E63 – Editing Author Voice

Show Notes

In this episode, V.E. Griffith and Miss Catherine M.H. explore the concept of author voice, defining it as the unique way a writer narrates a story, distinct from character dialogue. The hosts discuss when and where author voice is employed, particularly how it interacts with the story’s inherent “pulse” or rhythm. They also touch upon the uniqueness of author voice while acknowledging the practice of mimicking other authors for practice or market trends. Practical aspects of editing author voice are covered, including word choice, sentence structure, and paragraphing, with one host emphasizing adapting their voice to genre. Finally, the discussion addresses when to remove or temper author voice to avoid interfering with character development and the importance of differentiating character voices from the author’s own.

The Revision Wizards are at https://www.revisionwizards.com
V.E. Griffith’s website: https://www.vegriffith.com
Miss Catherine M.H.’s website: https://www.scribes-pen.com
Lon’s Twitter/X: @lonvarnadore1
Lon’s Instagram: @lon_scribbler

Transcript at: https://revisionwizards.com/?p=2648

Transcript

VE:
[0:00] Welcome to the Revision Wizards podcast. I’m V.E. Griffith, and I’m joined by my recently married co-host, Miss Catherine M.H. This is episode 63.

MC:
[0:10] We are continuing our Editing by Parts miniseries with how to edit your author voice. Let’s take a crack at a few things. You or me first?

VE:
[0:22] You first.

MC:
[0:23] Okay, so what is an author voice? So an author voice is going to be the way you narrate a story. This is literally the way you would tell someone a story. If you were to just sit at a campfire and just start going, that is an author voice. So that is found inside of books. It is the narrative behind everything that’s going on. So that’s what an author voice is.

VE:
[0:52] I tend to define it as anything that is not dialogue. And by that, I mean anything that is not characters interacting with one another.

MC:
[1:03] Yeah, I could see that. That makes sense. So when do you think the author voice is used?

VE:
[1:11] Anytime characters are not interacting with one another.

MC:
[1:14] Oh, I beg to differ, because why wouldn’t I?

VE:
[1:17] Why wouldn’t you? Of course. We’re always different. Go ahead.

MC:
[1:21] I think an author voice is used in between the story, because the story itself is going to have its own voice, and the author voice has to mingle with it.

VE:
[1:33] That confuses me.

MC:
[1:35] Oh, okay. So for me, a story has its own pulse and its rhythm that it’s going with, that is happening with the story. It’s pulsing around it, and then the author voice, cuts in and out of that to help move it along is how I’ve always seen an author voice.

VE:
[1:55] Okay.

MC:
[1:56] So like there are definitely ways that like writing has to happen and that’s like story part. And then there’s ways that it can be manipulated a bit to sound more like how the author would like it to be.

VE:
[2:09] Do you think that author voice is unique to each author?

MC:
[2:13] Yes, but you can mimic it. So there are ways to mimic an author voice, and it’s something that I used to do as practice for writing. So I would try to mimic the way my favorite authors would write in order to learn what I did and didn’t like from their voice.

VE:
[2:31] A lot of us do that, and copying artists that we like or that are important in our genre is common in all kinds of art. It is common for people learning to paint to copy paintings from the master. So it’s common for authors to sound like authors that they like, at least for a while, until they naturally develop their own voice through the mechanism of simply writing a lot. making more work.

MC:
[3:02] Yeah. And you can find the copycat. And that’s usually found when groups of people are writing straight to market. So if something is really big, like great example was Twilight. When Twilight was huge, all kinds of vampire stuff was coming out of the woodworks and they all sounded so similar. And that was exactly what, you know, we were looking for. We wanted that exact same tone, the exact same way that they were written, and we just kept gobbling it. So there are times where you mimic it.

VE:
[3:37] Deliberately.

MC:
[3:39] So how do you edit your voice into the narrative?

VE:
[3:44] I pay attention to making sure that the words that the narrator uses are words that I would use that are clear to the reader. I want to make sure my problem is that I tend to be loquacious. I write a lot. I write. I choose words that are complicated, that are long, because I’m a college-educated white guy. And sometimes I need to back that off because my readers, my target audience, is not necessarily college-educated, wouldn’t necessarily know what loquacious means. So I need to be careful of that. I need to make sure that each of those choices that I make are consistent. So that if I’m choosing not to use the word loquacious, it doesn’t sneak in because I am loquacious.

MC:
[4:37] That’s interesting. I don’t do it in the sense of like, how would I sound if I spoke the story half the time? My narrative voice, like the author voice, comes in the sense of the way it’s written. And you haven’t read my space opera, but it’s the sentence structures are different for me. So it’s how would I say the story? So my steampunk, a little bit more long-winded. It’s part of that genre feel to it. It has that Victorian essence in the way. And then my space opera is short sentences. And I mean like short sentences. And it’s how I break up the paragraphs on a page that really shows like, this is me talking to you. This is me telling the story. And it’s completely different. And it’s fun for me because my voice will change depending on the genre. It’s not, the exact same. It’s like I have my customer service voice when I want to talk to people on the phone at my job versus like, let me tell you a story about this awesome thing that’s happening in space. And so it’s a very different voice.

