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WHOSE VOICE WAS THAT? by Penny Dolan

Yesterday, browsing in the library, I picked up a book. I hadn’t intended to pick it up, or read three pages, or bring the book home with me. But I did. What made me choose the book? It was in a mildly interesting non-fiction section, but the main reason I opted for that particular book was the voice of the title and writing, welcoming me in to the opening pages.

‘I’d like more of this,’ my reading mind told me.

‘Then that is what you shall have’’ I replied.

So now the book has added a teeny tiny smidgeon to the writer’s PLR and is waiting at home here, by my bed.

I often fall in love with a book for its ‘voice’, that magic quality that brings a subtle wit to the way the writer writes, gives glimpses of the writer’s stance on their story, adds cadence and rhythm to their style – and is often lost when a book is ‘translated’ into a film. 

Voice is there from the very start, confidently carrying us into the story. How about this opening to Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate diCamillo?

My name is India Opal Buloni, and last summer my daddy, the preacher, sent me to the store for a box of macaroni-and-cheese, some white rice and two tomatoes, and I came back with a dog. This is what happened. I walked into the produce section of the Winn-Dixie grocery store to pick out my two tomatoes and I almost bumped right into the store manager. He was standing there all red-faced, screaming and waving his arms around.

‘Who let a dog in here?’ he kept on shouting. ‘Who let a dirty dog in here?’

Or this from ‘I Catherine, Called Birdy’ by Karen Cushman, set in the 13th Century:

12th Day of  September: I am commanded to write an account of my days: I am bit by fleas and plagued by family. That is all there is to say.

13th Day of September: My father must suffer from ale head this day for he cracked me twice before dinner instead of once. I hope his angry liver bursts.

14th Day of September: Tangled my spinning again. Corpus bones, what a torture.

15th Day of September: Today the sun shone and the villagers sowed hay, gathered apples and pulled fish from the stream. I, trapped inside, spend two hours embroidery on a cloth for the church and three hours picking out my stitches after mother saw it. I wish I was a villager.

Or even this opening, written many years ago:

This is the story of the different ways we looked for treasure, and I think when you have read it you will see that we were not lazy about the looking.

There are some things I must tell before I begin to tell about the treasure-seeking, because I have read books myself, and I know how beastly it is when a story begins, “‘Alas!” said Hildegarde with a deep sigh, “we must look our last on this ancestral home”’—and then some one else says something—and you don’t know for pages and pages where the home is, or who Hildegarde is, or anything about it.

Our ancestral home is in the Lewisham Road. It is semi-detached and has a garden, not a large one. We are the Bastables. There are six of us besides Father. Our Mother is dead, and if you think we don’t care because I don’t tell you much about her you only show that you do not understand people at all.

Dora is the eldest. Then Oswald—and then Dicky. Oswald won the Latin prize at his preparatory school—and Dicky is good at sums. Alice and Noel are twins: they are ten, and Horace Octavius is my youngest brother. It is one of us that tells this story—but I shall not tell you which: only at the very end perhaps I will. While the story is going on you may be trying to guess, only I bet you don’t. It was Oswald who first thought of looking for treasure. Oswald often thinks of very interesting things. And directly he thought of it he did not keep it to himself, as some boys would have done, but he told the others, and said—

‘I’ll tell you what, we must go and seek for treasure: it is always what you do to restore the fallen fortunes of your House.’

From, rather obviously, The Story of The Treasure Seekers by Edith Nesbit, with that proud but quietly voiced aside: ‘I will not tell you which’.

I love the completeness within those three first-person openings, and the way the writer leads the reader securely into the whole ‘amusement’ of the story, with no doubt, continuing small asides and comments throughout the whole narrative.

 

The Jericho Writers website, which offers writing tuition and other services, says that: ‘Voice is to writing as personality is to humans’ and ‘refers to the author’s writing style, or authorial voice. It is the stylistic imprint of the individual author – their unique, signature style, if you like.‘ 

It ‘should have an instantly recognisable quality, or personality, and it should remain present throughout the novel. It’s what will captivate your readers and hook an agent.’

