From Monica:

1. How do you maintain the voice as you write a longer piece? I’ve been trying to work on a novel, but I can’t seem to hold on to the tone through the whole thing. 

2. Also, everyone says to edit your work down–what if your pieces tend to be too short, and need to have additions? I don’t know how to do this.

3. How do you make your writing *thick* the way novels are? I feel like mine is too spare.

4. I find that when I read something excellent, I can’t write after that. It’s like "why bother?"

Dear Monica –

Who says to always edit your work down? I have a theory that there are fat writers and skinny writers – half of us write too much, and the other half write too little –so fat writers edit more, and skinny writers add more.  Though spare writing can be  wonderful (or so I like to believe, being a skinny writer myself) there are a lot of very successful writers who are not spare. As for “thick” novels – maybe you mean layered or detailed? This is what rewriting is all about. Draft after draft, you try to go deeper and add more details. It ain’t easy. If it were, we’d all be home writing novel after novel. (Check out Writers Dreaming, edited by  Naomi  Epel about writers grappling with all of this.) Rewriting is also how you maintain the tone.  Though sometimes your tone changes for the better – you discover it as you write. As for reading something  excellent and thinking why bother? I sure understand this, especially when I read Virginia Woolf –  but then there are also other wonderful writers who inspire me and get my juices going. Find those for yourself and read them.

From Evey:

Midway through a recent newspaper article by Tom Hanks, who apparently is venturing more into the written word art form (see June Esquire)I stopped reading because the article had the tone, flow, arc, humor & clarity of the type essay I have tried unsuccessfully to write. I could probably learn something, but like Monica, I think, Why bother? How do you stop comparing your writing to everyone else’s?

Dear Evey:

You never stop comparing. You never stop having those moments of: why bother?  All you can do about it is to keep writing. There was a wonderful story about  the novelist Jessamine West (anybody out there remember Friendly Persuasion?) – she was moaning to her agent that she wished she could write like Eudora Welty and her agent said, “But you have Jessamine West’s pen and she has Eudora Welty’s pen.” 

We all have our own pen, our unique voice. I hear this clearly every month in my Wellness writing workshop and every week in my UCLA classes – a whole chorus of unique voices. The trick is getting your voice down on paper and then crafting it into an essay or fiction. And not giving in to that critic sitting on your shoulder.