Originality? Maybe You're Trying Too Hard

I love to read an author who's truly an original, don't you? Perhaps that's why writing conferences devote so much time to techniques for developing our own "voice." It may also explain how we get trapped in a ceaseless round of rewrites, trying so hard to say something in a fresh way.

I recently came across a comment by C.S. Lewis that pulled me up short. Here's his "take" on original writing:

No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work's sake, and what men call originality will come unsought.--"Membership," quoted by Patricia S. Klein, ed., A Year with C.S. Lewis, April 29.

Faithfulness to the Lord demands that we invest every story with the best efforts of which we are capable; but when we obsess about giving the story our own unique "brand," we shift the object of our faithfulness--to ourselves!

Lewis' comment reminds me of the time a friend tried to teach me golf. Having never played golf before, I needed to start at the most basic level, so he took me to a driving range and began giving a series of instructions: Stand this way...grip the club that way...turn your shoulders, but not your head, etc. I eventually grazed the ball with my club. I kept on trying, and my friend kept on instructing, until he finally said, "You're being too self-conscious. Forget about yourself and just hit the ball." When I did that, it flew down the range.

"Try to tell the truth as you see it," Lewis advises. "Try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work's sake." In other words, forget about yourself and keep your eye on the "ball," story that needs to be told. Then originality will take care of itself.

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Joe Allison and his wife, Judy, live in Anderson IN, where Joe serves as Coordinator of Publishing for Church of God Ministries, Inc. Joe has several nonfiction books in print, including Swords and Whetstones: A Guide to Christian Bible Study Resources. He's currently writing a trilogy of Christian historical novels set in the Great Depression.

Visit Joe's blog at http://hoosierwriter.wordpress.com

Writers are weird.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Recently I drove a friend of mine to a downtown Indianapolis hotel because her son had an early appointment at Riley Children’s Hospital the next day. On our way there, on downtown Meridian Street, a police car zoomed out in front of our car and stopped. The officer jumped out, drew his gun and shouted at a suspect to get down on the ground.

My passengers (my friend and her mother) screamed and ducked.

I grinned ear to ear and took in everything. “Oh this is awesome. Check out that gun!”

I memorized every detail – the size of the gun, the stance of the officer, the way he held his weapon, his tone of voice, how neatly pressed his shirt was, and his tall, skinny frame. I studied everything carefully, thrilled to be witnessing a real-time live crime drama.

My friends, frightened and shaking, stayed on the floor.

It reminds me of the time in Kansas many years ago (okay, over 30 if you must know) when my boyfriend and I had a gun held to our heads for being parked in a farmer’s field looking at stars through my boyfriend’s zoom lens camera. (We really were looking at the moon and the stars. Honest. Really. Why don’t you believe me?)

The owner of the field pulled his muscle truck up behind us and put on his fog lights. Minutes later his son pulled up and did the same.  They got out of their trucks and walked up to our car.

They were drunk.

They had rifles.

They cocked them, held them to our heads and yelled at us for being in their field

I prayed while my boyfriend cried.

Somehow we negotiated our way out of the drunkard's line of fire.  As soon as we escaped unharmed I turned to my boyfriend and said, “I can’t wait to write this down!”

He left me because of that.

Writers are weird. They can’t go through anything without filing it away as “research.”

Some writers scream when they see a stick up and then there are those of us who just can’t wait to write it all down.

Are you as weird as I am? What experiences do you remember hurrying to write down?

 Karla Akins is a pastor's wife, mother of five, grandma to five beautiful little girls and author of O Canada! Her Story.  Represented by Hartline Literary Agency, she lives in North Manchester with her husband, twin teenage boys with autism, mother-in-law with Alzheimer's and three rambunctious dogs. Her favorite color is purple, favorite hobby is book-hoarding, and favorite food group is cupcakes. When she's not writing she dreams of riding her motorcycle through the Smoky Mountains.

