I was thrilled to learn last week that my last novel, When I Killed My Father: An Assisted-Suicide Family Thriller, is a finalist in the San Francisco Writers Conference 2022 Writing Contest (Adult Fiction.)
Winners will be announced before November 30, 2022.
You can read the first three chapters here.
Last month, I participated in a panel discussion on “Finding Your Voice” for the California Writers Club Marin Branch. I’m writing my fourth novel, another “page-turner with a conscience,” and I know that I have an author voice that is me, the writer, and it’s distinct from my characters’ voices. But it wasn’t until I was asked to take part in this panel that I deconstructed that author voice, and identified how it differs from my characters’ voices. (Spoiler alert: sometimes it doesn’t, when it should.)
(Here’s a video of my presentation if you prefer to watch instead of read. Only nine minutes.)
I’ve been in a wonderful writers’ group for five-plus years now, and one of the most useful, and common, critiques I’ve received, in regards to my dialogue, is: “That doesn’t sound like your character, that sounds like you.”
(I hate it when people are right like that.)
To deconstruct my author voice, I looked through my three novels, and compiled dozens of excerpts, but because I had a time limit, could only include a few in my talk.
From Wasted: Murder in the Recycle Berkeley Yard
Once, while we were unloading groceries from the car on a rainy afternoon, Eileen said to me that she had mistaken my unhappiness for depth.
Ouch.
So I know Eileen is absolutely the last person in the universe to seek comfort from. But bad habits die hard.
From When I Killed My Father: An Assisted Suicide Family Thriller
Robert Rose lay on his back, his hands crossing his chest. Peaceful. Deep in sleep. Lamar used to be able to sleep like that — “You could probably nod off on a fire engine with sirens blaring,” Janis once said, not hiding her resentment.
He couldn’t sleep like that now.
He couldn’t sleep like that now.
He couldn’t sleep like that now.
He couldn’t sleep like that now.
He couldn’t sleep like that now.
From Bones in the Wash: Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher.
(This is a conversation between Lamar and his daughter, Sierra, who has just returned home to Albuquerque to work on a political campaign just as her parents are separating.)
“Tell me what’s new,” he said.
“You mean, other than the fact that my parents are splitting up and I’m coming home to land in the middle of it?”
As they neared downtown, the windows of the Plaza Tower and the Hyatt reflected the afternoon sun. “You’re upset and you’re not sure how you’re going to manage,” he said.
“There you go, doing that therapy thing on me.”
“No, that’s called listening, a highly underrated part of conversation. It’s where you say something, and I pay attention. You may want to try it sometime.”
“Dad, I am a good listener. That’s why I can hear you manipulating me.”
So when I looked at these and many more excerpts, I asked myself “what characterizes my author voice?” and I came up with these adjectives and attributes.
It was a valuable exercise for me, and I encourage other writers to try it. We all have a voice, but often, we are not conscious of it. Think of it like accents. Many of us don’t think of ourselves as having accents, but we do.
There’s a difference between author voice and character voice, but they can blur together. Many successful writers sometimes have many of their characters sound alike — one example is Aaron Sorkin, writer of the West Wing.
But ideally, they don’t. If you see a line of dialogue, or an internal monologue, it’s bestg if you can tell who is speaking without identification.
Think of the difference in how Barack Obama and Donald Trump speak. Obama is thoughtful and deliberate, sometimes painfully so, like he is formulating his entire sentence in his head before he says it. Trump is impulsive and improvisational. He has riffs he repeats, but you get the sense that he just opens his mouth and blurts, almost without thinking. He speaks in short guttural phrases, doesn’t finish his sentences.
What I aim to do with my characters is identify speech patterns like that.
Here’s a simple one. I’ve got a character in the novel I’m writing now named Mickey Macgillicuddy, who talks like this.
“Hey man, like I went to college. Well, Grateful Dead University. Hey, how can you tell when Deadheads have been staying at your pad? They’re still there, man.”
In this case, I run the risk of sounding like a cliche, but it may be worth it for the joke.
Here are a few ways to make your characters’ voices distinct.
One critical way to make characters’ voices unique is what they notice, what they are concerned about, who they care about, and so on. Their inner thoughts and feelings. Their goals. Their regrets. Their yearnings.
By showing their character, you also show their voice.
