Voice is — to me at least — the most elusive aspect of writing.   It’s so easy to see another writer’s voice…or maybe I should say it’s easy to feel another writer’s voice.  It’s not so easy to see/feel my own.  I’ve spoken with other authors (both published and aspiring) who admit to the same.  Yes, it’s in the words we choose (or our character’s choose) to use in their dialogue and internal thought.  It’s the balance of narrative and dialogue.  It’s sentence structure — compound sentences or sentence fragments.  I know it’s all that and more, but I can’t see it in my own writing while I’m writing.  I can feel it at times, especially when the good writing fairy has come to call.  Other people have muses.  I have a good writing fairy.  She?  He?  Whoever stops by and inserts amazing phrases and bursts of characterization among the dreck I’ve written.  She?  He?  Whoever comes after I’ve left the computer to do its nightly back-up and puts that sentence or two in what I had considered worthy only of a massive revision.  When I go back and read the next morning, there it is — brilliance amongst the words that soon will be highlighted just before I hit the delete button.  And almost always those gifts from the good writing fairy focus on voice.  They provide the initimate insight into the character by having the character speak or act in a way I hadn’t imagined before.  Too bad they come so seldom.  The rest of the time I have to slog through the wordy paragraphs and the unnecessary scenes, but I’ve learned that it’s important for me to overwrite and overplot.  Only then can I go back and sculpt the story I want by slicing away everything that’s not needed, like the sculptor who creates a magnificient statue by cutting away everything that doesn’t look like his subject.  And when I get that story down to its bones and sinews, I can get a glimmer of my voice — from the words that I delete and the words I let stay.

I’d like to say that with each book the self-awareness of voice comes more readily.  It doesn’t.  When I go back and look at the finished product, I know that my traditional Regencies have a slightly different voice from my historicals and a very different voice from my contemporaries, but still each time, the voice is mine.  Too bad I can’t see it as I go along.  Or maybe it’s just as well that I don’t, because when I can’t hear my voice, I have to listen to my characters’ voices telling me their unique story.

More photos — this time on pubs:

Pub

Twice Brewed Northumberland:

White Horse in Capel Garmon Wales:

Pub signs:

Fox and the Hare in Yorkshire:

Queen and Castle Kenilworth:

Food board (Kensington):

Here are some photos for those taking my class…or who just enjoy looking at photos of England.

First is one of the heads of the artisans who carved the pews at Trinity Church Coventry

Misericords (also from Trinity Church in Coventry).  You can see the small shelf you could lean back against at the very top of the photo.

Round towered church in Norfolk (Fritton Church):

Church with “witch hat” (St. Mary-in-the-Marsh, Romney Marsh):

Lychgate (church in Helmsley, Yorkshire):

Church porch (Assington Church Norfolk/Suffolk):

Pink pews at St. Clements:

Templar Window in Temple:

Memorial stone (my ancestor from Norwich Cathedral):

Bosses (Norwich Cathedral):

Mouseman mouse (Coventry Cathedral):

Painted church walls in Pickering:

Chapel flag St. Mary’s Warwick

Effigies from Beauchamp Chapel in St. Mary’s Collegiate Warwick:

Crypt St. Mary’s Lastingham, Yorkshire:

Modern Coventry Cathedral and original:

St Cybi’s Well (Lleyn Peninsula Wales):

St. Non’s Well near St. David’s Wales: