What makes something a verse novel?  Simply speaking, a verse novel (or novel in verse) is exactly what the name implies: a novel that is told in verse rather than prose.

It’s a bit more complicated than that, though.  Why aren’t works like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid called epic poems and not verse novels?  After all, they are novel-length stories told in verse but epic poems and verse novels are not one and the same.  Epic poems are poems on a grand scale, but they are still poems nonetheless.  Verse novels, on the other hand–whether they are written as one long poem or a collection of shorter poems–must combine poetry with story.  Perhaps the best definition I’ve found comes from Michael Symmons Roberts, who says:

A verse novel can only be written in conscious awareness of the novel as a form.

To write a true verse novel, you have to be aware both of the musicality of the poetry and how the narrative structure works.  This means that an an epic poem is still a poem, not a verse novel.  Nor does “prose-with-line-breaks” count as verse novel material.  Virginia Euwer Wolff (author of the Lemonade Trilogy) said in an interview with The Horn Book (2001):

Writing my prose in funny-shaped lines does not render it poetry. And there’s nobody more aware of that than I.

Which is ironic because Wolff insists her own trilogy (one that reads like poetry) is actually prose-with-line-breaks and the books cannot be called verse novels.  As she says, poetry is more than just prose rearranged with line breaks in funny places.  In fact, poetry has an element of surprise and a musicality that differs from prose.  In my mind, prose emphasizes character and story before language whereas poetry puts imagery and language first.  The line breaks in poetry serve as parallels to breath and rhythm, whereas prose with line breaks must focus first on telling the story.

Which leads me to an important question: who decides if a something is a verse novel?  The author?  The reader?  Some poetic authority from above?  I’m not sure.  What is more, if an author does not consider his/her work as verse, can we the readers appropriate it as such?

Again, I’m not sure.  If an author says his/her work is prose then I feel that I must read and accept it as prose, even if it looks like verse.  But what if the author set out to write prose and somehow it morphed into verse, with all the musicality and imagery that goes with it?  Is it possible for an author to misplace their work as prose when really it’s poetry?

Some argue that poetry and prose exist on a spectrum, that while certain books may clearly reside at one extreme or the other verse novels live somewhere in between.  After reading several verse novels, however, I’ve come to the conclusion that for something to fit that category, it must be both verse and novel.  Verse novels are not watered-down versions of each genre shoved together into one book.  The verse novel must, in fact, do double-duty, having all the elements of of both genres.  This means a verse novel must have the music and imagery that we find in poetry and at the same time character development and story structure of a novel.  Verse novelists must write good poetry and a good story, and they must combine the two seamlessly in order for the verse novel to work.

Interested in checking out some verse novels?  There are several great lists on the web to get you started.

• Sarah Tregay’s List of Novels In Verse (Middle Grade / YA / Adult)
• Novels in Verse (Adult) – Lib Guides at Mohawk Valley Community College
• Goodreads: YA Novels in Verse
• Connected Youth: Novels in Verse

Whether it’s in an auditorium in front of hundreds of people or in your living room with a couple of close friends, reading your work in public can be nerve-wracking.  In fact, even writers who have been speaking in public for years still get nervous when they have to read their own work aloud.  I myself have long battled with stage fright and have had to work hard to get myself to a point where I’m OK with reading and speaking in public.  (Forget being “comfortable” in front of an audience, my only goal is to survive.)

What I’ve observed both in myself and watching other writers read their work is that it all comes down to mastery.  If you go into a performance or reading without much preparation, your reflexes and instincts will take over.  But if you’ve mastered the piece you’re performing–if you know exactly what you need to do and how you’re going to do it–you can keep those reflexes in check.  You can even start having a little fun.

For example suppose you’re someone who naturally speaks quickly, if you don’t practice mastery before a performance you’ll end up reading too fast because that’s what your body naturally wants to do.  And if your reflexes take control, then you can’t have fun because you’ll sprinting just to keep up.

Mastery doesn’t mean being obsessively in control of every last detail in a performance, after all a little spontaneity can be a good thing.  Instead, mastery is about taking control over those reflexive habits that your body leans on when you’re anxious.  Here are 3 steps to gaining mastery for speaking or reading in public.

Step 1: Practice Vocal Technique

There are 4 different aspects of voice that you need to be aware of.  These are: Rhythm, Pitch, Volume and Timbre.

• Rhythm is all about how you vary the pace of your speech.
• Pitch has to do with how high or low your voice goes.
• Volume means loud vs. soft.
• Timbre is hard to define, but the best way I can explain it is that it’s the texture of your voice.

