A couple of years ago an agent turned me down after he read my query letter and a couple chapters of my manuscript. After I received the rejection, I responded to his email with a question: “So is it the lack of platform, the quality of the writing…or both?”
He answered quickly. “To tell you the truth, Michelle, it’s both. You don’t have a strong enough platform yet, but the bigger issue right now is your voice. Your writing is okay, but your voice needs work.”
“Okay? Okay!? My writing is ‘okay’?” I ranted at the computer. “Two years it took me to write this stupid book, and you tell me it’s okay?! Are you kidding me?!”
After the tantrum subsided I promptly burst into tears, and wept soundlessly through three straight games of Candy Land with Rowan (who didn’t notice – or perhaps he thought I was weeping over my inability to move past the Gumdrop Mountains).
The problem with the manuscript, I learned later after I paid to have it professionally edited, was that there were two voices vying for control: the personal, memoirish voice and the instructional voice. The two voices didn’t play well together. Just when the reader hit a comfortable groove with the personal voice, which was humorous, self-deprecating and a little bit irreverent, I switched to the instructional voice, which was scholarly and delved into Biblical exegesis. The switching was unsettling to the reader, according to my editor.
In my heart, I knew he was right. In fact, my best friend had told me as much months earlier, when she admitted she’d put the manuscript down when she got to the Bible parts and “had trouble picking it back up again” (another steamroller-flattening moment). I could have saved myself a few hundred dollars in editing fees, but I hadn’t been ready to hear that truth then.
“Writers worry a lot about this, about voice. They are always wondering if they have one, and if not, how they can find one,” writes L.L. Barkat in her book, Rumors of Water. “The truth is that every writer has a voice. It is probably best heard by listening to oneself speak.”
A completed manuscript and 713 blog posts under my belt, and I still worry about voice. As I prepare to begin a second book, that same editor’s comments from an email he sent me recently ring in my head: “The strength of the first book was how you wove truth and humor into a natural, engaging writer-voice.”
“Great,” I think when I read his email. “Now I have to be funny. No pressure there.”
Fingers poised over the keyboard, frantic questions bubble to the surface: What if this new book isn’t supposed to be funny? What if it’s serious? What if I don’t feel funny anymore? What if I don’t have a voice if I don’t use my “truth and humor” voice?
As I’ve hemmed and hawed over all this in the last couple of weeks I’ve reached one conclusion: there’s no better way to find my voice, again, than to start writing. Again. In the end, sometimes we have to trust the process and have faith that something good will (eventually) come out of it. Sometimes the voice begins to speak clearly along the way.The key is simply to begin.