Getting an Eyeball on Your Writing

Getting an eyeball on your writing

 I've been writing blog posts for many years now. I started after a couple published writing friends said I needed to have a blog if I was a writer. We (writers) now have so many places to get a "presence" on the internet, that it has become a topic of conversation among writers where to spend precious writing time. But back then, blogging was about the only place to do that. I started my blog so I could find my "voice" in writing again and just see what interested me. 

I had the blogspot with the title "Christian Book Scout" for a full year before I ever posted. All I knew is that I had published a lot of book reviews and read a lot of manuscripts and books. I wrote magazine and newspaper articles and tried my hand at several nonfiction book proposals and manuscripts, too. I did a stint on a mini-syndicated parenting column, but I found that I hated revealing too much about my four boys and the privacy issues. I wrote a book column in a magazine for many years and liked that assignment. But on my blog and on others' blogs I've posted on just about everything that interests me. It's a topic list about as jumbled as my brain. 

Sometime back something clicked after I had yet another disaster at my house. I'm describing my disaster in great detail to my friends and they were laughing at the way I talked about it. This has been my whole life--one "disaster" after another and me making fun of myself through it all. Me, leaning wholly on God while in the midst of it. God keeping me from a much worse outcome. Somehow I always picture myself in the middle of chaos, falling back on God (tripping into His waiting arms!) and Him smiling down at me. It's like Peter in the middle of the storm at sea. I have mentioned more than once how I'm like Peter. I can really relate to him.

Because of all this, I think my focus has cleared and my sweet spot in writing emerged. I have been in some very serious life and death situations, am married to a man who helps people through their own life and death situations, and I've learned that I just have to trust God and keep smiling through my gritted teeth. Grit--it can be dry as sand or sweet as sugar.In whatever circumstances, I'm looking for the way closest to God and Him calming me in the storm. It's the only viewpoint from which I can make sense of everything.

If you write enough, you start to see a pattern in theme, how you express it, where you feel you best express a character's conflicts. Writing becomes like your life. You begin to view the writing you're doing in the same way you view your life and your worldview.It does take a bit of standing back. You try to see your writing from a perspective outside yourself. 

So, do you think you're finding your sweet spot in writing? How do you get perspective on your voice, your characters, your choice of genre/settings? How do you see yourself as you're writing? (And is there anyone in the Bible you can relate to??)

~Crystal Laine Miller

7 Questions to Ask When Finding Your Genre

Early Spring for a Writer Doesn't Always Mean You're in Full Bloom! (Had to get my photo of my crocus in here somewhere...)

 It's not always easy to know where to begin when a person starts writing. Most start off writing what they like to read, but then, get stuck in the process, realizing that they are missing something. 

And it's true that just because you love reading historical romances, maybe your voice, your time that it takes to research a time period or just you, writing in the historical genre, doesn't click. Plenty of authors have come to this place, and at least one author I know was getting rejected miserably in romantic suspense so much, it was by accident that she discovered her voice in romantic comedy. (And went on to be a New York Times Bestseller.)

So, what can you do to find that sweet spot where you write best? Here are some questions to think and pray about so you can perhaps get there faster. Or if you're being rejected over and over, do consider these questions--before quitting or hiring someone to work over your manuscripts.

•  What are you passionate about?
• What gives you energy and motivates you?
• What shows up over and over in your stories--or in the stories you love to read?(What is the true thread in your writing?)
• What is important to you creatively? (Educate, scare, entertain, enlighten, explore...)
• Do you have a personal cause or agenda that defines you? (Already established a platform?)
• What stories did you love as a child? (And if you've read any of the When I Was Just a Kid interviews that I do, you'll often see a thread that connects the child with the writer she grows up to be. Be sure to email me if you'd like to be featured in a When I Was Just a Kid interview. I have one planned soon, but will start taking more soon.)
• What genre truly is best for your writing style and for your interests?

I've struggled over some of these very things and have come to some surprising answers, and still am discovering some. Maybe these will help you, or maybe you have a few other questions to ask that we could learn from in our journeys. 


Crystal Laine Miller

An Author's Voice: Innate or Developed?

