← The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
Author Voice Mastery, And Rebooting an Author Business With J. Daniel Sawyer
00:50:21
Loading summary
Transcript47 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the Creative Penn Podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur, bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing, craft and creative business. You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots more@thecreativepenn.com and that's Pen with a Double End. And here's the show. Hello creatives, I'm Johanna Penn and this is episode number 871 of the podcast and it is Wednesday the 1st of July 2026. As I record this early as I am heading away for a few days in today's show I'm talking to J. Daniel Sawyer about author voice mastery and rebooting an author business after a hiatus. We talk about how chronic pain can impact your writing and what happens once you re emerge into health, some of the building blocks of author voice and how a more eclectic substack might work for creative expression and attracting a certain kind of reader. So that's coming up in the interview section. Just a short intro this week and a reminder that it is mid year, it is the middle of the year, it is the 1st of July. How are you doing with your goals for 2026 and is it time to plan out what you can achieve before the end of year? Now if you struggle with this kind of planning, I was reminded this week while I was doing a few consulting sessions about using Claude or ChatGPT to help with your blind spots. So if you have your CliftonStrengths assessment, which I know many of you do, and if you haven't, it's super useful for understanding what you are strong at. And I like that about the Clifton strengths that it really focuses on your strengths and you can kind of double down on your strengths as opposed to being upset as to why you don't have these other things. But you can look at your strengths. And of course the extended report does include your blind spots, but the fact they are blind spots means you're not aware of them on a day to day basis. So one of the good use cases for AI is to set up a project in Claude or Chat and load up your CliftonStense report and then get Claude or Chat to write project instructions for you around Being a coach for your blind spots. So essentially an example being someone who has high focus, high achiever, high discipline, but very low strategic can be working incredibly hard on all kinds of busywork. But it might all be going in the wrong direction. It might be strategically not the right direction. And having this project means for your blind spots basically means you can get Personalized help as to how to achieve your goals in a way that suits your strengths, rather than trying to do things in a way that might suit somebody else but might not suit you. Now, of course, working with a human coach is the gold standard, but sometimes you need that daily help. So that is a tip for you. And also in my own plans, I basically write off December as it is my worst month. It's always my worst month in terms of energy. I definitely have a little bit of the seasonally affected sadness and the weather and socializing and family things. And so November is my end of year to get most things done. I really try and achieve everything by the end of November. That always runs a little bit, but, you know, try and get stuff done. So that's only five months left in the year. And I looked at my goals for the year and I realized I will get some of it done, but I certainly won't get all of it done. But that's usually what happens every single year. But what do you want to achieve by the end of 2026? How can you make it happen? Now? In personal news, I'm heading to London today for the selfie award finals where I'm up for fiction, best fiction for Death Valley. I like the selfie awards because they're are three elements. So of course the content, the writing, craft, the book has to be a good book, but then also the production, how lovely the physical object is. And I entered my foiled special edition hardback with the custom endpapers and the quality paper feel from Book Vault. And then the marketing and business side is also part of the assessment. So you have to say what you did for marketing and how many books it sold. So it is all three aspects that are judged and the three aspects of writing, craft, production, publishing, quality and marketing. That really is what being an indie author is. And yeah, so then I'm heading to Brussels and Bruges in Belgium for a book research weekend and by the time this goes out I'll actually be heading home. So you can check my Instagram or Facebook fpenauthor for pictures and I'll tell you next week whether I won that award or not. I've also been hand editing my short book on how to write, publish and market short stories on everything I've learned in over a decade of writing shorts and publishing them and licensing them and repurposing them in different ways, including making a collection. And I was originally going to try and make it a big book, but I have cut it back so much because I don't want to overlap with how to write a novel or successful self publishing or how to market a book. And so it will be short and useful and out in August. So it is a short non fiction on writing short fiction, no specific launch. I'm just going to put it out everywhere all at once. I will human narrate the audiobook. So yeah, that will be on its way. It actually feels so good