• Café Life is the Colony's main hangout, watering hole and meeting point.

    This is a place where you'll meet and make writing friends, and indulge in stratospherically-elevated wit or barometrically low humour.

    Some Colonists pop in religiously every day before or after work. Others we see here less regularly, but all are equally welcome. Two important grounds rules…

    • Don't give offence
    • Don't take offence

    We now allow political discussion, but strongly suggest it takes place in the Steam Room, which is a private sub-forum within Café Life. It’s only accessible to Full Members.

    You can dismiss this notice by clicking the "x" box

How to not critique voice

Invest in You. Get Full Membership now.
Status
Not open for further replies.

Pamela Jo

Full Member
Blogger
Joined
Oct 26, 2021
Location
Wexford, Ireland
LitBits
0
It's something I'm becoming more and more aware of. Voice in its early stage may be sotto. It's easy to overlook or overpower it when doing an editor side of the brain critique. Now I'm trying to make clear only this structural bit is problematic when building story.348853056_738035121655480_8831646423652564679_n.jpg In photography we call it masking. Covering the bit we dont want changed while we fix the rest.
 
I find the battle between keeping my voice and writing correctly to be a perpetual struggle. Sometimes, I break rules on purpose for effect and it immediately gets picked up on by those kind enough to critique the work. Then I'm torn between fixing it so that it's "correct" and keeping it, because it's how I want the sentence to feel.
 
I read the fix-its, let them sink in then go back to them when I've read an untouched (by others) chunk. If I feel, but that's not what X would say/would think, I ignore the fix-it. The voice is much more important than the correctness of the English. One reason why I stopped using Grammarly pretty soon after I'd given it a go.
 
I find the battle between keeping my voice and writing correctly to be a perpetual struggle. Sometimes, I break rules on purpose for effect and it immediately gets picked up on by those kind enough to critique the work. Then I'm torn between fixing it so that it's "correct" and keeping it, because it's how I want the sentence to feel.

I struggle through this all the time too :(
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest Articles By Litopians

  • The Joy of Lit Mags
    While my first novel is tentatively making its way towards agents who already have too much to read, ...
  • Advertising and Social Media
    There has been much discussion in writing circles about how much a writer has to self-promote these ...
  • Future Abstract: Fights at Night
    SATIRE ALERT: The following abstract is entirely fictional and does not represent actual events or s ...
  • Great Novel Openings Quiz
    As writers, we all know how important it is to grip the reader from the very start. Intriguing, surp ...
  • In The Summertime
    In the early seventies, I had a semi-Afro hairstyle and a shaggy beard. . I thought I looked like th ...
  • Working with a Literary Agent
    The Querying In a previous post I mentioned that I was back in the query trenches. To recap, my earl ...
  • Danger! Danger!
    What is perhaps the most feared creature of the Borneo rainforest, I hear you ask? Who is the King o ...
Back
Top