“I am looking for authors with a distinctive voice.” “Great premise but I couldn’t connect with the writer’s voice.” “The voice isn’t strong enough in the first ten pages to make me keep reading.” So what do editors mean by “voice” when they talk about the craft of writing? Voice is the individual writing style of an author. It’s the way a narrator tells their story. When you put yourself into words it’s your personality on paper. Ouch. Does this mean the editor doesn’t like you? Not exactly. Criticisms of your voice, or the lack thereof, suggests you think long and hard about the way in which you express yourself in writing. Let your distinct personality, perspective, or world-view shine in your prose. Too often writers try to write in a manner so bland as to offend no one. It ends up sounding like something written by a committee instead of a real person. If you were a musician instead of a writer, performing a piece note-for-note with perfect pitch in synch with a metronome isn’t enough. If it lacks expression, the performance is at best merely mediocre. Making the song your own is what distinguishes the rock star from the karaoke singer. Even though the basic melody is the same, Prince’s song Purple Rain sounds entirely different when sung by Tom Jones, LeAnn Rimes, Bruce Springsteen, and Etta James. Each of these singers has a distinctive voice which is different from the one belonging only to the Purple One.…

Passive voice weakens your writing. It obscures responsibility for action. Those who learn English as a second language struggle to make sense of the many ways in which Americans use passive verb constructions in everyday speech. It often finds its way into our writing. Rarely is the writer conscious of this problem in their writing. Passive voice is used by victims. Instead of actors, they are acted upon. Let me help you understand passive voice and how you can get rid of it in your writing. “The boy was hit by the bus.” Passive. The boy is the subject of this sentence. He is the passive recipient of action. The responsible party for the vehicular accident ends up an object in the sentence instead of an actor. The focus is on the victim, not on who or what caused the crash. Who did what to whom? “The bus hit the boy.” Active voice. Notice the different grammatical sentence structure. Subject-verb-object. The subject is the bus. The bus acts upon the direct object, the boy. The readers’ sympathies still lie with the boy; often intended by the writer of a passively constructed sentence. The action and agency, however, are front and center. The reader can see the bus crash into a boy more easily with the active verb of “hit.” Responsibility for the action is clear. See if you can change these 10 sentences into active voice. The transcript was stamped with a seal of approval by the registrar. Grant recipients…

A common problem for writers of narrative is overwriting. They work on a piece, edit, add more, read it again, out loud, and add a few more things. Overkill. The writing becomes so writerly it draws attention to itself and gets in the way of the story. The raw authenticity evaporates in the translation to prose. There is enormous pressure on the unpublished writer to use the tools and conventions of literature, grammar, and language usage. And sometimes it sucks the life out of the idea. When a writer is insecure about whether they are being clear, they often continue to muddy the waters further by adding more. More is not always better. Simple, clear, direct language. Words and sentences your reader can understand. Don’t let the writing get in the way of your story. Adding adverbs or adjectives to your sentences won’t help. Your most common sentence structure in narrative form has to do with what happens next. “Who did what to whom, how and why?” Subject-active verb-object. If you have complicated sentences or ideas to communicate, try to express them in this way to help your reader follow the action. Let the reader draw their own inferences from what information you provide. Don’t tell the reader what to think or only give them your interpretations of raw data – provide the direct observations with concrete language. How can you tell if you are overwriting? Do you obsess over word choices? Have you introduced more than three new words…