FULL BLEED: ALL THAT GLITTERS

So last week I had a post half-written up and it was such a bummer (but not wrong) that I torched it instead of posting it. But let's be clear, everything I said in it is still floating around the back of my head and could pop back up at any old time. So I got that going for me. There's not much reason in hashing out what it was about. It may yet come back. Won't that be exciting?

In brighter news, I shipped out all the rewards for the Fake Believe Kickstarter campaign. Hopefully none of them get lost in the mail or bounced as being subversive material, corrosive to the public good. You never know. Good to get those books out to folks who took a chance on my work. Hopefully I don't let 'em down. Funny, but I don't think about the audience when I'm writing these things. If I'm lucky, I'm not thinking at all, particularly when I'm editing, where I tend to overthink. But I think a little bit about it now as these books are going out and I can't take anything back and whoops. That's the gig. You put your voice on paper and people get to read it and make something new with that.

But what's the voice I'm talking about here?

With any luck or skill at all, the voice manifests in everything in a book. The amount of detail or lack thereof. What's important and what's not. Plot or atmosphere or both? The sense of place and the words that are chosen or left out. Was it Bakhtin who talked about the not-said? Lacan? I can't remember. My major critical theory class was more than thirty-five years ago and all I was allowed for the final was a 3x5 card in the tiniest print that an apple dot-matrix printer could generate. What the book is about. That's the voice. The choices that are made by the writer (and maybe the editor -- not sure about that because I've never really gotten effective editing and I'm probably too old to learn anything from it now other than "well, they just didn't get what I was laying down and okay" and save that for next time I'm standing at the keyboard mashing out words. But I'm far past the point where I need to impress an acquisitions editor or line or copy editor. I try to make clean copy that flows. I'm not getting paid enough to bend that work in one direction or any other.

Voice is the soul of the book. And sometimes that soul is just dead flat. It's words on a page. Words that deliver a plot but don't juice it, don't make you feel much of anything other than "Yes, this thread is coming to a conclusion" or "Of course you have to have a chapter break there to get me to keep reading". We've all read books like this, or set them aside once it's been realized that they're not going to deliver any punch of sparkle or sense of danger. That they're not going to be more than they are. Or maybe it's just me being allergic to a certain form of prose that feels like it wants to be a Netflix adaptation more than it wants to be a book. I've seen it before in comics, too. Read something and you say to yourself "Well, this is someone's pitch document, but it's a story that's flat as hell." For the record, Hell isn't flat. It's got pinnacles that poke almost to the firmament and depths where if pressure worked like it did in the Materia, you'd be crushed to something the size of a stunted walnut.

Voice.

Not that it's a matter of metaphor or simile or descriptiveness. It's every word. It's the spaces between. It's the rhythm, whether staccato or languid or regimented as a court waltz with Bach-like perfection continuing on and on into infinity. It lives in words that are a pleasure to read or hear read and nothing is really happening on the page to offer a hook, a moment where a detective is considering the travels that got a bug up to the seventh floor of a police office in a crooked town, or the travels of a boy leading a wolf he himself trapped and injured back home to Mexico, or laying green and dying in the arms of the sea.

Voice is what makes a book real, at least to me. Maybe to you. But then I've seen lots of books get a lot of heat where the voice just plods and lays there and reads off a litany of actions in a dread monotone and people will eat. that. shit. up. There's no accounting for taste. I can't tell you how to write your books or what to even write about or how to market them or that they're good or bad. All I can do is gauge my reaction to them. Whether I can finish them or not, if it's a chore or easy no matter the length.

Ultimately, voice is where you fall in love with a book. And you can't choose who you fall in love with, or what. You cannot. You can imagine objects of desire, but those are just daydreams (still better than AI, where you have something imagine the desire for you and what a soul-sickness that must be.) You come in contact with it and before you know it, you're acting in ways you'd never have expected, doing things you never thought you'd have done. All because of the voice of an author speaking to you from a book. And genre doesn't matter in this. It doesn't. Voice is voice. Just that most people aren't likely to drift outside their comfort zones (I'm no better in this than anyone else. I'm also a slow reader because I was taught to go over every word because they were chosen deliberately, right? There's a reason that every one of them is there. I tell myself this when I flip through a giant fantasy doorstop and then I say "nope" and put it back on the shelf.)

And it's tough because it feels like voice is something you have an affinity for, it's there from the start. Yes, it can be developed and sharpened as can anything we call talent which is just a proclivity that allows you to do the hours and hours of work necessary to express that part of you effectively and getting past all the cruft and whargarble that isn't important or is better saved for blog posts. Hyuck. Voice takes time to develop and will change over that time because the writer changes too. Or at least one hopes they do. Maybe not. To some degree, I'm still writing about the same stuff in... kinda the same way that I did starting back in 1991. I've read Black Trace (the novel I wrote back then, about a United States in decay and broken up but trying to claw itself back together) a couple times over editing and there's some stuff that still jumps out a great line, great vibe and I wonder "Who even wrote that?" to which the answer is some dude I can't access any more except through memory and there's lots of problems with that. Some of my tics are there, but those tics are voice.

Just like all those literary satires of people doing hard-boiled and trying to ape Hammett's or Chandler's voices. There's reason for that. Those guys were really good. They put it on the page in a way that only they could (or someone trying to copy them). They had easily recognizable moves or patterns that people could yoink and riff off, but you're always left thinking that you'd rather just have the real thing.

Or the Marvel movies, which just can't get the voice right. Sure, they can update the characters and looks, but they can't get that fevered breathlessness which is part of the artwork on the page and the text demonstrating the fevered breathlessness. They're of a whole. Well, that and the wild imagination and pulling anything out of your hat because you had three other books to get out the door that month (at least on the writer side.) The movies can do slick competence and fantastic vistas of beautifully-rendered CGI, impossibly complicated costumes and huge stars quipping their way through an alien invasion. It's entertaining. It's not better than the comics. It's not even a patch on them. The comics have a voice, which is why they're still read now (well that and Marvel can reprint them whenever with minimal cost in royalties, etc.) Because they have something real. They have a voice.

I can't say "Voice is dead" in contemporary fiction. I don't read nearly enough of it to have any dog in that fight (remember: I read slow). I can point out how no books are sold on it these days. They're sold on trope lists made up with cute little graphics. So you can have a checklist and see if everything you like is in that book so you know you won't be wasting your time with it. And that's honestly depressing. That's a level of engagement with the work that feels gutted and without heart. Does that book have the flavor crystals you're looking for? Yikes. But it's (I guess) certainly easier to sell books off these checklists than it is to try and build a relationship with the potential reader. I guess that's hard if not impossible in this atomized landscape. So maybe that's the right way to do it.

For someone else. Wouldn't be me.

And given the landscape we're in, voice is the real reward for writers these days. Everything is so small-scale that you may as well go big between those covers. Even if it's by concentrating attention on small moments or texture or how the evil witch is disappointed that her birthday wasn't and couldn't ever be a surprise. The voice is how you'll be remembered (if you're lucky -- you could become infamous off the page instead and no thanks.) This might not be much, but it'll be yours.

Until next week.