My voice

A good author has a great voice, one easy to identify and powerful. Stephen King has a voice that's unmistakable. So does CJ Cherryh. A voice isn't about having a great story to tell; when we say 'they have a great voice' we mean they have the tools, the command of the craft, necessary to tell a great story in a great way.

Do I have the tools? The literary voice? Do I? Do you?

The first measure of that is how long it takes you to write a sentence. Do you dash a sentence out and run on, never stopping to read it back and consider whether you've used enough creepy words, whether it gets the information across clearly and cogently? In short, is this a conscious process, or are you just writing down the first thing that comes to mind?

I plead guilty of the latter, all too often.

Okay, I've failed there. Next; are you writing something that would fit in a newspaper, a cold analysis of what happened that isn't using words like weapons? Your words are your weapons. Some words are cold and impersonal. "John hit the guard." That doesn't have any ring at all to it. "John smashed the guard's face." All I change is the words, and it gives you a completely different image. Not only that, it's more information. You can't tell in that first one whether John managed to do a good job of it. Maybe it was a girly punch; you can't tell. When John smashes him, you know for sure exactly what happened.

I'm getting better at a command of the words. A little bit.

Finally, and most importantly, are you showing them the stuff you talk about? Or telling them? "Mitch saw a spaceship fly by, and it was the coolest thing he'd ever seen." Wow, that's nice. You told us that Mitch was awed, and the spaceship was cool. How about a few words on what that means? "The silvery streak of the spaceship moved contrary to every law of phsyics, and Mitch's eyes popped open." I included a color, a movement (albeit a boring one) and an action on Mitch's part. I didn't call it cool, and I didn't call him awed, but you get the idea anyway.

And I'm sure you can think of a million better ways to show the readers he was awed.

If you just tell the readers how awed Mitch was, they don't feel it. They may know it, but they don't feel it. And they didn't enjoy it much. Show them, and they will love you forever.

Show; don't tell.

I know, this is hard. All we do with words is tell, right? The best authors, the ones who are remembered, are the ones who create images with those words. The ones who write vividly, so that we're sure we know what the character looked like, even though there were no pictures, no images. Just words.

I'm not sure how well I do that.