Kristine Kathryn Rusch has an interesting blog post up today about how writers are all being herded into writing in flat, bland tones. She called it “Serious Writer Voice.” I nodded knowingly, because I’ve seen Serious Writer Voice before, and wondered at it.
Trouble is, I might be writing in Serious Writer Voice without even knowing it.
I’ve been in a relative state of writerly constipation, if you’ll pardon my disgusting terminology, for a while now. Just under four months now, actually.
I’m not sure what the reason is, or what the fix might be, but I got some very good advice from my main writer dude yet again.
The best part is, he does it without even knowing.
Real horror isn’t necessarily something gory, or something that makes us jump in start. It’s not always fear of some unknown, hockey-masked killer wielding a machete, and it’s not always a burn victim with razor blades on a glove invading our sleep.
Real horror, sometimes, involves spring boarding off one of our very real, very close fears, and making them become more tangible.
Learning is a lifelong process for writers, something that never stops. We learn when we read, and we learn when we write, but sometimes we learn by just…well, learning.
It occurred to me, only this morning, that the best things I’ve done, which inspired me to write more than anything else, involved learning something new about the craft.
Every so often something comes along and hits me right between the eyes. Sometimes it changes my behavior, and other times it changes how I think. Occasionally it does both.
This past week, I think I found something big enough to do both. But the choice isn’t as clear-cut as it might appear on the surface, and there are a lot of underlying matters which are either causal or affected by the choice.
J. Dane Tyler 