Fine-Tune Your Storytelling Voice and Make Your Book Stand Out from the Crowd

by Marylee MacDonald in For Writers Doing Revisions

Finding the right storytelling voice has launched the career of many a novelist. In this post I’m going to talk about how to discover where your voice is strongest and how you can build from there. In a previous post, I provided a word cloud so that you could begin thinking about voice. Even with that […]

Voice-Driven Fiction | Why You Can’t Afford to Ignore Voice

by Marylee MacDonald in General

Voice is like the juice in an apple. If there’s no juice, the apple tastes dry, and the reader won’t take another bite. And, readers aren’t the only ones who’ll take a pass. Unfortunately, apart from the issue of “likeable characters,” the single biggest reason agents send you a “bong” letter is that your manuscript […]

Sagas | The Magic of a Storytelling Voice

by Marylee MacDonald in For Beginning Writers, For Readers

Sagas are one of our most enduring story forms. In sagas the voice of a narrator takes us back into a heroic time of grand deeds, power struggles, and families pitted against one another. Sagas are about survival. Something is a stake. That’s why sagas make terrific templates for new writers. Here you sit in […]