Category: Guest Posts

Changing Voices

Guest post
by Melissa Bowersock

I’m a novelist by trade; the current count stands at nine. That count ranges over the various genres of action, romance, fantasy, western, spiritual and satire. As you can see, I like variety and I will tell any kind of story that grabs me by the throat, drags me to my chair and insists on being written down.

I’ve also learned that every story will demand a different voice. The romance novels will often have a more flowery style to them while the action stories are more clipped and direct. My spiritual novel, Goddess Rising, demanded an almost archaic voice, while my satire of romance novels, The Pits of Passion, bounced irreverently between gushing descriptions and off-the-cuff puns. The voices seem to arise naturally out of the story and require very little effort on my part.

So when I was inspired to write the true story of my aunt, an Army nurse and a prisoner-of-war during World War II, I thought, “No big deal.” I’m an author; I should be able to “auth” any kind of story there is, right? Continue reading “Changing Voices”

Get A Group: Critique Partners Make a Difference

Guest post
by Darlene Deluca

They may push you. They may make you rewrite. And rewrite some more. They might ask you tough questions like, “what’s the point of this scene?” They may be brutally honest. You might not like them very much sometimes.

But, relax, they’re making you a better writer, and your book a better product.

They’re called critique partners. And you need them. Why? Because they’ll tell you if something doesn’t make sense, if you need to chop twenty-five pages of backstory, or if you’ve used the word “just” fifty times in one chapter. Continue reading “Get A Group: Critique Partners Make a Difference”

Book Club Views May Vary

A guest post
by Dave Vizard

Women and men often look at life through completely different lenses.

So, it really should come as no surprise that the way men and women view the same novel after reading it is sometimes as different as what can be seen through a set of eyeglasses and a microscope.

That became apparent after I recently met with members of two book clubs – one all male and the other all female – that had read my novel.

One club hails from Attica, the rural community about 30 miles north of Metro Detroit, not the infamous prison in New York state. The Attica Ladies have been reading a wide variety of books and meeting regularly for more than 10 years. Noteworthy. Continue reading “Book Club Views May Vary”

Narrative Voice: Breaking the Rules

Guest post
by Mark Hamner

As I worked to complete my third book, Cinder’s Reach, I encountered a situation which led me to think about narrative voice rules and if it’s ever okay to break them. I believe that most of the time the answer is no, but there may be some situations in which it’s not as cut-and-dried.

For those perhaps new to writing, narrative voice can be thought of as the general perspective of the story. The narrative voice goes hand-in-hand with the narrative point of view. Some common narrative voices are first-person character voice (“I wonder what Jennifer is thinking”), third-person limited voice (“Mike had no idea what Jennifer was thinking”), and third-person omniscient voice (“Mike was confused; Jennifer was furious.”)

My Echo Chronicles series is written in third-person omniscient voice. As you know, that means I follow the characters in a “He said,” “He went,” “He thought,” manner, and I give my readers insight into the thoughts and feeling of more than one character. My story does, of course, have a protagonist, and his is the main point of view and narrative voice, but I do drop into others as well. I have four main characters, and all four have lent their voices to the story at various times. This worked well for me through my first two books, but I hit a snag in the third. Continue reading “Narrative Voice: Breaking the Rules”