to write something reasonably fast. I essentially got that done because now it is pretty short. It's like 20,000 words and that has been sitting in my brain for a while. The text is also based on a webinar transcript I did for the Kickstarter for the Buried and the Drowned. And this is a good tip for non fiction. If you're a speaker or a teacher or you have slide decks and recordings of your talks, you can use those to start the draft and then edit the material into book shape. Because of course book shape is different to webinar shape or talk shape. But yes, it's certainly a good place to start and at least it acts as a checklist for you to cover everything you want to cover. And then finally, Bones of the Deep, my thriller with teeth set on a tall ship sailing from Fiji to Vanuatu, is out now in all the usual formats in all the usual places and of course on my store jfpenbooks.com and these are not your Disney mermaids. If you have read it, a review would be much appreciated on Goodreads if you review there or my store or wherever you usually review or buy books. So then, not many comments this week, obviously, as the podcast only came out a day or so ago. But Diane Holland on YouTube already commented on the episode with Nicole where she talked about her book marketing event in person. And Diane says a gathering of readers with wine and cheese where a couple of authors sell their books sounds 50,000 times better than a Tupperware or Mary Kay. Where do I sign? How can we get this started? I love that enthusiasm. So yes, I think these kind of book events and Nicole kind of talked about it's sort of a book soiree. It's what it sounded like is a great idea and we should definitely do more of that. Book Parties okay. Please leave a comment on the podcast show notes@thecreativepenn.com or on the YouTube channel. You can email me, send me pictures of where you're listening or your thoughts or your favourite cemetery or churchyard. JoannaTheCreativePenn.com I love to hear from you. It makes this more of a conversation. So today's show is sponsored by prowritingaid because however you choose to publish, whether you go indie or you want a traditional deal, you need to make your book the best it can be. ProWritingAid remains one of my absolute must use tools in my writing process. I use it to go through my first draft before printing and hand editing, and then again after I put the edits back into Scrivener, since I always make mistakes and I do that before sending it to Kristen, my editor. In fact, I did this yesterday with the draft of the short stories book. I use ProWritingAid anywhere, which means you can use it within Scrivener or Word or whatever you use. ProWritingAid knows all the rules of editing and helps you apply them. And of course you can choose not to make changes as you like. It helps with making your writing more active, finding repeated words, finding words and sentences you could improve, adding sensory detail, sentence structure, grammar, punctuation issues, as well as typos, spacing, and more. It also now has a set of useful reports, including story strengths and weaknesses, areas for improvement, and other analysis Using AI tools to help you improve your writing. So why use software to help you? Why don't you just learn all the grammar and writing rules and apply them yourself? Well, we all use tools to improve our process, and we're also often blind to our writing issues. It helps to have another pair of eyes, even if the eyes are software. So won't an editor do all this? Well, yes they can, but I'd rather pay my editor to fix the things the software can't and comment on things that human readers notice. So I use prowritingaid as my essential editing tool before sending to my human editor. Check out the free edition or get 15% off the premium edition using my link prowritingaid.com Joanna J-O-A-N-N-A that's prowritingaid.com Joanna this type of corporate sponsorship pays for the hosting, transcription and editing, but my time in creating the show is sponsored by my community@patreon.com TheCreativePen thanks to the four new patrons who've joined over the last few days, and thanks to everyone who's been supporting for months and years. If you join the community, you get access to all my backlist videos and audio covering writing, craft, author, business and AI tutorials. Last week I shared my audio Q and A, which is an extra solo show for patrons where I answer questions on all kinds of topics. The Patreon is a monthly subscription, the equivalent of buying me a black coffee a month or a couple of coffees if you're feeling generous. So if you get value from the show and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon.com thecreativepen that's P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com thecreativepenn Right, let's get into the interview. J. Daniel Sawyer is the Author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories and non fiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book for authors is the Pitch Perfect Voice Mastery for Writers. So welcome back to the show, Dan hello Joanna.
- [11:05]
B
It's good to be back.
- [11:07]
A
Yeah. And goodness me, you have been on the podcast a few times, but actually the last time was April 2017, which is crazy. It's nine years ago. And when I saw your book, I was like, I can't believe we haven't talked for that long. But for anyone who doesn't know you, tell us a bit more about what does your creative and author business look like these days.