A distinctive ‘voice’ can hook an agent, but can be a mixed blessing. I never read a certain historical writer’s popular tomes because I can hear no ‘voice’ within his writing. However, after indulging in a vivid series of crime novels set and around in and around the Florida Everglades, I wanted no more, no more, no more of that once-captivating tone.

Does the same fate affect strongly-voiced writers on social media too? When does the distinctive tone that so interested us in a blogpost or Sub-stack article suddenly become too much, and turn readers away? Or, worse, be too strong a reminder of the personality’s real voice, and all that comes with it? 

Oh heavens. I’d like to have a ‘voice’, but please let it be a good one!

Wishing you all Happy Reading and Writing for November.

Penny Dolan

ps. For anyone still curious, the chosen book came from the Cookery shelves in the library, and is 'Midnight Chicken (& Other Recipes Worth Living For' by Ella Risbridger, who describes herself as 'Writer, bit of everything. More butter than toast.' I hadn't heard of Ella either, but the book does start more dramatically than most cook books, and is full of the kind of simple enjoyment that can bring comfort on too-wide-wake nights. She is also a poet and has a newsletter You Get in Love and Then You Die. Which contains, surprisingly recipes and other stuff.

Thirteen Steps to Book Thirteen by Sheena Wilkinson

As regular readers know, because I may have mentioned it occasionally, I will shortly be self-publishing a book for the very first time. 

Will Miss McVey Takes Charge, the sequel to Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau be a one-off venture, or am I moving into a hybrid phase of my career, where I use different publishing models for different projects? I have no idea. At this stage all I know is that I am nervous, excited and determined to do all I can to make it as successful as possible. 

It's easy to see that these books belong together 

The big difference of course is that the buck stops with me. I have worked with excellent professional editor, typesetter, proofreader and cover designer, so I know the product is as good as ever, but there’s no publisher behind me making marketing decisions or anything else. 

Thankfully I have the support of Writers Review Publishing, the author-led co-operative who invited me and Miss McVey on board. Their logo, and my biog which makes it clear that I am an established professional, endorse the project, give it that stamp of approval which I’ve realised I need and want. 

Writers Review Publishing 

It's easy to think of this book as an outlier  – I’d be lying if I said that self-publishing would be my preferred option for future books – but Miss McVey Takes Charge is as much a Sheena Wilkinson book as any of the previous twelve, and they have all been steps along the way to its publication. Even a pony book, even a gritty contemporary teen love story, even a cosy 1920s school story – all contain the same DNA as Miss McVey. 

Just for fun – and hopefully to generate some interest in the book! – I have written a series of (very short) blog posts – 13 Steps to Book 13 – which I will publish over on my Substack platform as I countdown to publication day on 13 November. 

It’s been fascinating looking at my thirteen books not only as a body of work, but as steps along the path to the publication of Miss McVey Takes Charge. 

Readers might be more excited than Stroller 

I hope some of you might like to come along for the ride! 

Giant-Sized stories by Claire Fayers

 How did you spend your extra hour on Sunday? I had a nice lie-in, worked out a knotty problem in the book I'm editing and remembered that I needed to write a blog post. So here's one I wrote earlier for a Welsh fantasy kickstarter campaign. 

Think of Wales, and you’ll probably think of dragons. Maybe sheep. But giants? When I started researching stories for my Welsh Giants, Ghosts and Goblins, I knew about Idris, of Cadair Idris fame, and Bendigeidfran – Bran the Blessed – who led a war against Ireland in the Mabinogi. But, digging deeper, I was surprised how many different giants wandered our landscape. They largely fall into three categories: hero giants who carry out good deeds; villainous giants who stand in the way of heroes’ quests; and random, chaotic giants who have a penchant for rearranging the landscape.

 Giant heroes

John o'the Thumbs got his name because he had eight fingers on each hand. (I don’t know why he’s not called John o'the Fingers in that case.) In some versions of the story, he’s a giant, in others he’s a warrior, but he definitely killed a dragon at Denbigh castle following an epic battle. 

