Writer’s Voice, By Patti Larsen

Patti Larsen is my guest today! I love Patti she's a super nice lady, and an awesome author. I'm happy that Patti finally found her all elusive voice and could bring us the Hayle Coven Novels (it's one of my faves)! Here she shares with us how she found her "voice"...

Writer’s Voice

By Patti Larsen

When I started writing so many years ago (I was twelve, I’m now forty, do the math), I had no idea what voice meant or that I was supposed to have one. In fact, as I continued to create and grow, even after I heard the term, I was lost—that ever-elusive voice was missing. Or, at least, I had no real definition and couldn’t find anyone who could solidly quantify it. Yes, I was told, finding your voice is key to great writing. Every writer needs it. But when confronted and asked point-blank how to uncover it, no one was able to actually tell me how to do it beyond, “Keep writing.”

Through decades (OMG really? I’m so old…) figuring this stuff out (and I’m still at it, believe me), after a journalism diploma, five years with an all-female improv troupe (I still miss the F.I.G.H.T. Club), independent film making and screenwriting, inventing, songwriting and performing… I still struggled to find my voice and despaired of ever, ever uncovering what it meant.

It was like this elusive, phantasmal entity endlessly taunting me. Yes, I could write. I was always good at it. But the lack… the lack of voice tortured me until I gave up writing for the pursuits you read above.

Until I found young adult literature, thanks to my darling niece. She thrust a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone into my hands one day and insisted I read it. When I did (and all the books that came after) it was as if something opened up inside me. This was the genre. This was the source of voice. I just didn’t know how yet. But the passion to write novels flared again and I embraced it.

I remember going to bed one night, asking the Universe (it gets much more crackpot than this, just wait for it) for an idea, a new, fresh path to take. For my voice to find me. If I was meant to be a novelist, to write as I’d always believed, I had to get it right this time.

I woke that same night around 2:30am with a girl in my head (see? More crackpot). She insisted I get up, badgered me until I stumbled to my office and wrote down what she had to say. Only then did she let me go back to sleep.

Suddenly, a floodgate of understanding opened in me, a tide of wonder and knowledge and knowing that was so powerful and so profound it changed everything. Everything. My eyes were wide open, the meaning now of what had been so elusive for so long as clear as a freshly polished sheet of glass: my voice.

I found my voice. But it’s not mine. That’s the secret, the part others had been unable to tell me. But I’m telling you now. That voice belongs to Sydlynn Hayle (the teen witch who badgers me even now to get back to book six of her ongoing story, bless her) and all the clamoring, demanding, smart-ass teenagers who began showing up, one after the other, jockeying for position and my attention until I had (and have) enough books onepaged to take me into 2016.

My voice. Their voices. Awesomesauce. I’ve found it at last.

About the Author: Patti Larsen has a serious passion for YA paranormal and thrillers. Her novels Family Magic and Run have just been shortlisted for the PEI Book Awards. Now with multiple series in happy publication, she lives on the East Coast of Canada with her patient husband and four massive cats.

You can find her:

On her website www.pattilarsen.com

On Facebook www.facebook.com/pattilarsenauthor

On Twitter www.twitter.com/#!/PattiLarsen

On Amazon.com and Goodreads