In Search of Voice

There has been a fascinating and wide ranging discussion over at the British SCBWI list serve about VOICE.

How many editor/agent panels have I attended in which the Holy Grail to publishing, apparently, is Voice.

I am looking for a fresh Voice that draws me in immediately.

Last year's SCBWI (UK) anthology competition focused on voice - hence the anthology's title UNDISCOVERED VOICES. And yet when I search the mountain of How to Write books I've accumulated through the years, I am hard pressed to find one with a clear guide to finding your Voice.

What is Voice anyway?

It's not point of view, although the list serve discussion swung in and out of the merits of third person, first person, omniscient etc etc.

I can cite examples of novels with clear, compelling voices - Anthony McGowan's boy with a wisecracking brain tumor in Henry Tumour, Meg Rosoff's anorexic leading lady in How I Live Now, Geraldine McCaughrean's hearing-impaired teenager who has an Arctic explorer for an imaginary friend in White Darkness.

I've been re-reading Geraldine McCaughrean's earlier novels, A Pack of Lies, The Stones Are Hatching and A Little Lower than Angels. And although the quality of writing is formidable, clearly, McCaughrean had not yet found the Voice that makes White Darkness such a triumph.

I would venture to guess that a unique Voice is something one develops over time.I would also guess that though every novel is unique to itself, each author has a particular, unmistakable voice.

If you checked out the very earliest posts on this blog (see this piece in 2004 on multicultural writing), you will find a completely different voice. When I started out, I had imagined myself reporting in the manner of a journalist. But personality will out and the journalism is now buried under... well, I've found my Voice.

Newbie bloggers often experience that same groping and searching suffered by authors seeking their Voice.

Comes the modern reality of an over-publishing, over-crowded children's market.

We don't have the luxury of time to discover that Voice. There are no publishers willing to publish two or three books so that an author can discover that fresh, unput-downable Voice.

Interestingly, there are some who are up to the challenge.

It's a bit sad that my social life revolves around critique groups. But at various critique groups I've attended, I heard some fine unpublished examples: Anita Loughrey's tough-talking (and hilarious!) teenage blogger, Miriam Halahmy's island girl who finds herself hiding an illegal immigrant, Angela Cerrito's grieving heroine trying to understand her sister's suicide. At the reading of Anita's newly penned chapters, we just wanted her to read on and on, the voice was so extraordinary.

It was clear to me that for these talented writers, getting an agent/publisher was probably only a matter of time (or finishing their manuscripts!).

Why Writers Need Agents

It was half term last week. We didn't manage to go away because the teenagers had exams coming. Bored children took root in my shed. Here is the result.

Teens Do Read - Take That, Anti-Hoody People!

As the mother of two hoodies, I take exception to frequent put-downs of teenagers - the sort that reduce their complexity to 'feral thugs who live on advertising jingles and drugs'.

So you can imagine my urge to say I TOLD YEW SO when Newsweek declared that teen writing is the 'one bright spot' in a flat children's publishing market.

Contrary to the depressing proclamations that American teens aren't reading, the surprising truth is they are reading novels in unprecedented numbers. Young-adult fiction (ages 12-18) is enjoying a bona fide boom with sales up more than 25 percent in the past few years, according to a Children's Book Council sales survey. Virtually every major publishing house now has a teen imprint, many bookstores and libraries have created teen reading groups and an infusion of talented new authors has energized the genre.

Libraries and booksellers are taking teenage books out of the kiddy section and putting them in their own spaces.

YA Author (and executive editorial director of Scholastic Inc) David Leviathan goes so far as to call it a 'second golden age'. This, he says, is the "most exciting time for young-adult literature since the late 1960s and 1970s when 'The Chocolate War' [by Robert Cormier] and 'Forever' [by Judy Blume] were published."

Wehey!

Leviathan and others point to the increased sophistication and emotional maturity of teenagers as well as the fact that:

... young-adult books are simply better and more diverse than ever, and readers are responding.

I guess it's a double edged sword.

On the one hand, the books are better, the kids are reading more. On the other hand, kids are turning to books partly to escape the fact that contemporary teenage life is more challenging and more stressful.

What can we do?

Write better. Write well. They so deserve it.

(Important Question: Will the good news trickle across the Atlantic to the UK?)

Thanks to Achockablog for the heads-up.