The frightened townsfolk, however, refused to believe the dragon was dead and so John hacked off its head and paraded it through town, which finally convinced them.

Giant villains

My favourite of all giant villains is Yspaddaden Pencawr, father of the peculiarly normal-sized Olwen in the tale of Culwch and Olwen. He’s truly enormous and as blood-thirsty as any giant you might hope to meet. The sort of giant who’d grind your bones to make his bread then use what’s left of you to make marmalade. His most notable feature is his skin, which is so saggy and wrinkled that great folds of it droop over his eyes and a team of servants have to prop them up with long forks so he can see:

“The greeting of Heaven and of man be unto thee, Yspaddaden Penkawr,” said they. “And you, wherefore come you?” “We come to ask thy daughter Olwen, for Kilhwch the son of Kilydd, the son of Prince Kelyddon.” “Where are my pages and my servants? Raise up the forks beneath my two eyebrows which have fallen over my eyes, that I may see the fashion of my son-in-law.” And they did so. “Come hither to-morrow, and you shall have an answer.”

In the grand tradition of angry fairytale fathers, the giant sets Culwch a set of impossible tasks to win the hand of Olwen – a list that goes on for pages. Culwch and his team of Arthurian heroes complete every one of them, after which they kill the treacherous Yspaddeden. Olwen doesn’t seem to mind very much.

Chaotic giants

Where you find a stone, or heap of stones, there’s often a tale of a giant who put them there. 

The burial mound, Barclodiad y Gawres (Giantess’s Apronful) on Ynys Mȏn, was formed when a cobbler carrying a sack of worn-out shoes for repair came across two giants who asked him how far it was to Ynys Mȏn because they intended to build a house and settle there. Thinking quickly, he tipped all the shoes out of his sack and told them he'd walked from there and had worn out all the shoes on the journey. The giantess was so disgusted, she dropped the apronful of rocks she'd brought to build the house and the two giants sulked off back to England.

In a similar story further south, Mathilda the giantess built Hay-on-Wye’s castle in one night, carrying the stones in her apron. 

Jack o’Kent is variously described as a magician, a trickster and a giant. He lived on the Welsh borders and had a habit of making bets with the devil. In one story, he and the devil have a stone-tossing contest, resulting in the three standing stones that give the South Wales town of Trellech its name. Two other stories relate to Mount Skirrid, just outside Abergavenny. The mountain gets its name from its distinctive split peak (the Welsh name, Ysgryd, means split.) In one story, Jack and the devil meet to play cards on top of the mountain and Jack bets the devil he can jump from Skirrid to the top of the Sugarloaf, a distance of about three miles. He succeeds, but kicks out a giant piece of the Skirrid as he leaps. The second story has Jack betting the devil that the Sugarloaf is higher than the Mendips. Again, he wins, and, in a motif you'll recognise by now, the devil grabs an apronful of earth from the top of Mount Skirrid to add to the Mendips, but he drops it too early, creating a hill which is known as Little Skirrid.

Good or bad, metaphorical or literal, giants are larger-than-life forces that can send your stories off into unexpected directions. As with all magical creatures of Wales, treat them with respect.

Ysapaddaden Pencawr by John D Batten (1892)

www.clairefayers.com

Do we protect the children?

It opens with father declaring that Christmas won’t take place this year because he’s annoyed with his son’s school report. He then hits his wife with a spoon, stabs her by accident with the carving knife, reminisces fondly about brutal public school traditions and says that if he’d talked to his father the way his son talked back to him, he’d have been forced to drink a gallon of petrol.

So the son gets sent to Groosham Grange, to toughen him up. He discovers strange things happening, meets gruesome teachers and watches the boy and girl who arrived with him gradually fall under the evil influence the school holds over all its pupils. The brave boy hero he is, he escapes.

But…

… and this really surprised me, everything I expected to happen at the end doesn’t. I can’t write about it because that would spoil it for others. Not fair. I’ll just say it took me by surprise.

Here’s the thing, though: reading it, the Protective Adult reared its head inside me. Should children be permitted to read this? Shouldn’t they be protected? Isn’t it too violent? Too grotesque? Too… well, just not nice?