When you read in public, you want to have command of these different variables and be able to alter them to suit your purposes (as opposed to letting them dominate you.)  How do you gain this mastery?  Practice.

Exercise: Take one sentence of medium length from the piece you plan to read in public and practice varying the Rhythm.  Now, read the sentence through as fast as you can say the words.  Practice that a few times, until you feel comfortable.  Next, read the sentence as slowly as possible.  Practice that version as well.

Now, you need to practice varying between fast and slow.  See the diagram below for a visual of the different ways you can do this.  Start the sentence reading slooooowly and end reading as fast as you can (Blue line in the diagram).  You can also start fast and end slow (Turquoise line).  Once you’ve mastered those two variations, try starting fast, getting slow, then speeding up again (Orange line), or going slow-fast-slow (Burgundy line).

Once you feel comfortable varying the rhythm of your reading, try the same exercise with Pitch and Volume.  Don’t worry about practicing Timbre; once you’ve practiced the other three it will come naturally.

Step 2: Consider Voice

You can use a conversational or informal voice or you can choose a formal, presentational voice.  Or you can do something in between.  Think about where you want to be on that spectrum.  Are you going for chatty and relaxed or something more formal and authoritative?  There’s no right or wrong way to do it, but make sure that whichever way you choose to go, you do it intentionally and not by accident or reflex.

Remember also that there’s more than one voice you need to think about: the voice of your narrator and the voice of the characters speaking in the passage that you read.  Unless you choose a piece that is all narration, you’ll need to consider how much “acting” you want to do in terms of making the character voices come to life.

Think also about Cadence when you read.  Cadence is where the voice drops or stops (like at the end of a sentence).  The trouble with cadence is that most people usually let their voices drop more often than is necessary.  For instance, you don’t always need to stop at the end of every sentence.  Sometimes it makes sense to keep your voice buoyant through an entire thought, even if it spans several sentences.

Step 3: Focus on Presence

Be present.  Be in the moment.  That is what “presence” is about.

Presence is not about looking flashy or having some magical ability to capture an audience.  People who have “Presence” are right there, in the moment and the audience is right there with them.  When you’re present, you pull the audience in because you help them be present as well.  This makes the reading experience more intimate because the audience feels closer to you.  When you are present, you aren’t just telling the story… you are in it.  And you draw the audience into the story with you.

‘Tis the season for shopping and celebrating and generally just being around people.  Lots and lots of people.  For many of us, the holidays have become a bit of a sensory overload, what with the lights and smells and eggnog and constant buzz of holiday muzak in the shopping malls.  But in the midst of the madness of the season, it’s important to stop and give your brain a chance to rest and refocus.  That is the purpose of this week’s prompt.

Weekend Prompt: At some point this weekend take a break, grab an cup of your favorite warm beverage and sit quietly.  Turn on a piece of music (something short, maybe 5-10 minutes in length).  The type or style of music does not matter; what matters is that you listen, pay attention, and really focus.  As you listen to the music, close your eyes and focus on one line or one instrument.  Let the rest of the sounds melt away and follow that line or instrument while you listen to the whole track.  The idea here isn’t to take in the whole piece, it’s to train your ear to focus on one sound, one individual voice hidden in swirl of sounds.

Why is focus important?  Research has shown that noise has a major impact on people, not just physiologically (such as elevated blood pressure, hearing loss, etc.) but also cognitively (such as difficulty paying attention or performing complex memory tasks).  Researchers have found that kids who are exposed to chronic noise end up having a hard time mastering tasks like reading or understanding directions.  This is because when kids are surrounded by chronic noise, they develop a coping mechanism and tune it all out.  In the process, many kids end up missing important cues which are crucial in skills like reading.  If kids develop this type of coping mechanism, it stands to reason that adults exposed to chronic noise would also develop similar ways of coping with the noise.

This exercise helps you train your ear to focus.  Rather than tuning out all the noise, you can train your ear to selectively focus on certain things and let go of the rest.  This week, I was a guest teacher for three piano classes at a music school in New York City, where I did this very same exercise with kids ranging in age from elementary through middle school.  These kids did an amazing job of identifying different instruments and melodic lines in the music.  Of course, these are kids from an excellent music program and most have been playing piano for years, so they already have had good practice at listening.  Even so, this doesn’t mean that non-musicians can’t hone this skill as well.

How does this apply to writing?  This week we’ve been talking about voice and really the only way to master this area of writing is to have a well-trained ear.  Sure, we read the words on the page, but really when it comes to voice we’re “hearing” the voices come alive in our minds.  When we focus our listening, we get better at capturing these voices and using them in our writing.

This weekend, take a moment to stop and LISTEN.  Give yourself the gift of focus.