- [11:29]
B
Oh, well, these days it's in a state of recovery because it basically ground to a halt while I was dying. A few years ago, I had, it turned out I had an organ disease from the time I was a kid that I didn't know about. And it just progressively gotten worse and worse, putting me in more and more pain. And I hit a point round about 2020 or so where I was in so much pain that I couldn't write fiction. I continued to write nonfiction. But when you're carrying around a lot of physical pain, there comes a point where so much of your brain's activity goes into coping with it that you actually lose the ability to model other people's emotional states or at least well enough to write fiction. So I was very frustrated and I was despairing that I was ever going to be a novelist. And then suddenly what I was sick with went acute. I went to the emergency room and they're like, oh yeah, if you don't surgery in the next 24 hours, you're gonna die. So I went and got surgery and there was one bed in the whole state. It was a three hour drive to go to that that was available in the time window. There was a three hour drive. I get there, they wheel me into the or, I wake up afterwards and I realize that I'm not in pain and that I had never felt that before in my adult life.
- [12:56]
A
Wow.
- [12:57]
B
And just the walls of my whole reality came caving in. But Two weeks later I was back up and working. And since then I've been slowly reacquiring my ability to write fiction. So now I've got four novels going again like I used to have going all the time, as well as doing a weekly column and all sorts of other stuff.
- [13:19]
A
Yeah. So I think a lot of people will be interested in this one. A lot of writers have chronic pain issues or chronic health and the sort of up and down. It sounds like yours was sort of down, down, down, down, and then it's more of a sudden up. But maybe just talk a bit more so that I feel like a lot of times people are too hard on themselves about oh my goodness, if I can't write fiction, is it the end of everything or. So how did you adapt to that with the sort of mental health aspect, I guess, of, of dealing with it, that change in circumstance?
- [13:53]
B
Well, it was happening so gradually and it happened at the same time that a whole bunch of other weirdly stressful things happened, like Covid and a couple of family emergencies that derailed my whole life for a couple of years that I assumed that it was just really bad stress that would pass with time. So I had the despairing feeling because it, you know, when you write fiction, it tends to occupy a central place in your self concept. But I'd also been through very tough times before and so I was like, well, I got through that then, maybe I'll get through this now. And I just made sure to keep writing something because at least you keep the discipline of the words flowing and whatnot. And there was still thought going on. So I would have ideas for novels and write them down. And there were good days and bad days. Occasionally I would sit down and be like, I feel like fiction today. And I would write a couple thousand words and then be 10 months before I could do that again. When, when you work with your mind, it is really easy to develop or sink into the delusion that your mind is not your body. Now, if you're paralyzed or you're missing limbs, you can still write. But your mind and your body are a single system. And eventually if something terrible is wrong with your body, it's going to affect your cognition, your emotive abilities and all the things that we depend on. Creativity. That doesn't necessarily mean that if you're sick or injured or chronically or you've got chronicle chronic health problems from birth that you can't write. It just means that that's really, it really is one of the factors that goes into shaping Your experience of the world that goes into shaping the way that you process things and they come out on paper. And when there's a massive change in your health, it's going to show up in your fiction somehow. If your health goes way down, especially if you get into a lot of pain or you have a terminal illness, your fiction's gonna get darker. And one of the reasons I discovered this after I got my surgery, one of the reasons is that the sense of impending doom is actually a medical symptom of organ death.
- [16:14]
A
Well, don't say that to a dark writer like me. I have a sense of impending doom the entire time.
- [16:22]
B
There's, there's a cognitive sense of impending doom that you get if you're like modeling systems and you see how things can go wrong. But the sense like that you feel the claws of demons grasping at your heart all the time, that can be a medical symptom. So pay attention to that. I didn't know that until afterwards or I'd have gotten looked at a lot sooner.
- [16:44]
A
Yeah, that is, that is really interesting. And you mentioned there you are reacquiring the ability to write fiction or that's what you've been focusing on. But you also talked about having to boot the business. So what are some of the concrete things that you're doing to rebuild?
- [17:01]
B
Well, the first thing I did is I allowed myself to get talked into doing a weekly substack column a couple of years ago. And that's worked out really well. Pays pretty decent. I've been posting most everything for free except for some previews of upcoming books. But I'm now learning the art of paywalling, so that also helps. But yeah, getting paid for the weekly column is quite nice. And it's. The side effect is that it does drive people occasionally to the fiction. Even though I'm writing nonfiction, it more frequently drives people to the non fiction books. But it gives me a good place to announce new releases, to promote book bundles, Kickstarters and all of that sort of thing. Very good place for that because the people who are subscribing there, especially the people who are subscribing and supporting, are interested enough in what I'm saying that they want my email every week. So it's a good filtering mechanism for building, for building the email list as well.
