Instead, Schneiderman is much more critically psychoanalyzed within the Voice community – and by that measure, his career is a study in disturbing pathology. While Schneiderman’s career, in any man’s business terms, is a great success – he’s kept the shareholders happy, dramatically expanded the Voice enterprise, and achieved substantial wealth for himself (tens of millions of dollars, certainly) – that sort of analysis gets short shrift at the Voice. With his six city papers including the Voice, he’s done what Bill Gates, Barry Diller, and assorted other moguls failed to do – make a business out of local advertising (the $4 trillion worth of miscellaneous movie, restaurant, dry-cleaner, podiatrist, futon-store, employment, real-estate, and personal ads). It’s part of Schneiderman’s genius, or revenge, that he has turned the Voice into an exciting business proposition – like turning Coke into fine wine, or Russia into a smoothly running market economy. On the other hand, a big part of the tragicomic aspect of the Voice, and the subtext of its revival, is that the Voice has become a business story – about “creating a national footprint for local advertising,” in Schneiderman’s words – and that’s a story that no Voice lifer or alum worth his or her salt has any interest in. Of course, you can’t tell the Schneiderman story, or begin to make sense of it, without touching on the tragicomic story of the Voice, which gets you back into the quagmire. Instead it’s about one of its least likely employees, David Schneiderman, its former editor and publisher and the current CEO of Village Voice Media LLC, who, after 23 years of hard and mostly unappreciated labor, has become the Voice, for better or worse. Victoria Hanley will be teaching our Writing the YA or MG Novel class, starting August 17.This is not, strictly speaking, about The Village Voice, which is a quagmire of journalistic recrimination and lost youth – and you don’t want to get into that. Publishers are actively seeking fresh voices, and by finding yours, your chances of signing a book deal increase. Switching viewpoints can be surprisingly effective for unleashing voices that are otherwise inclined to hide.ĭo what you can to cultivate the voices that are yours alone. When you hit a new flow, you’ll know that the critical mind has stopped running the show. If first person is your go-to point of view, make a temporary move to second person in the spirit of play. So if you normally write in third person, try switching to first for a little while. Signs that the critical mind is horning in on your creativity include feeling stuck, hating what you’ve written, and rewriting your beginning over and over. The critical mind has a place in writing, but not during the generative stage-and sometimes it needs encouragement to bow out for a while so you can get that first draft written. Play with different points of view to bypass the critical mind. It’s just you and the page you’re creating a space for imagination to run free. Use good grammar or bad, be neat or very messy, write in a logical way, or make no sense at all.

But here are a couple things that may help:įreewriting. There isn’t a formula for finding your own voice because, by definition, it’s unique to you. Each style is unlike the others, because the authors aren’t imitating one another they’ve found their own voice. These are just a few of many examples to be found in YA and MG novels. Generic rewrite: He was bored with the conversation and wanted it to end. And he sure didn’t want to hear any more about apples and the trees they were stuck underneath.' Original text from Pax by Sara Pennypacker (MG): 'He didn’t want to hear about duty. Generic rewrite: We leave as fast as we can to get away from the chaos. Original text from The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (YA): 'We screech off, leaving chaos in the rearview mirror.' Generic rewrite: The wind is beating against our storm windows. Original text from Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson (YA): 'I can feel the wind fighting to break through our storm windows. The resultant prose, while competent, would be unlikely to captivate a reader the way the original does. I’ve taken the liberty of rewriting each excerpt in a more generic style that conveys the same basic information but removes the voicey touches. “Voicey” writing means developing an original style.īelow are examples of voice in Young Adult (YA) and Middle Grade (MG) literature. The tone and timbre of your voice cannot be duplicated by anyone else, not even by a talented mimic. Interesting fact: a voice print, much like a retinal scan, is unique to each person. So why do publishers keep saying they’re looking for fresh voices?

Voice returns very village voicey