Finding A Voice

1. Honesty:

My debut novel, The Exclusives, is a psychological thriller set in an all-girls boarding school.

Initially, the book was a romantic comedy inspired by the American film with Drew Barrymore, Never Been Kissed (still one of my favourites nearly twenty years on.)

As I was writing the novel I was being tutored by Esther Freud and Tim Lott at the Faber Academy.  When I showed *Tim five thousand words of my first attempt at this particular book, his initial comment was that he didn’t think I was being “honest with myself”.

I had no idea what he meant by this. How could he tell? I was having fun writing it. That was honesty, surely?

But then I went home and thought about what he said. And I think it was this: that my writing was not authentic. It didn’t come from the ‘true me’ and that there was a disconnect with what I had presented on the page, and how I felt inside.

That I hadn’t been inspired enough by my characters and I didn’t have the confidence to allow that vulnerability onto the page.

In turn, there was no ‘voice’. Nothing beyond a terrible plot, with no structure

This was a turning point for me. And when it first happened, it felt awful. Like layers of me were being stripped back but with no direction for them to go but inwards. But then something happened – as soon as I realised he was right, the voice came to me. A dark, persistent narrator, that begged to be written down, which soon after led to a finished draft of The Exclusives.

*Tim Lott also does one-on-one mentoring

2. Failure can be your friend

I had years of rejection. There were moments that I came close to getting somewhere. When agents would write to me and say, “Yes, we think there is something there, rewrite and resend” and I would, and they’d turn it down. It was gruelling. But I wanted it and so I carried on. Only to be turned down some more.

Feeling pretty despondent, I watched JK Rowling’s talk on the Fringe Benefits of Failure . What it taught me was that failure could be a good thing. That I could learn from it. And that’s when I decided to stop feeling quite so sorry for myself and do something about it. Which ended up in my applying to the Faber Academy course. It was the action of ‘doing’, having learnt and taken stock from previous rejections, that kick-started me into finding my voice.

3. Find Your Person

Find someone who can tell you what’s working and what’s not. That means:

• Someone with no agenda
• Someone who is honest. That won’t just say what you want to hear
• Someone who is going to be kind and supportive – and patient!
• Someone who will tell you, time and time again, to keep going.

This is a lot to ask – but for me, mine were the other writers who were going through the same journey. And those that knew that they had to be honest for it to work. My best friends have read some utter codswallop from me and always found a way to say, “Look sorry, this isn’t working but keep going”.

Writers are an amazing, amazing and supportive bunch and they will always be my first stop. Twitter has been a great source of meeting fellow authors – and I still keep in touch with my class-mates from Faber. I was also lucky enough to have been signed by my agent, Nelle Andrew from Peters Fraser Dunlop. She’s with me every step of the way – guiding, cheerleading and suggesting editorial solutions.

4. The Importance of Character In Finding Your Voice

I spent many years trying to come up with a mind-blowing plot for a novel. Nothing stuck and I wrote into an abyss of rejection slips. I signed up to a writing course because at the time, there was nowhere else to go, and I had no idea how to structure a novel. I thought that it would help teach me the technicalities of writing a book.

Sadie Jones came in for one of our tutorials, to discuss her at-the-time new novel, The Outcast. She discussed how character led plot.

It sounds so obvious to me now, but I had been desperately over-compensating my lack of character and voice, with an over-egged, and ridiculous storyline. Once the character was fully-formed in my head, the voice was easy to get on to the page, and I found that the everything else followed.

5. Write, write write

Ah the difficult second novel phenomenon! For me, there is a lot of truth in in this. People (kindly) told me to write through it. Well – that might have been easy enough – but I had no ideas to work with. No character means no voice.

But I carried on writing. I wrote about themes and ideas that, on some level, interested me. I wrote about characters that I wanted to get to know. And eventually, I hit on something that seemed to have a hint of a voice. It meant I had to scrap absolutely everything that I’d worked on so far, but at least I had an initial base to work with. I’m still going with it, so I’ll have to keep you posted on this one!

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Rebecca Thornton is a journalist and author. Her work has been published in Prospect Magazine, The Jewish News, You Magazine, The Guardian and The Sunday People. She was Acting Editor of an arts and culture magazine based in Jordan, and she’s reported from Kosovo, London, and the Middle East.

Rebecca is an alumna of the Faber Academy writing-a-novel course, where she was tutored by Esther Freud and Tim Lott.  Her first novel The Exclusives was published by Bonnier in April 2016.

She lives in London with her husband and two children, and is currently working on her second novel.

TWITTER: @rebs_web

 

 

 

 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips