrasings and terms, but maybe my diction and vocabulary just naturally fit well with this genre. Do I think I need to work on my voice and style? Absolutely! It could be a matter of perspective and personal bias, but my writing still feels pretty lifeless on the page, but I know I need to write. Write. Write. And then, write some more.

What are you actively doing to develop your voice and style? Do you feel you’ve found your “voice”?

Excerpt Monday: Take 11

It’s Excerpt Monday again!

Bria and Mel are at it again. Everyone wants to play along with Excerpt Monday! If you’d like to join in this meme, visit their Guidelines page for more details.

This month’s excerpt is drawn again from Beneath His Touch. James has agreed to accompany Tabitha on an outing to Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre with his cousins and the two young bucks he fears will be the ruin of his cousins.

As always, any comments or criticisms are welcome.

Transportation in the Regency Era

Writing and Transportation

On Monday, I spoke of a need for structure in writing a story or novel. When writing about another time period or indeed even in fantasy and science fiction settings, the author needs to consider the infrastructure of their setting and the effects that will have on their characters and stories from the time travel takes, to sensible clothing choices to relevant status symbols.

Travel and transportation have only increased in speed, comfort and horsepower since the Regency Era. We take for granted the speed at which we travel dashing from one city to another often in a matter of hours instead of days or months when jet setting from one continent to another. Likewise different sorts of conflict and obstacles are going to crop up with different modes of travel. Instead of a flat tire, the heroine’s carriage may break an axel or lose a wheel on the road past the hero’s manor house. She can’t just go in and call for a taxi, but may be invited to stay as his guest until the vehicle is fixed.

Types of Transportation

Before the 1830s, trains had not yet spread widely across the English country side and many factories still relied on canals for the transport of raw materials and goods to market. The postal system and its need to carry mail and people along particular routes required reform and refurbishment of the infrastructure during the late Regency period. Thomas Telford and John McAdam (of the Tar-McAdam or tarmac fame despite his not using tar in his construction, but possibly because of family business in the 18th century involving tar and shipbuilding) led to widespread rennovations and improvements (in terms of the roads taking people where they wanted to go) on the Roman roads, including the Great North Road, the corridor between London and Edinburgh that is now called the A1.

The designs of the various carriages during the Regency Period reveal the inadequacies of the roads for which they were meant to compensate. Lighter carriages that were well sprung were the sports cars of their day. One’s mode of transportation was tightly tied to one’s economic propserity. As you climb the rungs of the economic ladder, vehicles move from heavy and ponderous to become lighter and more lavish. However, walking was universal. The poorest people walked because they no other altrenatives and the more affluent walked for exercise and one suspects freedom from the bumps and jolts of traveling in a conveyance over rough roads. While it wasn’t fashionable to ride one’s horse instead of riding in a carriage, the maneuverability and freedom gained was surely preferable for some gentlemen.

While many carriages were built to order, you could also walk into a show room and purchase a new vehicle off the premises much the same as the modern car dealership, without the hard-sell one would hope. Unfortunately, many of the carriages from the Regency haven’t survived due to rapid advances in design where older vehicles were either scrapped or rennovated.

I’ll go into more detail on the different types of carriages as well as more information about horses next week.

Entertainment or Transportation

In January 1818, the first ‘running machine’ was patented by a German named Karl Drais. This pre-cursor to the modern bicycle was wooden and one straddled the contraption and propelled it along with one’s feet in a running motion. This prototype was of little practical use as it was only possible to ride on well-maintained paths in parks or gardens.It was promptly copied and became popular in England and France. This ‘running machine’, ’swiftwalker’ or ‘dandy horse’, as it was often called in Britain being favored by the dandies, gained in popularity and the term ‘velocipede’ was first used in the 1860s when Pierre Michaux, Pierre Lallement and the Olivier brothers built the first bicycle equipped with pedals, the ancestor of the modern bicycle.

Which travel nightmares do you think you would hate to have encountered the most in the Regency Era or which ones would you glad trade all the speed and comfort of now to avoid by traveling back in time?

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For more information regarding Regency Transportation, Carriages and Horses and a variety of Regency-themed topics can be found on my Regency Resource page.

Structure

Just like we need a bit of structure in our lives in order to thrive and stretch our selves to reach our goals, our writing needs a bit of structure to it. This helps keep the story coherent and cohesive and helps it resonate with the reader. I’m sure there are experimental structures out there where upon first glance it makes no sense at all and as a reader you can’t make heads or tales of it, until you learn the structure and suddenly everything clicks and makes sense.

Now, structure isn’t the same as plot, nor is it the same as a formula.

When people talk about stories, books, tv shows and movies as being formulaic, they don’t necessarily mean their structure is boring and worn out. Usually they mean their plot is tired and so well-worn, there are no surprises for us.

However, people have been telling each other stories for millenia. Some jaded folks claim there are no new stories or ideas. But we’ve seen numerous stories told where the structure is repeated time and time again. Why? Because it works with a wide variety of plots and people are comforted and satisfied by the familiar. Indeed many of the same basic plot lines have been retold with new characters throughout the ages.

The most familiar structure is probably the three Act Structure as described by Aristotle in his Poetics. It can be found from ancient Greek plays to numerous books and movies of today.

Aristotlean Play Structure

1. Exposition
2. Rising Action
3. Climax
4. Falling Action
5. Denouement/Resolution

This structure will look very familiar if you graph it like Gustav Freytag did at the right when he analyzed ancient Greek and Shakespearean dramas.

Many people are interested in how novels and screenplays are structured and each have their own perception of how it works best and why. Some look at it from the angle of characterization and the emotional stories of those characters. Others have likened it to a journey that the character takes and the steps involved to propel the character on his journey and the adventures and trials experienced and his glorious return as a hero. here’s even a twist on this for the heroine’s journey. Yet there are others yet who are more plot-oriented with some delving into what motivates the characters to make the decisions that they do during the course of the plot.

Popular Takes on Structuring A Novel or Screenplay

• Traditional Three Act or 5-Part Structure
• Christopher Vogler’s Hero’s Journey
• Peter Dunne’s Emotional Structure
• Debra Dixon’s Goal/Motivation/Conflict
• Michael Hauge’s Six Stages
• Kara Lennox’s breakdown for a 400-page novel
• Billy Mernit’s Seven Steps for Romantic Comedies

I’ll be looking closer at these in the coming months, but I don’t think most of them are really completely different structures so much as various lenses with which to analyze a story or alternate sets of questions to ask yourself as you go about building your story.

Whether you’re a plotter or a pantser will determine your level of comfort and need for outlines, but I’m sure you’ll still find yourself asking these same types of questions that will affect your structure at one point or another, either before your first draft or as you try to assemble a later draft into a coherent story.

 

Which type of structure comes naturally for you? Have you ever used some other type of structure? Diary, Framed Flashack, Family Saga, or something else?