And then I thought that if I’d found such a book when I was 12, it probably would have been just the thing. Weird, wild, funny, delightfully odd! It wouldn’t have been Biggles bashing the Hun and vanquishing the natives. It wouldn’t have been Enid Blyton. It wouldn’t have been all the traditional, jolly good stuff I grew up on, with all its faded Empire glory, rippling heroes, wet girls and snivelling foreigners.

It would have probably been The Best Book In The World. And it wouldn’t, ever, have turned me into an axe murderer.

Writing historical fiction - Sue Purkiss

It's an interesting thing, writing historical fiction. I've written several books in this genre: one set in the 9th century, one in the early 19th, and one in the mid 19th - plus there are two yet-to-be published books set in the Second World War.

There are practical reasons for writing books set in the past. For one thing, you don't have to grapple with modern technology - if you're writing in the present, and your hero/heroine is stuck up a mountain or has missed the last bus, you can easily - too easily - extricate him/her by means of a quick text or phone call. On the other hand, you know your context - the world of your story. Whereas I remember when I was writing Warrior King - about Alfred the Great and his daughter, I'd been researching for months, if not years. Finally, I came to the point where I was actually ready to start writing my story. In the first chapter, Alfred reaches for a drink. But what would he be drinking out of? A goblet made of metal? Wood? What? Or would it be a cup? And later, someone serves cakes (no, not THOSE cakes!). What would they cakes be made of? No sugar around then - honey, perhaps? What would make them rise? Or would they just be flat?

And then, of course, there's finding out, as far as possible, the truth about what was happening in your chosen period. Of course, the closer to the present you're looking at, the more information there is available. With Jack Fortune, for instance, which is about a plant hunter and his young nephew who set off for the Himalayas, I found online a detailed journal written by Joseph Hooker about his own adventures doing the same thing. Hurrah! But then that all gets complicated. You have access to how a person of that time perceived the world - but nowadays, looking through the lens of a 21st century view of imperialism, and recognising that Hooker's thrilling adventures were carried out in the sevice of the Empire with all that that entails - well, do you write from the point of view of a person of his/her time, or do you take account of a contemporary view of the same issues and actions?

And then there's the language. Do you try to approximate to the language as it was spoken in the time period of your story? If you're writing about the Elizabethan era, do you scatter your dialogue with 'thees' and 'thous' and the occasional 'Odds bodykins, forsooth'? To me, that's a no-brainer. If you're wrting about the 9th century, they would all have been speaking Anglo-Saxon, or some variant of it. So of course, your dialogue has to be in modern English. But it's not as simple as that. You have to avoid modern slang, obviously; you have to attempt to get the right sort of register for the person who's speaking - Alfred, for instance, will speak differently to a shepherd. Well, probably... So much to think about.

What's set all this off? Well, I've just read Ken Follett's latest book, which is about the building of Stonehenge and is called The Circle of Days. So it's set several thousand years BCE.

Now, I've been fascinated for a very long time by the era of prehistory. In particular, I'm intrigued by the cave paintings of south west France. They are so beautiful, so sensitively done - and how does this square with the version of the Stone Age that I was taught in school, with brutish early humans struggling to survive and engaged in a constant struggle with nature and with each other? Well, it doesn't of course, and that view of the distant past is being constantly revised. But when you start to write conversations between people of that era - how do you do it? How complex was their language - were their thoughts? Did they have similar notions about relationships to us - and about so many other things, like loyalty, friendship, duty, community?

So I found Follett's book interesting in terms of how he dealt with such issues. I'm still mulling it over - but I'm certainly impressed by the confidence and imagination with which he re-creates a world about which, really, we know very little. It's interesting that he uses very simple language and short sentences throughout - is that a nod to a simpler time?

As L P Hartley famously said, 'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.' But how different,  really, in terms of what people were like, was the past? It's an interesting question - I think! - and one to which there are no easy answers.

The whoosh of a collapsing plan - by Rowena House

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, I love making plans. I like the whooshing sound they make as they collapse.

