I admire people who have a distinctive look, a personal style. For years I worked to find that same effortless thing for myself, trying and failing, always ending up trying too hard to force something inauthentic. It was only when I found what felt right and worked with it that I started to feel like I had any style of my own.
There’s a very apt writing tie-in to this (I promise!), and it’s the elusive quality that, though every agent and editor says they’re looking for it, is so hard to define: voice. It seems like every interview with a publishing gatekeeper includes the term, and they all put it way, way up there on lists that will push one writer’s work from rejection to request, from sub to sale.
Just like style, voice is something innate that isn’t so much discovered as nurtured. And in light of New York Fashion Week this week, I thought it might be helpful to provide some examples of YA authors out there right now who have some of the most distinctive voices around, and ask the most stylish person I know, fashion blogger and certified bestie Megan (a.k.a. Step Brightly), to help me relate those voices to the world of fashion1.
Voice/Style example 1
I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Voice/Style example 2
Poetic, focused on beautiful, intricate details. Something out of a fairytale, but the nuanced, sad, complex original Hans Christen Andersen kind, not the Disney kind. Takes traditional ideas and makes something beautiful and refreshingly new from them.
“That’s how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you’d have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.”
— Catherynne Valente, Deathless
Megan association: The Character Sweater
You have seen them everywhere at this point, am I right? From bulldogs on cashmere to owls on wool, the ‘Pictionary sweater’ is making its mark on year – end fashions. The fact of the mater is none of these characters are cutesy and many of them are quite the opposite. The melodramatic themes and romantic undertones come across in this crazy lady and this French bulldog.
Voice/Style example 3
Just because something isn’t practical doesn’t mean it’s not worth creating. Sometimes beauty and real-life magic are enough.”—Stephanie Perkins, Lola and the Boy Next Door
Asking, “How do I develop voice?” is almost exactly the same as the question I’ve been asking my closet mirror forever: “How do I develop style?” You study the great ones, the icons, and try everything on until something feels comfortable.
What do you think?? Is style, or voice, as elusive for you as it is/was for me? What other great YA voices deserve a shout out?
- descriptions of the voices are mine ↩
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