You don’t want all your characters to sound alike, but if their journeys and their conflicts and what’s meaningful to them are unique, their voice will reflect that.
Let’s look at Lamar’s voice. (This is him talking to his daughter, in the same scene as the excerpt above, about listening.)
“OK. My Story, by Lamar Rose. Chapter 1. I still care for your mother. I do. I take marriage seriously. I take my responsibility as a husband seriously. I believe in keeping my promises. But love is a verb, not something static. It’s how you act. In our case, it’s become acting—on my part. Your mother doesn’t even bother with the acting.
“There’s a difference between the unconditional love I have for you and what I feel for your mother, which is conditional love. I’m going to love you no matter what. I want you to love me too, but if you don’t, well, I’m never going to stop loving you or being your father. It’s not a choice I have to make.
“But I can’t make a marriage work by myself and I’m no longer willing to give up my own life because I made a promise. I can’t live a healthy life married to your mother. I can’t heal her—I’m not sure she wants to be healed—I can only heal myself. So I am. I apologize for not consulting you, not giving you a warning. This has nothing to do with you.”
“But why did you move?” she asked. “You love the house, the garden. Mom doesn’t care about any of that.”
“I brought that up, said we should figure out who lives where, to which she said something like, ‘after all you’ve done to me, I’ll be damned if you kick me out of my house too.’ Those were the exact words—they’re seared in my mind.”
Sierra flinched.
“Sorry,” he said. “I should have kept that to myself.”
“What did you do to her?”
That’s when I ended my presentation. My nine minutes were up. You can learn more about my author voice and character voice in my books.
I’ve been listening to podcasts almost everyday since the beginning of the pandemic, and now I’m a guest on a podcast. What a thrill!
Thank you to hospice doctor and End of Life University founder Karen Wyatt for hosting this engaging conversation about addressing end-of-life challenges through fiction. She read my novel, When I Killed My Father: An Assisted Suicide Family Thriller, enjoyed and appreciated it, and asked me questions no one asked before, like why my protagonist did what he did when he didn’t want to. As well as some of the more common questions, like do I support assisted suicide/euthanasia? (You’ll have to watch to learn the answer to that.)
It’s available as a podcast on the End of Life University website, Apple podcast, or your favorite podcast app. (Search for “End of Life University Barry” and it will show up.) You can see it here as a YouTube video.
If you enjoy this conversation half as much as I did, that’s still a lot of enjoyment. I shared this with friends and through Twitter and Facebook, and one friend remarked on what a warm and terrific interviewer Karen Wyatt is. I couldn’t agree more.
We talked for a long time and could have kept on going. If your time is short, and you want to take a peek, jump to 3:23 or 35:07.
For the billions of you who have not read the book, here it is in a paragraph: What if your ailing father asks you to kill him? And what if, at your father’s memorial, from the pulpit at the front of the church, your sister accuses you of murder? When I Killed My Father: An Assisted Suicide Family Thriller is a “page-turner with a conscience” about a man caught between what is compassionate and what is legal.
Thank you again to Karen Wyatt for her generosity and curiosity as well as the courage to tackle what is still a taboo subject for many. If you appreciate this kind of conversation, check out Karen’s other interviews on the End of Life University podcast. She posts a new one every Monday and she’s on episode 365 now — that’s the equivalent of a full year of interviews. This week’s “interview” is a solo episode about How to Live a Death-Aware Life.
In June, I hiked and hung out with my brother-in-law at his family’s off-the-grid cabin at Echo Lake, and one evening, impatient with the library book I was reading on my tablet, I scrolled through what other books I had downloaded and there was my first novel, which I finished writing nine years ago — Bones in the Wash: Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher.
I started reading it and could not stop.
It was a thrilling experience, to enjoy my own book, enjoy it immensely, as if I were a reader, and not the writer.
I like to say that I write the kinds of books I enjoy reading, so I have to acknowledge that I am the target audience of my book. Which means there are plenty of readers for whom it may not sing. But that’s true of all books.
(Reminds me of what I wrote long ago in an online dating profile — ”I’m not for everyone, but if you’re looking for someone like me, I’m perfect.”)
I remembered a lot of Bones in the Wash, but there were many complications and details and snippets of dialog that I did not remember, and I found myself rooting for both of the main characters, who were working against each other.