VE:
[5:55] It’s a code switch.

MC:
[5:56] Yeah. I mean, I do it with literally how I structure the paragraphs, the sentences. That’s really where my author voice is.

VE:
[6:05] Mine tends to be also in looking at how, not just word choice, but also paragraph size, paragraph choice, how I choose sentence structure, even in things like dialogue tags or body language. Those are things that characters do, but how I express them can be different from another author.

MC:
[6:28] Yeah, that makes sense. Because I will focus really on that story, like that pulse that I was talking about, where the story speaks for itself, writes itself, does it. And then I have to guide it through. So that’s where I’m making sure that little parts are me telling the story as well as literally the storytelling itself. So with my, you know, my space opera, it’s very fast paced. It’s very going, going fast and exciting. But there’s still little bits of I’m telling the story and what’s known as my Catherine isms, where I can have something very calm and simple going on. But you know, shit’s about to hit the fan in the next at least two chapters because something calm is going on. And they’re known as my Catherine isms. And I get real detailed on you about some weird, grotesque thing that suddenly hits because my space opera does have some horror in it. And that is fun for me. But my my alpha reader definitely calls it Catherine Isms. He’s like, I know shit’s about to go down because like all of a sudden everybody’s getting along and things are going really smoothly. And I’m about to have like some dead body drop out of the ceiling. And I was like, yeah, you are. So there’s there’s those little things where. You notice that author voice. You know who is writing this book based when you’re reading it, just by reading it. You don’t need to see the name. That’s the author voice.

VE:
[7:50] When do you remove your voice from a story?

MC:
[7:53] If it gets in the way of the story is when I remove it. Because there are times where, as a pantser, I’m telling a different story than the story that should be there. So there are times where I have to pull myself back and really think about what is the story supposed to be. So that story pulse, I think, needs to be a stronger element to my storytelling than my voices.

VE:
[8:19] Okay, that makes some sense. One of the ways that you can remove your author voice is change who the narrator is. For example, in the movie, I know we don’t do movies a lot on this podcast, but in the movie Shawshank Redemption, the movie is narrated by one of the characters. So if you have a narrator other than the author or other than the unnamed narrator from God, if you have a character narrating, then your author voice will still be in there, but will be submerged under the voice of the character who’s doing the narration. So if you’re telling the story from, for example, Red’s point of view, I don’t know if you have you ever seen that movie? You need to go watch it. It’s a great movie. It was a box office bomb, and it’s absolutely classic. And it’s not a box office bomb because it was bad. It’s fantastic. It’s based on a Stephen King short story called Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.

MC:
[9:21] Hmm.

VE:
[9:22] Which is also a good short story.

MC:
[9:24] That I’m not a big Stephen King fan?

VE:
[9:26] It’s not a horror.

MC:
[9:28] Okay.

VE:
[9:28] I mean, it’s not the horror.

MC:
[9:30] I just don’t like his writing.

VE:
[9:31] Oh, okay. Well, then don’t read it. Watch it.

MC:
[9:33] Okay.

VE:
[9:34] It’s a Ridley Scott movie, if I remember right.

MC:
[9:37] So, changing the narrative voice also changes.

VE:
[9:41] Also changes basically everything about the story and how it’s told.

MC:
[9:46] So, how would you edit that? Like, if you were reading it in someone’s work, how would you go about editing it?

VE:
[9:55] Well, I try not to in some ways. I feel like an author chooses words specifically for a reason and if I’m going to rewrite your sentence I’m going to try real hard to do it in a way that respects the words you’ve chosen so I might reorder the words that you’ve chosen but I won’t change them if I can avoid it now if you pick the wrong word if you say address is blue and it should be red for whatever reason then I will fix that But if you choose words carefully, I want to make sure that I respect those choices.

MC:
[10:31] Yeah, when I’m editing someone else’s work, I’m making sure that I’m looking at, okay, this is how it’s written. How would we change this to help them? And then to make sure that this is not how I would write it, because then I don’t want to put my voice and my style of writing into their writing. So usually I’m looking at those three things where it’s like, here, this is what you’re saying. How can we help clarify this a little bit better? Because usually I’m working on the developmental end just to make sure we’re not writing this the way I would write it.

VE:
[11:04] I tend to… write like a lawyer. I tend to sound like a lawyer. And in my day job, I spend all day now listening to lawyers. So I need to be careful about that, especially with writers who have a smaller vocabulary than I do. I need to make sure to not inject myself into their work. I need to make sure that their work shines, but that it’s still their work.

MC:
[11:29] You do have a very big fandom for commas.

VE:
[11:32] I do i do i love commas i especially like the the oxford comma but yes i abuse commas considerably uh the comma is one of the keys that is wearing off on my keyboard i.

MC:
[11:46] Imagine it is and see and i like my short sentences sentences.

VE:
[11:51] And i write sentences that are just too damn long.

MC:
[11:55] So when do you think it’s a bad thing to have an author voice in a story.

VE:
[12:01] When it interferes with character development or character interaction or character activity. So you want characters to stand alone and speak for themselves. You don’t want the author to speak for them.