- [18:06]
A
And you used to do a lot of audio. That's how we connected way back like 17 years ago. I think we first connected. So are you still doing a lot of audio?
- [18:18]
B
I am not at the moment. It's not because of a decision to drop the audio. It's because I am now building my house, and I don't have a place that's quiet enough to record dependably. So in the deep winter. I'm living in a little RV at the moment, while I build the house in the deep winter, everything is quiet enough in the forest to record some things. And so I do audiobooks for clients, and I work on audiobooks of my own that are coming out, but it's not quiet enough to podcast, and it's not quiet enough to be recording any other time than when the whole world is asleep. Hopefully by next year, I will have the recording studio building built and then I'll be back at it because, boy, I miss it.
- [19:06]
A
Yeah, I mean, I know. And so you mentioned their bundles and Kickstarters and things, and we reconnected because I bought a story bundle, and your new book, the Pitch Perfect Author, was in the story bundle, which was part of why I bought it. Anyway, so let's get into the book and what's useful. So. So let's start with what is author voice anyway? And why is it important?
- [19:32]
B
Author voice. Everything about the way that you write is part of your author voice. The themes that you gravitate to, the way that you turn a phrase, the way that you tell a joke, the way that you handle dramatic tension, all that kind of stuff, all of that sort of. It creates in the reader's mind an emotional fingerprint, a gestalt that says, this is a Joanne, a pen book. This is a Dan Sawyer book, or whoever. But when you bring the focus down further, author voice is fundamentally an auditory phenomenon. And you can see this if you look at the careers of writers who had major worldview shifts during their career or who shifted genres. If you read an Isaac Asimov mystery, and you read Isaac Asimov's Guide to the Bible, and you read Isaac Asimov's robots and dawn, they're all Asimov. You can hear him talking to you through all of those different venues. So it's not. Author voice is not a genre thing. It's not dependent on content. It has to do fundamentally with how your brain processes language and how it comes out your mouth. That, in turn is based on patterns that were laid down when you were pre verbal. As an infant, you learned language by mapping the music of the conversations around you and then gradually learning that the. The sing song that you were hearing corresponded to ideas. And that's how the. That's how the brain bootstraps itself into language. So when you start Writing, just like when you start speaking, you wind up imitating a lot, unconsciously, the people who you've read and heard, because that's how you develop your voice. But there comes a point at which all the various influences on you and who you are and how they pass through you crystallizes into something definite. And by the time you're a moderately competent writer and you're finishing novels and short stories, well, your author voice is pretty well established. But that doesn't mean it's sharp, because most people don't actually concentrate on learning to hear their author voice, so they can't tell when it's off. And this is why new writers who revise a lot tend to revise their voice right out, because when they write, they're using language as feels right to them, but when they read, they're reading it like an English teacher or through the lens of someone who has very definite ideas about how grammar should work in all circumstances. And so they tend to smooth the quirkiness out of their voice. And what you get is something flat. It doesn't feel alive. It may convey information, it may tell a good story, but it doesn't feel like you're entering something that's living. Yeah.
- [22:51]
A
And I think this is so difficult, especially for people who are new to writing, because I remember very much spending the first few years going along to writers conferences, and there were always sessions on, you must find your writer's voice. You must find your author's voice. And we publish books because of the voice and all this. And it was very, very confusing to me. As you say, it has to emerge somehow. And yet that emergence seems to be very hard to accept. So what are some of the ways we can perhaps think about voice? I mean, you mentioned there some patterns. You talk about music, so what are some of those angles? And you, in the book, you have different chapters on all of these things, but just maybe talk more about some of the elements.
