Critical Voice vs. Creative Voice, & Upgraded Offer
In Today's Journal
* Echoes of Hemingway
* Critical Voice vs. Creative Voice
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Echoes of Hemingway
is published. It will go live on Amazon and everywhere else on July 12.
But it is live NOW at the StoneThread Publishing discount store.
BUT WAIT! UPGRADED OFFER!
I misspoke in yesterday's TNDJ.
You can get BOTH the Echoes of Hemingway anthology AND my 10-story Mobster Tales collection for donating $10 to the TRUE PULP Kickstarter!
For descriptions on both collections, see yesterday's post. Basically, you get THIRTY high-quality short stories for reading pleasure and instruction for only ten bucks. How is that not a great deal?
Critical Voice vs. Creative Voice: How Can You Tell?
I first posted a version of this back in October 2023.
I received a great question from a fellow writer. Here’s an excerpt from his email:
“I have a problem finishing longer works. I’ve only ever finished short stories (55 stories in the last couple years). I’m 7k words into the ‘novel’ I wrote you about yesterday, and my lead is telling me it’s time to wrap up this mystery and move onto his next case.
“Is this my creative voice telling me I’m simply a short story writer or is it my critical voice killing me being a novelist? How do I discern?”
Great question, and one I also used to struggle with.
Short answer: It’s your critical voice.
The critical voice is always negative.
Always. If something’s “telling” you to wrap up the story OR to abandon a story and start another one, that has to be critical voice. It’s telling you to stop writing, and creative voice would never do that.
In fact, I can’t imagine a character telling the writer the end of the story is even near.
The characters are LIVING the story. They don’t know how or when it will end any more than you do.
They'll lead you through to the end, but they won’t say “Hey, the end is coming” or “Hey, it’s time to think about wrapping this story.” They just won’t.
And your critical voice isn’t trying to kill you being a novelist. It’s trying to kill you being a writer.
Short stories are easier to write in only one respect: You can have the whole story (or most of it) in mind the whole time you’re writing. When you’re writing a longer work, you really have to trust your creative voice and your characters, and Just Write.
And there’s no real-world risk involved. Nobody’s gonna come to your house and thump on you if they don’t like your story. The story isn’t important. What matters is that you enjoy writing it (and experiencing it) as you run through it with your characters.
For the writer, writing fiction is a win-win situation. Even if you never publish your story or novel, YOU are the first person in the world to have witnessed and enjoyed that authentic story. That’s pretty cool.
If I hadn’t taken a deep breath and forced myself to trust my creative voice and my characters back in 2014, I still would never have written a novel.
My best advice is to let the story be however long or short it wants to be. Just keep writing. As I was telling a writing friend yesterday, all writing fiction really requires is solving the application problem:
Apply your bottom to the seat of a chair.
Apply your fingers to the keyboard.
Move your fingers in concert with the voices and pictures in your head.
Of course, all of that is preceded by taking a deep breath and muttering "I'm just gonna DO this." :-)
Would your character maybe go back to his office, do whatever he does there to pass the time, set a new record for the time he catches a tennis ball he banks off the floor and then the wall and catches? Flirts with his secretary or whatever? And then another call comes in within a day or two or a week? That’s how my Stern Talbot mysteries are.
That’s also kind’a what the POV characters do in my Blackwell Ops series. The POV character goes from one high-tension assignment to the next with some relaxing “down time” for the reader (climbing a hill in a roller coaster) in the times in between as readers see the guy living his non-tension life.
Then a new assignment comes in, and blam! the roller coaster plunges down a steep hill toward another set of twists and turns. Many of my novels in all genres are actually collections of short stories.
As for how to tell the difference between critical voice and creative voice: Critical voice is always negative and it's always trying to stop you from writing. Creative voice (your characters) will never do that.
You have options:
If you're bored with the story, maybe you aren’t simply running through it with the characters and writing down what happens and what they say and do in response.
If, on the other hand, the story slows to a crawl and the words seem to have left you, chances are you've written past the end of the story or scene or chapter or book. In that case, read back a few lines or paragraphs. You'll see where the story, scene, etc. ends. Let it end. Then start the next story or scene.
I’ve found that if you trust the characters and just follow them through the story, they will lead you to a well-duh ending where there’s no doubt in your mind.
Finally, here’s some of the best advice I ever got from Dean Wesley Smith. It might be just what you need:
If you get to a place where you feel “stuck,” but you also feel there’s more story to tell, take a deep breath and Just Write the Next Sentence, whatever comes, then the next and the next. Very soon the story will be racing along again.
I hope this helps. Any questions, email me at harveystanbrough@gmail.com.
Of Interest
Advanced Magic Bakery… Chapter Six
Advanced Magic Bakery… Chapter Seven
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 1010
Writing of Blackwell Ops 46: Sam Granger | Still on the Ghost Trail
Day 1…… 1814 words. To date…… 1814
Fiction for June………………………. 25849
Fiction for 2025………………………. 489301
Nonfiction for June………………....... 13730
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 139860
2025 consumable words…………….. 622651
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 12
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 27
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………..... 116
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 297
Short story collections……………………. 29
If you’re new to TNDJ, you might want to check out these links:
Oh, and here’s My Bio. It’s always a good idea to vet the expertise of people who are giving you advice.
Questions are always welcome at harveystanbrough@gmail.com. But please limit yourself to the topics of writing and publishing.
Excellent offers.
That darn critical voice can be sneaky!