For the billions of you who have not read it, here’s a brief synopsis: Bones in the Wash is one-half political thriller, one-half family soap, and one-half murder mystery — that’s right, a book and a half. It’s a “page-turner with a conscience” set during the 2008 presidential campaign in New Mexico. Ambitious Albuquerque Mayor Tomas Zamara is charged with doing “whatever it takes” to deliver the state’s five electoral votes for John McCain, which includes shutting down voter registration drives and accusing the Democrats of stealing the election, charges he knows are not true. Challenging him every step of the way is fierce, young Sierra León of the Democracy Project, who calls on him to listen to his better self and reject his party’s dirty tricks. Both protagonists, knee-deep in politics, face as many or more crises with their families and relationships.
What I was especially pleased with as I read the book was the way it weaved together Tomas’ and Sierra’s stories. How their plots collided. For example, in one chapter, we see Tomas shut down a voter registration drive in Bernalillo, creating a new obstacle for Sierra, even though, at that point in the story, he doesn’t even know who she is.
The context in which I was reading Bones is important — I’m rewriting my fourth novel, a mystery/comedy tentatively titled Showdown in Sausalito: The Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery True Story, which sounds like a Borat movie and maybe that’s the point. I am happy with the first ten chapters or so and with the overall story, but I’m struggling through the muddy middle. I’m on Chapter 21 and I wish I could just tighten and polish my first draft, but instead I have to rethink it.
There were two threads going on in my head as I raced through Bones. One was that it was damn entertaining. It was tight and well-written. So many chapters ended with a cliffhanger that made me want to keep reading, even when it was time to sleep or eat. I cared about the characters as they faced one obstacle after another and I wanted to find out how they overcame them. Or didn’t.
The second thread was that the book I’m writing now is not as strong. Aren’t we supposed to get better with experience?
But then I reminded myself that Bones had, at many points during the writing and editing process, been flabby and unfocused, and I kept making it better and most important of all, cutting what wasn’t necessary.
Another interesting, albeit depressing part of reading the book was seeing how, in 2008, the Republicans used allegations of “voter fraud” to shut down voter registration drives and challenge legitimate voters. In light of Trump’s big lie about the 2022 election being stolen and the January 6 attack on the Capitol, what happened in Bones in the Wash was on a small scale and seemed comparatively innocent. But the seeds were there.
I remember talking with one reader, from Canada, who said he loved the book, but that the voter suppression tactics and dirty tricks didn’t seem realistic. I assured him that, though they were fictionalized, all the tactics and tricks in the novel were based on real and recent events, though not necessarily in New Mexico. If he read the book today, he would not consider it unrealistic.
While writing Bones in the Wash, I had this delusion that as allegations of voter fraud were exposed as frauds themselves, as empty excuses to push new voter suppression measures, that this false narrative would die away. Instead it has grown. Even when politicians say the silent part out loud.
I underestimated the power of the big lie. (But I’m not going down that rabbit hole now.)
One more thing I was impressed by was how all the main characters, and even many minor ones, had their own journeys. They were not static one-dimensional stock characters serving only as foils. While writing, I often remind myself of Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the Tom Stoppard play about two minor characters in Hamlet, who are, in this play, the protagonists in their own life stories, as they should be. And as are the secondary characters in Bones in the Wash.
If all goes according to plan, early next year I will finish Showdown in Sausalito and then, five or ten years from now, I’ll pick it up and reread it and be as impressed and entertained as I was with Bones in the Wash. Hopefully, other readers will enjoy it as much as I do.
In May, I was invited to be a guest on the Let’s Talk Death podcast, which is also a video now, to discuss my assisted-suicide family thriller, When I Killed My Father. I talked about how the book was inspired by my family coming together to deal with our mother’s dementia, and how somewhere along the way, I imagined a fictional situation characterized by conflict instead of communication.
I wrote the book because I believe it’s important to talk about death. But it’s not easy to talk about death and it certainly wasn’t easy to write the book. Now that it’s been several years since our mother’s death and several years since the novel’s publication, however, I find that it’s not as hard for me to talk about these issues as it used to be. And if you watch or listen, you’ll see it’s not a heavy conversation. It was fun, enough so that part of me feels like there’s something wrong with that. But no, there isn’t.
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