I’m working on a revision right now and after several false starts, I created a voice that I really like. It’s heavily dependent on a narrator and is pretty informal. It’s worked well for most of Act I.
But as I enter Act II, I’m finding it hard to judge whether I strayed from the voice or not. Part of the problem is that I’m trying to use what I can from the previous draft and not TOTALLY rewrite. Not sure that strategy is best. I may be losing the voice.
I’ll have to stop this morning and read aloud the first couple chapters and then the last one I did and either rewrite totally, or tweak. Here’s hoping that tweaking works!
I did some Grammatik analysis and the last chapter seems to be slightly more complicated, with reading level going from 3.6 to 5.3. Overall the story (so far) hits a 4.1 reading level. It’s not helpful in revising, but it does confirm the red flag that I need to pay attention here.
How do you make sure that the voice stays consistent over the course of a novel? Any strategies, ideas, tools besides reading aloud?
Related posts:
- 5 Ways to Keep Characters Consistent
- Voice: Questions?
- The Writer’s Voice: What is Voice?
- Novel Diagnosis–Voice
- Voice Friday: Revising for Voice
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Hi Darcy,
Funny you should mention this.
I had written several chapters of my MG novel as part of a workshop several years ago. Then much later, I wrote the rest of the novel surrounding those chapters, start to finish, with just some short breaks in the schedule here and there. I thought everything flowed fairly well in the completed novel, but my critique group picked out the old chapters 100% of the time – because the voice changed. The voice change was so subtle I couldn’t detect it in my read-alouds. But the coincidence of the old chapters picked out as the culprits was too strong to ignore. I rewrote most of the chapters salvaging little and the novel is much stronger for it. I think an objective reader may be the only person who can pick out the subtle problems.
Jean