The thing that makes me fall in love with an author is the voice. The way that a writer uses language, chooses the words and the pace and the tone. If I like the voice, I\u2019ll read about the characters doing their taxes.<\/p>\n
Plenty of writing sites and lots of writing advice will try to steer you toward the \u201cright\u201d way to write. Don\u2019t exactly ignore them, but understand why the conventions exist, and feel free to bend them to preserve your voice. Terry Pratchett wouldn\u2019t be Terry Pratchett without his distinctive voice, but the man loves adverbs and speech tags, which current thinking says are worse for you than gluten, refined sugar, or using dirty needles<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s be honest. Most plots aren\u2019t new. We\u2019ve been saturated with movies and TV and books enough that most readers can spot the tropes, read the trend lines and tell where the story is going. We\u2019ve already met all the stock characters. Most of what we read isn\u2019t breaking new ground.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s nothing wrong with that. A story isn\u2019t bad because it\u2019s familiar. There\u2019s a reason that it was popular in the first place. If we stopped retelling stories, there would have been no point in writing a political thrilled after Alexandre Dumas, or a detective story after Conan Doyle. Maybe the technology has changed, but the story is essentially the same.<\/p>\n
What you do have that is your own is your voice. Write that heroic rescue and don\u2019t worry that D\u2019Artagnan or Flash Gordon or Luke Skywalker or Katniss Everdeen has already done it. There are only so many ways to scale a castle wall or have a swordfight.<\/p>\n
But there are an infinite number of ways to paint that picture.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t let anyone stifle your voice.<\/p>\n
Embrace it.<\/p>\n
And don\u2019t sweat the gluten or refined sugar. You\u2019ll be fine. You may want to avoid the dirty needles though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The thing that makes me fall in love with an author is the voice. The way that a writer uses language, chooses the words and the pace and the tone. If I like the voice, I\u2019ll read about the characters doing their taxes. Plenty of writing sites and lots of writing advice will try to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":195,"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions\/195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}