- [23:37]
B
The first and most obvious is functional vocabulary. This is not the number of words that you know. These are the words that you can reach for in the moment. And you can expand your functional vocabulary by deliberately using more words. Burnish your inner thesaurus. The greater your functional vocabulary is, the more your personality is going to come out through your voice. You know, you've got more options to do something that's just the way that you want to do it, the closer it's going to be the way you want to do it. There's functional vocabulary. There's your native dialect and accent. You being British have a different set of preferred terms for everything than I, being a West Coast American, do. One of the great differences that's always visible between an English writer and an American writer is you guys have different. When you speak of a difference between one thing and another, you talk about how this car is different to that car, car, and Americans say this car is different from that car. Always marks out a British writer versus an American writer. There's a hundred little things like that. They happen not just between major countries, but within regions in every country. You can tell, I'm sure you could tell on paper the difference between someone from Yorkshire and someone from London, just as I can tell on paper the difference between the difference between someone from the west coast and someone from Mississippi. Even if they're highly educated. The idiom, the preferred turns of phrase, the preferred imagery, all of that is going to be a little bit different, and it conveys that regionality. There's also the musicality of the language. This is the actual rhythm of the words with which you speak. When you learn to analyze poetry or to write poetry, you learn something called scansion. How poem scans is are the beats of the lines. How are the beats of the lines related to each other? And how does the rhyme move in and out of that? A Shakespearean sonnet or a sonnet from the Elizabethan era has a specific meter and a specific number of lines and a specific rhyme scheme. And the meter is an iambic pentameter. An Iam is bum, bum, if I remember right. Yeah, it's the rhythm of the heartbeat. It's bump, bump, oh, it's bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. And you can hear it in the name of the meter, the iamb. The iambic pentameter is. It's where the stressed syllable is the second syllable and the unstressed syllable is the first syllable. All of Shakespeare is written in blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter. The pentameter is five feet per line. So one im is bump, bump. And so that's one foot, and five of those makes one line of Shakespeare. We all have inherent rhythms like that in the way we naturally speak. But we can also tweak those rhythms on purpose to achieve dramatic effect. The Iam has the sound of the heartbeat. It's a very reassuring speech rhythm. The trochaic is a much more rapid mirrors the rhythm of a rapidly beating heart. So you see this a lot in Edgar Allan Poe, especially in his frenetic poems like the bells, how they jingle. Jingle jangle on a hoary moonless night. There's a rushing sound to that meter. You're gonna find that you automatically do a little bit of this, just the way that you'll automatically have picked up the convention of breaking sentences up into shorter lengths during really exciting or suspense filled parts of your book. But once you know what it is, you can start to use it on purpose. And quite a lot of developing your voice is learning to recognize these latent existing qualities in the way you communicate and sharpening them up and making them conscious tools that you can just pull in whenever you want.
- [28:05]
A
Yeah, And I think on the one hand there's a lot of technical words there that are really interesting and maybe poets know a lot more of those words than most other write. And the book is really interesting in that way, is kind of learning about these different things. But I guess I want to reassure people as well that as you said, some of this can be unconscious. So often when we are. Like when I'm self editing and I'm reading a sentence to myself, there's something that doesn't feel right about it. So I will rewrite that sentence so that it feels right. And how the word. Sometimes we do something that might be grammatically less correct, but it sounds better than it did before. So many of these things we almost know instinctively just from reading so much.
- [28:52]
B
Oh yeah, and from reading so much and talking so much. And again from the way that you acquire language that gives you a template in your head of what sounds right. And language is inherently musical. And so if you've ever listened to a song, especially one that wasn't recorded by a professional but someone you know, you're singing in a church choir, or your kid is practicing for a recital, or you were practicing for a recital. You know that feeling that happens when someone hits a wrong note? There's that little wince down in the core of your being and then the song carries on and you forget about it, unless there's too many of them, in which case you just sort of cower and ooze out of the room. That feeling of, ooh, someone just hit a wrong note. That's exactly the feeling you get when you're reading through to edit your work and something is off in the technical layer of your voice, you should pay attention to this, that and rewrite so that it feels good or feels great. Which is even better because you've got the opposite of the wince, which is that sense of rapture and joy. If you're listening to a professional musician and they go on like an amazing guitar solo or a flautist does an incredible trill that just sends shivers up your spine. That sense of excitement and joy. That's what happens when you're reading, when someone, when the author does something with the language that makes the whole piece fly. And so you want to be paying attention for those too, because those you will, you'll commit that act without intending to. When you're reading back and you find those, you want to make note of those because that's you seeing where you are at your strong with your voice. And by learning both where you're making mistakes and where you're being brilliant, just like with anything else, you can start to advance towards being brilliant more often and making fewer mistakes.
- [31:13]
A
But then also there's a difficulty around like where's the line? Especially when you're an early stage writer. Many people working with editors and you mentioned about the problem of revising your voice away. And that may also happen if you're working with an editor who maybe like you said, as a British. I work with an American editor, Kristin, and she's excellent. She's very, very good at letting my voice be my voice and then fixing things that make it better. But a lot of people don't feel that way about their editors. So when can people understand where those lines are between being well edited and becoming a better writer and then needing to hold the line on their voice.
