Every novice writing mistake I mention here I've made, so here goes...and this one is painful.
Every novel, every story has a voice. It is not always the voice we think it has or that others say it has, however.
About five years ago, I wrote a middle grade novel that was a wreck internally (plot-wise). But as you know, you often don't know what you don't know when you're first starting out and I submitted the first 10 pages to a writing conference -- a biggie -- in LA.
The editor of a BIG FIVE publishing house said I nailed the voice of my MC, a 10-year-old girl. She had glowing things to say about the first 10 pages. Excellent.
But as we all know, a novel has to be the whole enchilada, not just parts of the enchilada or the story is strangely unfilling. Her words didn't erase the fact that I was starting to clue into the knowledge that the plot was a walking disaster.
I tabled the story and started working on another, feeling pretty confident that I had voice down, right?
My latest MS is a page-one rewrite. In deciding to rewrite, I changed the opening eight pages. I lay out the murder from the victim's mother's POV. The entire rest of the book is in another POV, that of my MC.
But those opening pages are, as my two kiddos described them, "intense." There is death and murder and grief and a promise of revenge and it's from a mother's POV (who also happens to be centuries old). Reader feedback on those pages has been great and as far as I was concerned, I'd nailed the "voice."
But I won't lie. I was concerned about those pages and three more at the very end, because (and this is a huge red flag) I've not read anything similar to them. I paid for a first 10 pages critique from an agent I'd identified a while ago and here's what they said:
Now, the writing advice I'd gotten prior to this came from an in-person critique group, who said the MS was for younger readers. We were all just starting out, some represented by an agent but most not, none having sold a manuscript. What they liked in the story reflected their tastes as adult readers and I realize that now. This is where writing buddies and critique partners can sometimes steer us wrong, not deliberately or maliciously, but out of sheer inexperience. Struggling writers are not the best judges of struggling writing. I asked the agent who did the critique and this was the clarification I got:
"Age actually doesn't determine the genre; voice does! Your voice is very adult. I think it would be tricky to have a 13/14 year-old protagonist in a YA, but that's actually not uncommon in adult."
Therefore, with my second round of beta readers, I'm looking for feedback specifically about voice, because I'm not entirely sure my story will fly with adult readers, either. It may not be sophisticated enough for an adult. If you read the questions I have for them, there are two regarding voice specifically in the opening and second to last chapters, which I foresee as being the most problematic.
In fairness to me, I was trying to capture the voice of a 600-year-old mother and her 1,000-year-old mom. My fear is that I may have done so -- too well. The rest of the book has just enough sophistication for a younger YA mystery ...but possibly not enough for an adult reader, who may reason through my clues far too quickly.
I'll wait and see what my heroic beta readers have to say, and then I may be back to rewriting...
