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 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.
Last fall, after a fellow author interviewed for a podcast, she said to me that she found it interesting that someone as articulate and accomplished as I was chose such a poor book title.
Ouch!
She was referring to my most recent novel, which is titled, When I Killed My Father: An Assisted-Suicide Family Thriller. I thought that was a good title. I still do, but with less confidence than before.
It was just one person’s opinion, I told myself. Still, I had to wonder if a different title could make a difference in terms of visibility and sales.
Titles are hard. I wrote an 80,000 word novel, with 54 chapters and an epilogue, and I had to distill that into a few words.
The premise of my novel is simple enough — what if your ailing father asks you to kill him?
Here’s my elevator pitch: Psychologist Lamar Rose’s father is suffering from cancer and dementia, and wants his son to help him end his life. Lamar refuses, but his father keeps demanding, and he relents. Then, from the pulpit of the church at his father’s memorial, his sister accuses Lamar of murder.
I like to call When I Killed My Father a “page-turner with a conscience,” about a man caught between what is compassionate and what is legal.
Response from readers has been heartening, but I have not had as many readers as I’d hoped. Not everyone wants to read a book about death and dying and end-of-life decisions, of course, even though, as more than one reviewer noted, the novel is also fun and funny. My disappointing sales may have more to do with my subject matter than the title.
It is possible to republish with a new title, but I have 40 ratings/reviews on Amazon, with an average of 4.5 out of 5 stars, and 46 ratings/reviews on Goodreads, and I would hate to lose those reviews.
There are authors who have done republished with new titles, and managed to keep their reviews — See Helena Halme on How to Change a Book Title Without Losing Reviews. But there’s no guarantee that her strategy will work for others.
The web is full of advice for writers, and no shortage of articles about how to promote yourself on social media, how to use the right keywords in your book description, how to find the right editor. But I have found hardly any useful advice on book titles, other than obvious things like, the title is uber important and you should devote your best energy to it.
The advice that is out there is more on how to avoid a bad title. As Tucker Max, co-founder of Scribe, says, “A good title won’t make your book do well, but a bad title will prevent it from doing well.”
Here are the attributes of a good book title, according to Max:
Well, I think I’ve got three or four out of six.
When I was first writing When I Killed My Father, its working title was Edgewater, which was the name of the senior residence Lamar’s father lived in, on the lakefront on Chicago’s North Side.
There was a lot I liked about that title — the noirish sound of it most of all — but it’s such a common place name and it doesn’t signal the subject or genre of the book in any way.
I brainstormed many title ideas, such as:
And many more.
My brother Pat, who read an early draft, suggested Let Me Go, which I liked a lot, and that’s what I used when I published my advance reader copy.
But one day, when I was sharing title ideas with fellow writers, one said Let Me Go was too subtle. I said, “Well, I don’t want to be too over the top and call it ‘Why I Killed My Father.’” She blurted out, “Oh, that’s so much better.”
I took heed and that became my first choice, but because it sounded like a how-to book, not a novel, I changed the first word from “why” to “when.”
I’d love to hear what you think, whether you’ve read the book or not. (If you haven’t, you can read the first three chapters here.) Should I change the title? What title do you like best?
If you’ve published a book, do you have second thoughts about your title?
You can share your thoughts in the comments below or email me at johnbyrnebarry@gmail.com.
I’m on the board of the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association (BAIPA), which has been holding our monthly meeting on Zoom since March, and we were recently discussing how we as authors and publishers might help each other promote our books during the pandemic, or whether we shouldn’t be doing that at all.
One idea we had was to interview each other on Zoom and post those interviews on BAIPA’s website as well as give the authors the interviews to use as they see fit.
I conducted two interviews of fellow authors, and last week, Janice Litvin, a wellness author and speaker, interviewed me — about how I came to write my book, what surprised me researching the end-of-life movement, and what I’m working on now. Thank you, Janice.
I hope you enjoy watching our conversation half as much as we enjoyed having it.
Recent Comments