- [31:55]
B
It really helps if you understand where you are weak. Why are you hiring the editor in the first place? I'm a big believer in the utility of having other eyes on the manuscript, but it's really important to know what you're looking for from them. You and I have both been to the Oregon coast writing seminars back when that was a thing. One of the things they would talk about with editors is how when you've got a story editor or a beta reader who says, hey, something here stopped, didn't work in the story for me, you usually don't want to look at that point. You want to trace back from that point to figure out where you set the wrong expectation. Any editorial feedback is going to have a gap between what they notice and what really needs to be fixed. And as a writer, learning to recognize or learning to interpret the feedback properly so that you actually elevate the material instead of interpreting the feedback like you're trying to do customer service for an employer where you just want to make the customer happy. Copy is a really important skill to develop regardless of whether the feedback has to do with voice. Or plot or characterization or whatever. Because editors get hired. Some editors are really good at backtracing and actually spotting the real problem. But editors make their money or get hired or get picked by you to volunteer because they're good at being an audience, not because they're good at being a writer. So learning to interpret the editorial feedback is a really important step in that maturation journey.
- [33:54]
A
Yeah. And I think maturation journey is a good way to put it, because personally, I think it was around book five when I really felt, okay, now I see what my voice actually is. It had to be five novels. And then I was like, okay, now I know. And I just didn't get it before then. And then finally, I don't know, a penny dropped or something. Maybe I grew into it, grew more confident, you know, that kind of thing.
- [34:18]
B
Yep. And that's actually about. If you look at writers with a big catalog, five books in is usually where they start really sounding like them. So that's a pretty normal maturation curve. There is a way to speed it up, which is to read your books aloud or even better, make audiobooks, and then listen to them a thousand times. Get listen to them until you're sick of them, and then listen to them until you start to like them again.
- [34:46]
A
That's a lot.
- [34:48]
B
It's a lot. But there's a really specific neurological mechanism at work. You're familiar with the comedy term crossing the line twice, right?
- [34:57]
A
Not really.
- [34:58]
B
Okay. Have you seen the Monty Python spam sketch?
- [35:03]
A
Yes.
- [35:04]
B
Okay, so for those of you who have not seen this, in the Monty Python spam sketch, there's a couple. They're in a diner, and everything on the menu has spam in it. And they say the word spam so much that you just want to shoot your television, but they keep it up. And then suddenly, at some point, it's a different point for everybody watching, but they keep it going on long enough that everybody gets. At some point, the word spam itself becomes hilarious, and you can't stop laughing. And you don't know why, because it shouldn't work. But God damn it, it really does. And it's so funny that we named junk email spam after this sketch because it's a whole bunch of stuff that you don't want, but it keeps showing up anyway. That's crossing the line twice. And what's going on is that your brain is getting accustomed to a sound. It has extracted all of the meaning it can, and so it's doing what it does with all sensory input when it thinks it's got it mapped out, it's trying to filter it. You, unless you are going to sit and concentrate on it, you can't feel the texture of the fabric of your clothing on the back of your leg, because your brain, despite the fact that it's getting that input all the time, is filtering that out because it needs you to have your resources free for thinking. When you experience something over and over and over, no matter what it is or how complex it is, the brain habituates like that. But if that signal refuses to be filtered and the input keeps coming and it keeps getting more intense, or it stays persistent and it's too complex to filter easily, your brain starts to think, oh, maybe I shouldn't be filtering this out. Maybe there's meaning here that's important for my survival that I hadn't extracted. And so suddenly it starts searching for meaning to associate with that sensation. And that's the point at which the joke becomes funny again. Or you start to experience your voice as if it's somebody else's. And when you begin to experience your author voice as if it's somebody else's, you can hear it as a distinct objective style rather than just as a echo of the voices that are in your head. And that's when. That's. That's why music students practice over and over and over and over and over, even on a piece they know cold, they're doing the same trick that I'm advocating with listening to your audiobooks until you're not sick of them anymore.
