On Finding Your Voice

with Penelope Janu

We'd like to give a big welcome to the lovely Penelope Janu, our guest blogger this week. 

I started writing creatively five years ago, after working for many years as a lawyer and legal academic (my six children kept me busy as well!). Harlequin Mira published my first novel, In at the Deep End, in 2017, and my second novel with Harlequin Mira, On the Right Track, will be published in June 2018. Another novel, On the Same Page, won the XO Romance Prize for 2017, and will be published by Brio Books. It’s been a busy few years, and a very steep learning curve—but in some ways starting from scratch, and doing things a little differently, has been a good thing.

 

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Much as writers do have to think about which publisher might be the best one to publish their book, or whether self-publishing is an option, I believe you should start out, particularly as a new writer, by ‘finding your voice’. Don’t worry about what others might think, just write the book you want to write, and then see if there’s a home for it. And even if there isn’t, you will have completed a novel and be ready to embark on the next one with all that you have learnt.

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My next insight relates to voice as well, but not mine—the voices of my characters. All my stories are told by one character, a woman, in first person. This means the reader sees most things from the heroine’s perspective. So how do we show the hero’s perspective?

Firstly, dialogue. I enjoy writing dialogue so, once I’ve worked my characters out, this part of the novel is an absolute joy to write. Sometimes I have pages of dialogue that end up being reduced to half a page, but it’s almost like my characters needed to have the long conversation, for me to get to the essence of what they needed to say.

Secondly, emails, texts, letters. I like incorporating these forms of communication in novels even though, in my view, they have to be used sparingly. Including emails and so on from my heroes is an excellent way to get their voice on the page for the reader. Not only that, when the main POV character receives the correspondence, it will give her a good opportunity to ponder what is meant by it. Although often the reader might see that she hasn’t understood him as well as she might! A good example? Lizzie Bennet poring over Mr Darcy’s letter in Pride and Prejudice.

Image courtesy of missgeorgianadarcy.com

There are other forms of communication too. I used blog posts in In at the Deep End to describe some of the historical background of early explorer expeditions to the South Pole. The circumstances were relevant to the contemporary plot, but to put them in dialogue would have been clunky—condensed they work well. In On the Same Page, my heroine is a writer of historical romance, and I use excerpts of her writing to demonstrate how the characters in her novels were starting to bear an uncanny likeness to the contemporary hero (who wrote emails that demonstrated he had no idea what was going on!) The heroine is a speech pathologist in On the Right Track. She uses animal assisted therapy, and a computer program developed for children without speech, other interesting means of communication that also become means of communication between the characters.



Have you come across devices that work well to illustrate character motivations or thoughts? Do you have examples of novels to show where this is done well? I’d love to read your thoughts!



Love to love: quiet scenes in a novel, where you can imagine that, once the characters have overcome their obstacles, they will be perfectly matched

Love to laugh: when my family imagines closing my laptop means I’ve finished thinking about my characters for the day

Love to learn: new things that relate to what I’m writing—polar exploration, and species of eucalypts. I know so much more than I did when I started writing my novels!