His original quote was about deadlines flying past. But having watched Master Blasters on TV years ago, I'm going to say edifices collapse with a whoosh as well, and a satisfying mushroom of dust, leaving a pile of rubble from which to start building again if that’s what takes your fancy.

The plan thus demolished?

That having finished draft one of the seventeenth-century witch trial work-in-progress back in April, I would power into the development edit on retreat in June and finish it in time for an historical writing course at Moniack Mhor in November.

However. 

A series of well-placed detonators went off in the real world, starting in May, and reverberating until now, leaving me surrounded by rubble, wondering if I’ll be able to pick up a trowel again before November.

Which is fine. My sort-of deadline for this story is end-September next year, and since I don’t have writing plans after that, there’s no pressure to finish this manuscript early.

Where, therefore, is the WIP in its fragmented state of becoming a story?

The A-plot is undergoing a thorough development edit to bring out its protagonist’s character arc as it evolved during the drafting. Before the latest detonation, this edit had reached the midpoint of Act 2 part 1, with the outline of further structural revisions tucked away safety in various synopses. So I should be able to pick up these pieces as soon as time allows.

The development edit must also integrate an entirely new B-plot into the A-plot. I’d planned to draft this B-plot before plaiting the two together, but in practice I found myself writing both in tandem – in alternating chapters – so I’ll carry on with that when I can. Meanwhile, I’m hoping the ‘backroom girls’ of my creative unconscious are already working out how to dovetail their dual denouements.

The shape of this ending is mostly being driven by the internal logic of each plotline, but external drivers are in the mix, too. 

For example, back in September, at another super-productive writing retreat at Chez Castillon [pic below], our leader, author and writing tutor Rowan Coleman, recommended the A- and B-plot protagonists have a closer relationship than the one I have plotted. She wondered about a romance between them – as had the tutor at the June retreat – an option I don't think is plausible in the world I've created for them. 

In two previous iterations of a female protagonist for the B-plot, both women were in a significant relationship with the A-plot hero, Tom. However, neither the role of lover nor surrogate mother suits the current B-plot heroine, Alys.

On the other hand, Tom's story would benefit from a more dramatic Q-factor to catalyse the final battle. So that is the specific story problem I have set the BR girls: how can Alys trigger Tom’s climax action during a face-to-face meeting?

For those not a fan of plotting via story beats, the Q-factor is – from memory – James Scott Bell’s term for the beat where a character or event that happens early in the story enables a critical action later on. It’s named after Q in the Bond films, the character who gives James Bond a gadget which will save the day.

Away from such structural plotting, the contours of Alys’s character arc are also growing in the cracks and dusty corners left in the rubble of my plan.

Earlier this month, for instance, the BR girls suggested a more relatable emotional wound than the one I had plotted, resulting in more poignant psychological scar and consequent immoral action. Perhaps her confession/self-revelation about her wound might factor into Tom’s Q-factor scene. Who knows.

Meanwhile, a separate suggestion arrived from the backroom last weekend. Since Tom’s story is at its core about a conformist who learns to think for himself, perhaps Alys’s story should - at heart - be about an outsider who chooses to come in from the cold.

Perhaps her self-revelation about her wound is what decides her to end her self-imposed exile, and finally meet with Tom. Hmm...

However it happens, the need for this significant meeting between Tom and Alys was reinforced last weekend by another serendipitous event. 

The leader of the Moniack Mhor historical fiction writing course in November is the author Andrew Miller. I adore his Costa prize-winning Pure and find his blogs and interviews about his approach to writing fascinating. So, for National Bookshop Day, I bought his 2025 Booker Prize short-listed novel The Land in Winter and read it over the past two weekends.

Now it’s finished, I don’t know what to think about it. Atmospheric, yes. Beautifully written in parts. But it's not my kind of book. Wrong era, wrong characters. It happens. But [spoiler alert] right at the end, all four point-of-view characters meet.

I'm not into signs, but this was a sign, right? Tom and Alys must meet. I just hope the BR girls are onto the case. 

 

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