MC:
[12:14] Yeah, that’s when I first started out writing in that lovely book that I read you a little piece of. All the characters sound like me. It was literally me talking. It was like, how would I do this? So I was like learning how to do dialogue. And later on in the book, they actually develop their own voice finally, like 200 pages in. But I really think you shouldn’t be each character. So they shouldn’t sound like you. If you’re reading the book and the characters sound exactly like the narration, that’s a problem. So I will look for that. I’m like, how is how is this narration going? And do the characters sound exactly like the narration? Because if they do, that’s the author’s voice and literally probably the way they sound and speak here in the character.

VE:
[13:06] Yeah. And so you need to make sure that if you want a character to sound like that, you’re making a deliberate choice. But then it needs to make you need to make sure that is different from other characters so that they don’t all sound the same.

MC:
[13:20] So, yeah. So that’s when I would think that the author voice is bad to have is when it is literally in your your characters, all of your characters voice. There are little bits, of course, of every character that, you know, will have your voice. Literally, because they do come from your head. But there comes a point where they also have to sound like separate people. They don’t all sound like, you know, the same person.

VE:
[13:47] And I have problems with that. I, a lot of my characters sound like me. And that’s something that I’m trying to edit as I go through my editing passes, editing my dialogue, editing my body language to make sure that my characters sound unique enough from me that you can tell they’re not all college educated white guys.

MC:
[14:07] Do you think you have a hard time with female voices?

VE:
[14:12] Yes. There are two reasons for that. First is I’m not a woman. And the second is I don’t have a lot of experience writing women. So that’s one of the reasons why the people that I’ve asked to read my book are women, so that they can give me guidance and help with that. Because I know that some of the things that I do that I write are not correct, and I want that looked at by somebody who has a better sense of how a woman would behave than I do. Because women are just fucking inscrutable to me.

MC:
[14:45] Sometimes I have a difficulty writing male voices.

VE:
[14:49] Yes, you do.

MC:
[14:49] Because I find that I add too much emotion.

VE:
[14:54] Yes, men tend to be more repressed than women.

MC:
[14:57] However, women like to read that. So there’s that weird fine line in writing.

VE:
[15:03] Yeah, where you have to pay attention to what your audience wants as well as good characterization.

MC:
[15:09] Yeah.

VE:
[15:09] Because if your audience wanted reality, they wouldn’t read. They would go live their life in reality. Part of what an audience is looking for is not just, as I always say, an emotional journey. They’re looking for an emotional journey that is relaxing and different from the real world.

MC:
[15:26] I think that kind of hits all the parts of an author voice.

VE:
[15:29] I think it does. I think we got around it relatively well.

MC:
[15:34] Yeah. Do you… change your author voice based on what you’re writing?

VE:
[15:39] Since I really only have one project in progress, no.

MC:
[15:42] Okay. So I was going to say, like, you don’t change it if you’re writing, like, emails versus if you’re doing, I don’t know if you’ve ever written articles or stuff like that.

VE:
[15:52] Yeah, I have. And I consider that to be code switching.

MC:
[15:56] What do you mean by code switching for those who don’t know?

VE:
[15:59] Okay. Code switching is a phenomenon that is well documented in the academic literature in sociology and linguistics, where you will speak differently to different people or different groups. For example, the way you talk to your boss might be the way, might be different than the way you talk to a customer, which might be different than the way you talk to your mother, which is different than the way you talk to your spouse.

MC:
[16:25] Gotcha. So, okay. interesting because I feel like I have different author voices based on what stuff I write well.

VE:
[16:34] You would because you’re right you’re writing different kinds of genres and you’re writing different very very different stories.

MC:
[16:40] But even my emails they’ll have a different author voice it doesn’t matter who I’m sending them to they will all sound about the same like I could send the exact same email that I would send to like my boss as I would to like my mom, It’s just an email format. People find my text messages really weird because I will text message in full-blown sentences with, like, proper punctuation.

VE:
[17:06] I do that as well. The only thing that I give up on is if I am texting from my computer, I will not have capital letters. And if I am texting from my phone, my phone will automatically capitalize sentences.

MC:
[17:21] It took a while for quite a lot of people to think i wasn’t screaming and yelling and being really angry at them in a text message because writing in full sentences with punctuation is apparently anger messages but i was just like i just write in full sentences sorry guys, now i add emojis like if i’m angry it’s an angry emoji yeah.

VE:
[17:43] Exactly yeah yeah i’m i try and use emojis in situations where I would be misinterpreted easily, which is a lot of different situations. Like, note the smiley face, asshole.

MC:
[17:57] Exactly. So, all in all, I think author voice is when, you know, you yourself are trying to tell the story without interrupting the story itself.

VE:
[18:09] I think that is a reasonable definition.

MC:
[18:12] Okay. Anything else to add?

VE:
[18:14] I don’t think so. I think we got it.

MC:
[18:16] All right. I don’t know, you normally end the episode, so I’ll hand that over to you.

VE:
[18:20] Okay, then I guess we’ll see everybody next time.

MC:
[18:25] Stay magical!

VE:
[18:26] Bye.