There is an correlation between how hard something is and how awesome it is. If you want to write an awesome and cool book you have to slave at it. It took me a good five years to produce a book that I didn't hate. (that's just the production of the book itself, not the failed projects that came before it)
Everybody is after the quick and easy fix. Nobody wants to hear me say 'you need to take more time on your grammar.' Or, worse, ' you need to work on your voice.'
So many aspiring authors have no idea what a literary voice is, or how to develop it. I'll give you a hint; it rhymes with WORK.
Usually it involves writing. Your voice is your style, the way you express yourself that is unique. Some twist of phrase, some way of doing things that's different. CJ Cherryh is a great example. Nobody writes quite like she does. Critics might say 'who would want to,' but the truth is that everybody wants to be like her. That is, published, known, praised. This despite the sometimes boring machinations and politics she dabbles with, the overly ambitious novels with anticlimatic endings, the trivial way she deals with most topics... (can you tell I'm a big fan? Oh, yeah, I am)
But the journey as she takes you through a story that any author could screw up is always great. If you summed up her stories, the synopsis is boring. I can't even read the summaries of her stories any more; it's just painful.
But she builds, with words, a world so real it hurts sometimes. She builds characters that speak with their own voice, and she uses her words carefully and viciously. She gets in your head, and hangs on tenaciously, using that voice, that particular way of putting things, to stay there.
That's what an author's voice should do.
More on my own voice later.
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