- [37:53]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think that's terrifying because I just don't want to listen to my books over and over again. But I think it's very interesting that you think it could shortcut that voice process. But staying on audio since we last spoke, really, I have done a lot of my own audiobook narration, mainly for non fiction, but also my short stories. I haven't done my full length fiction. But what I discovered in doing this is that what read fine to me when I was self editing my own work on the page. And obviously I'm hearing it in my head when I perform the audiobook, I actually have to edit things again. So what are some of your tips for how we can bridge that gap? Because that's kind of strange.
- [38:35]
B
So what's happening is that there's a. A much wider latitude of things that work on the page than what works with voice. And the reason is that with voice, all of those rhythmic elements that I was talking about before are really pronounced as well as all the sensual elements, Basically every word and sound has a mouth shape. The mouth shape affects the emotional valence of the sound. Stuff that's unpleasant tends to have real, really close. I'm trying to. So I'm trying to scrunch my face up. Has. Has a really close in feel where you would grit your teeth and scrunch up your face. If something is unpleasant and if something is really pleasant, it tends to have a rounded feel. And our language reflects it. In fact, all languages reflect this because language is a physical thing that's based on. On the sensuality of the body.
- [39:34]
A
Body.
- [39:35]
B
So like in all cultures, mama is the word for mother that babies first say. Regardless of what it is, it has a round feel because babies associate their mother with roundness. And a lot of language is built up that way from baseline. Sensual cues, when you're working just in text, that aspect is not nearly as obvious to you. And when you're reading, it's not obvious. It's not as obvious to you. It's still at play. But when you go to do something verbally and you go to read a text, all of those sensual cues come in at the same time and the rhythm comes in hard and you suddenly realize that that conveys the thought that. But it doesn't feel right. And so you wind up retooling it. And there's also occasional tongue twisters which you have to work your way around. But yeah, that's why that happens.
- [40:37]
A
And then I guess another thing is I hear quite often people say, oh, I. I don't like my voice. I don't. And they mean I don't like speaking out loud. I don't want to be on video, I don't want to be on audio. And I wonder if that does that sort of. It's not rejection, but it's a sort of resistance, presence, affect, potentially affect their writing voice. And are there ways people can get over that feeling?
- [41:02]
B
Yeah, for sure. So there's a few things that go into that. One is basic self loathing. A lot of people carry it around. Most people learn to live to make a decent life, even though they kind of secretly suspect that they're not worth anything or they secretly find themselves revolting. That kind of thing you can't really fix with. With exercises. That's something you fix with, with therapy, psychological work or spiritual work or that kind of thing. Yeah, but the not liking the sound of your own voice, that's easy to fix. Here's why it happens. When you're listening to your voice as you Speak your. The bones in your head are amplifying the bass signals and attenuating the treble. It's kind of like if you were to shout in another room and your spouse hears you, but they can't make out the consonants. It's because all the consonants are being filtered out by the wall in between, but the bass is being communicated, is being resonated through. Same thing happens in your head. So when you get on a microphone, especially if it's an accurate microphone, you're suddenly hearing what everybody else hears when you speak, and it sounds thin and tinny and unpleasant compared to what you're used to hearing hearing. The really easy way to get around this is to get a microphone that is tuned for singers. The condenser mic that I have isn't made anymore, so I can't really recommend a good condenser mic. But if you're on a dynamic MIC, the Shure SM58 is the one to use. I podcasted with that for years before I could afford an upgrade. But it is tuned for singers to set sound as good as possible without any other help from the sound engineer, which means that it sounds. The baseline sound for that microphone is what you're hearing in your head. If you use the right equipment, you get around that problem really quick to the extent that you can technically. And then after that, it's just a matter of crossing the line twice. You listen to yourself enough that you stop hearing, oh my God, I'm talking, and you start hearing, oh, that voice is making this sound. And once you hear, oh, it's that voice making this sound, you don't have that problem anymore ever again.
- [43:25]
A
Oh, good. Well, hopefully that's fixed it for people. And of course there are lots, lots of brilliant things in the book the Pitch Perfect Author. But before we finish up, I did want to return to your sub stack because I was having a look at your substack and it includes some really interesting sort of things about you're doing this metal work, which is. Is really cool. And I mean, it felt coherent to me because I know you and you're a polymath and you're interested in so many things. So your substack kind of stood out to me as quite eclectic compared to, say, other writers who are going on substack to try and sell specific books. So is this a sort of deliberate marketing choice or is this a just a be an interesting person and you will attract people who are interested more generally?
