I Lost My Voice!

I Lost My Voice!

Okay, it isn’t my voice that’s lost, it’s Lys’ (Lys is pronounced Liss) voice. She’s the protagonist in the YA novel that I’m writing. One of the ladies in my critique group (thanks M) mentioned that Lys didn’t have a distinctive voice until half way through chapter 2. Not good.

The problem is that she is very vanilla. Nothing wrong with vanilla, but most people would rather have a different flavor, or at least something yummy added to it—chocolate, nuts, caramel sauce, fruit . . . In writing vanilla is bad. In my book it’s bad. Just trust me on that.

I was going over the first three chapters of my novel today and found that Lys doesn’t stick with a distinctive voice. Not for long anyway. This has to be fixed. I can’t believe I didn’t realize this until now. Maybe I didn’t want to face it. That’s a possibility. I literally wrote the climax chapter for this novel yesterday. Today I was doing wrap-up and found that I couldn’t finish it. Lys has to have a voice, which means I need to get to know her, and probably throw her through the ringer a few times to get some decent emotions out of her. Poor girl. I feel a little bad . . .