Having an Adaptive Style and Consistent Voice

Any day now, I should be receiving back my manuscript from my editor for an action psychological horror book I wrote this year. It is different from my previous work, published and unpublished. It is different because I am using present tense and a first person POV, along with things I can’t get into now, but you will read it one of these days. It did get me thinking about how much I change my style—to some degree—between each book. Even then, my voice remains.

One of the best ways to be better at something is to challenge yourself. In writing, you can only be so good if you’re doing the same thing every time. I have read or edited books by the same author that are all samey with the characters, prose, or storytelling. Not only will it become dull for readers as they see you are just rinsing and repeating things across multiple books, but it leaves you stagnant as a writer. You have to try different things, even if you fail.

My debut, The Huntress and the Trickster, has its issues that I wish I could go back in time to fix, but it made me a better writer, so maybe it is best that the book is what it is. I am proud of it, but I tried a cinematic style by having things very descriptive, which leads to some bloat and unnecessary descriptions. I also did flashbacks to flesh out the MC’s backstory, which wasn’t necessary now that I look back.

These misfires lead to improvements down the line. I have honed in on what should be described to leave wiggle room for the reader’s imagination, while painting a picture of the important things I want them to imagine my way. My current WIP has loads of flashbacks that go beyond backstory, as they provide context and connect to the story happening in the present.

With each book, I try something different. When I wrote a religious horror that will one day see the light of day, I reeled in the descriptions to be immersive while not overdoing it. It is a slow burn, like the beginning 100-150 pages of The Huntress and the Trickster, but I managed to tie things better to the greater story instead of living with characters for the sake of immersion rather than storytelling.

Unfold (releasing December 15) balances two POVs throughout the entire book, something I have attempted with a small part of The Huntress and the Trickster. I challenged myself to tell two different POVs of the story to see both sides, the workers’ and the executives’.

Regardless of different genres and subgenres, different tense, one POV or multiple, I always maintain my voice. It is imperative that writers find their voice and be authentic, no matter how different they may seem. Stephen Graham Jones is a prime example of a writer who has stories that read vastly different, like The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, The Last Final Girl, and the Indian Lake Trilogy. The latter two examples are both slashers, but read like they came from different writers, unless you know SGJ and his brand of horror, then you see his personality shining in them. Immerse your readers in your story, but make sure you don’t lose what makes you you.

For writers, how do you challenge yourself from book to book?