- [44:12]
B
Well, I suppose it kind of winds up being the latter, but basically It's. I get bored easily, and if I'm going to be writing every week, I need to stay interested in it. One of the books I wrote when I was really sick, that's. That's not out on the market yet, but it is serialized on Substack is a guide to self education. And I talk in there. It'll be coming out later this year on the general market. It's called Reclaiming youg Mind and Autodidact's Bible. And I talk in there quite a bit about the illusion of discrete areas of knowledge. There is a level of learning at which the silos of information start to collapse together. Woodworking and writing have a lot to do with each other. A lot of the terminology we use in writing is pulled from the trades, especially woodworking and metalworking and gunsmith. As you begin to spot these connections between different areas of knowledge, it becomes really easy to slide between them for your hobbies, for your writing, for just your personal gratification. And as I've gotten older and also as I've gotten access to a little space that's not contained within a teeny little apartment, I have just gone with it, as I've discovered, hey, this thing is tangentially connected to this other thing over here. I'm like, oh, well, I'm going to go over to this other thing and see what's over. And it's tremendously creatively fertile. And since a lot of the things that our language connects us to have to do with trades and crafts and nature, it gets you out in the open air, which is really good for any writer, because sitting at a desk all day is worse than smoking three packs of cigarettes a day for 40 years.
- [46:02]
A
I love that.
- [46:04]
B
My curiosity is the chief feature of my substack, and it kind of works for me as a writer because it's also one of the chief features of my fiction. So.
- [46:12]
A
So, no, me too. And I was actually quite inspired by your substack, because I think this happens. You've been in the writing industry long enough. Substack has become the sort of trendy place to be now. And they're sort of going into specific niches very much like blogging did and then podcast has to be on a specific niche and. And all this. And of course, we know logically that marketing a book around the. You know, if you had just a substack on voice mastery, then for sure that would be a better marketing vehicle. But as you. How boring?
- [46:45]
B
It depends a lot on what you're trying to cultivate. As an author, if you're a single genre author with a very narrow niche and you really happy writing that kind of stuff, then a narrow column supporting it is not a bad idea. Especially when you serialize old novels once you got 20 or 30 under your belt. That's not a bad idea because you're trying to attract people who want one thing and want it regular. If I was to get a reader who wants one thing and wants it regularly and finds it, say, in my Clark Lantha mysteries, and then they hop over to my science fiction, oh, boy, are they going to be pissed if they're not there for my voice and they're just there for the way that I write a mystery plot. Not only are they, if they try to move over, not only are they not going to get what they're looking for, but they're going to start to doubt whether they can trust that they're going to get what they're looking for in my next mystery. Whereas if they're coming, at least this is my thought, is if they're coming to me through something where the multiplicity of what I'm doing is on display, whether that's this substack or whether that's what I used to do on the Everyday Novelist when I was podcasting that, or whether it's what I did with all the after shows on my fiction podcast when I was doing that, then they kind of know what they're in for. And the people that stick with me are more likely to be people who are in it for the experience of my voice and for my bibliography. That's what I've got to offer because I'm all over the place in terms of genre and subject matter.
- [48:27]
A
Yeah. Which is why I find you interesting. Yeah. So where can people find you and your books online?
- [48:36]
B
Well, you can find pretty much everything@jdsawyer.net I've got the weekly column at jdanielsoyer.substack.com@jdsoyer.net, there's a page with all of my podcasts on it, and there is also a store with all of my books on it. And of course, everything is available on Amazon and just about everywhere that the distributors take you.
- [49:00]
A
Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Dan. That was great.
- [49:05]
B
Thank you, Joanna. It was great to talk to you again.
- [49:12]
A
So I hope you found the interview with Dan interesting and that it gave you some more confidence around your author voice and things to try out yourself. Let me know what resonated with you. Please leave a comment on the podcast show notes@thecreativepen.com or on the YouTube channel. Or you can email me joannathecreativepen.com and please send me pictures of where you're listening or your favourite cemetery or churchyard next Monday. I'm talking about multi author bundles and anthologies with Jamie Ferguson, so happy writing and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening today. I hope you found it helpful. You can find the backlist episodes and show notes@thecreativepen.com podcast and you can get your free author blueprint@thecreativepen.com blueprint. If you'd like to connect, you can find me on Facebook and X at the Creative Pen or on Instagram and Facebook. Happy writing and I'll see you next time.