The trouble with voice is that it’s nearly impossible to find an adequate definition.  The best I can say about voice is that while I might not be able to define it, I definitely know it when I see it.

Before putting together this post, I did a little research on voice by looking at books about the craft of writing.  Some books break voice down into distinct categories like “ceremonial voice” or “conversational voice” but I’m not sure pigeon-holing voice into rigid categories is the way to go.  After all, most of the time, the voice in a writer’s piece won’t fit into a neat little category but may challenge those boundaries.  Also, just because you know what category your book’s voice falls into doesn’t mean you know how to make the most of that voice.  Sometimes labels are just that: labels.

Where does that leave us?  Today I decided to share a few things I have learned about voice that have helped me in my own writing.

(1)  Voice operates on multiple levels.  A lot of times, we hear people talk about the voice of a piece, but I find that generalization to be a bit naive.  Rarely does writing have only one voice.  In fact, there are usually at least two levels of voice in any given work.  (If you’re into meta-fiction, where the writer is offering commentary or where you have a story-within-a-story framework, you could have even more levels).  The most basic level is the narrator’s voice, the voice that’s telling the story.  We see this voice in the narration, description and other non-dialogue parts of the story.  But wait!  We also have the voices of the characters in the story, voices we usually only get to hear in dialogue.  So unless a story has only dialogue or only narration, we have to worry about at least two different types of voice: voice of the narrator and voice in dialogue.

Of course, when you’re in a 1st person Point of View (POV), the voice of the narrator and the voice of the protagonist will overlap because they are the same person.  This doesn’t mean, though, that the voices are exactly the same.  After all, the protagonist could be thinking in one tone of voice but talking in a very different tone.  For instance, imagine a protagonist who’s being very polite in dialogue but when we read the narration and get into the character’s thoughts, we hear a super-snarky tone.  Same character, but the dialogue voice and the narrator’s voice are completely different.

Also, there are times when you can eliminate either the voices of the characters or the voice of the narrator altogether.

Eliminating the voices of the characters.  Every so often, we come across a story that takes place completely in the narrator’s mind.  One great example is The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, in which we only get a snippet of dialogue, and even then we can’t take that dialogue at face-value because our unreliable narrator is telling us the story so we’re not sure if that dialogue is really “true” to what happened.  Since this story takes place almost entirely in the narrator’s head, all we hear is the voice of the narrator.

Eliminating the voice of the narrator.  Some stories, on the other hand, are so heavy in dialogue that we practically lose the narrator altogether.  One example is Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway, where with the exception of a few stage directions and dialogue tags, we really only get the voices of the characters in dialogue.  An even more extreme example is Seek by Paul Fleischman which is written as a radio play so all we have are the voices of the characters.

(2) Just because a piece is in 3rd Person, doesn’t mean the narrator doesn’t have a voice.  The temptation is to assume that just because a book or story is written in 3rd person, you don’t have to worry about voice.  Sorry, but in fact the opposite is true.  There are many ways a 3rd person narrator can have a voice in the story and these are conscious choices that you (the writer) must make.

Opinionated narrator.  Sometimes you have a narrator who has strong opinions and these attitudes neak out in the way the narrator tells the story.  One example is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.  Just look at the opening line.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Clearly, Austen has some opinions of her own concerning whether it’s the single wealthy men who are in want of wives or whether it’s single women who are in want of men possessing a good fortune.  Another great example is Matilda by Roald Dahl.  The contempt this narrator has for children (particularly spoiled, unexceptional children) comes across in the word choice: “blister.”  See the opening line below.

It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers.  Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think he or she is wonderful.

Invisible narrator.  At the other end of the spectrum, we have third person narrators who are subtle and unobtrusive that the reader hardly even notices that the narrator is there.  After all, there are times that the writer just wants the narrator to melt into the background so that the readers can focus on the characters and the story at hand.  Of course, invisible narrators don’t happen by accident.  They’re extremely difficult to pull off well and the writer must make a conscious choice to write the narrator this way.

One caveat: in the case of the invisible narrator, it’s not that you don’t have a narrator at all, but that the narrator’s voice doesn’t draw attention to itself.  Often this type of narrator is omniscient so it can pop in and out of character’s heads quietly and without making a fuss.  One lovely example of this type of narrator are books by Eva Ibbotson (Which Witch or The Secret of Platform Thirteen) where the narrator certainly has a distinct tone, but it’s so subtle that we hardly notice the narrator is there at all.  We just get carried away by a good story.

In the end, voice is tough to define and teach because it’s so flexible. The best way to really get a handle on it is to train your ear, so on Friday, I’ll give you a prompt that will help you hone your listening skills