One of the most challenging hurdles for a beginning writer is finding his or her “voice.” What does “voice” mean, why is it so important and how is it different from point-of-view? A well-developed “voice” is a technique used by writers to help a reader “see” the unfolding events in a story through the eyes of one or more characters. Since an author creates those characters, he or she knows their family dynamic, background, environment, accomplishments, hopes, dreams, loves, failures, vulnerabilities and fears. The better the author knows a character, the more real they will become. An effective voice is a crucial element to keep the reader turning the pages, and it’s manifested with active (as opposed to passive) phrasing, dialogue and narrative as it draws them deeper into the fictional world.

Is an author’s voice like a fingerprint, unique to that one person? Some suggest it’s innate and writers are “born” with it. Some believe voice is learned or developed after much practice, trial and error. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but it could be a combination of both. Just as some recording artists are easily identifiable (think Adele, Willie Nelson, Barbara Streisand), other vocalists’ voices are more generic. Authors should never be content to simply “blend in” with the crowd; they want to rise above the rest and shine! But how?

Showing is the best way to illustrate my point, so below are two examples from my March 2012 release, Twin Hearts (third in The Lewis Legacy Series, but it can stand on its own):

Example #1: Weaving his way through the room of a hundred or so women in red hats of all sizes and shapes—pretty much a reflection of their owners—Josh was a wonder to behold. A number of the ladies looked at the guys as if they were dessert, but they smiled and laughed as they went about their task, ignoring the middle-aged hormones in overdrive. It was as close to swooning as anything she’d ever seen. Based on all the fanning going on, there were enough hot flashes in the room to bake a cake.

Example #2: She didn’t want to feel such a strong attraction for Josh, but her heart and pulse weren’t listening. Don’t look at the eyes. If she repeated it to herself enough times, would it keep her from succumbing to his charms? Those eyes had been her undoing before and would be again if she didn’t watch herself. So much for the self-pep talk. A whole lot of good it did. Why he felt the need to dress in one of his fancy power suits was beyond her, but then again, here she sat in a dress costing the equivalent of a monthly car payment for Ladybug. Hypocrisy was highly overrated sometimes.

Both of the above examples are in the point-of-view of my heroine. Do you see where her “voice” comes into play? Even without knowing anything about this character, you get a good sense of who she is, her sense of humor, her powers of observation, and understand she has a history with Josh. Look at the last two sentences of each paragraph. Those are my zingers, but they’re not always at the end of the paragraph. However, writers should always try to end chapters with a word or a sentence that will hook the reader into turning the page in order to find out what happens next. One of the best compliments I ever received is when a reader said, “I’ve learned to stop reading your books in the middle of the chapter. Once I read the end of a chapter, I have to keep going.”

As authors, we love reviews describing our books with adjectives like fresh, innovative, effortless and engaging. More often than not, those words are referring to the writer’s voice. It’s that element of a novel differentiating it from the rest of the crowd which makes the writing shine, stand out and worthy of attention. Finding one’s writing voice can sometimes be elusive, and it can become a source of great frustration. Persevere and don’t allow it to deter you from writing your best. Perhaps it’s hidden, but I firmly believe a unique voice is within every author, waiting to be discovered and revealed. I’d like to suggest the following five ways to help discover your voice:

#1: Know your characters from the inside out.
#2: Keep the voice true to the character’s point-of-view.
#3: Be an observer of people and events, but also the ironies, humor, tragedies and triumphs of life. It makes you a better writer overall, but it also helps infuse your characters with personality so they almost leap off the page—and into the hearts and minds of readers.
#4: Write what you know and write passionately from your soul.
#5: Approach every character and story as if it were your first or your last. Make them count.

Remember this: even the most innovative plot can be dead-in-the-water without that well-developed voice. Conversely, even the dullest, plodding plot can be enthralling if told with a masterful voice.

Thank you for the opportunity to visit with you today, and I wish all of you God’s best as you read and write. Blessings, my friends. Matthew 5:16