Leslie Edgerton - Finding your voice : how to put personality in your writing

Finding Your Voice

by Les Edgerton

Blue Skies Books, 2012

Finding Your Voice: How to Put Personality in Your Writing . Copyright 2003 by Les Edgerton. Manufactured in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published by Writer's Digest Books, an imprint of F +W Publications, Inc., 4700 East Galbraith Road, Cincinnati, Ohio 45236. (800) 289-0963. First edition.

Published as an ebook by Blue Skies Books, 2012. Second edition.

Visit Les Edgertons blog site at http://www.lesedgertononwriting.blogspot.com/ for information on the author.

08 07 06 05 6 5 4 3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Edgerton, Leslie.

Finding your voice: how to put personality in your writing / Les Edgerton.

p . cm.

ISBN 1-58297-174-9 ( alk . paper)ISBN 1-58297-173-0 ( pbk .: alk . paper)
1. Authorship. 2. Creative writing. I. Title
PN147.E28 2003
808'.02dc21 2002191020

Ebook cover design by Bo Goff.

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This book is dedicated to all those who were in my psychic gang back in public school. You know, the kids teachers called the Under-achievers. All us poor souls who didn't live up to our promise (whatever that was) or our potential. Which, translated, meant all of those poor slobs who didn't fit their mold. The daydreamers. The ones who didn't know from kindergarten that selling insurance or being President was their shining goal. That's the gang I was forced into... and I'm glad I was.

It left my imagination in working order and I trust it did yours, too. After all, it's our reward for being the daydreamers.

A very special note of gratitude to a hulking mouthbreather I only remember as Waldo in the fourth grade in Freeport, Texas, who used to viciously bully my skinny scared butt in front of the other kids. I began writing little humorous vignettes about Waldo {he may not have found them humorous .. . ) and passing them around to my schoolmates, and that had two major effects on my life. Waldo quit bullying me because of the resultant public derision and I found out the truly awesome power of the written word and became a writer. Wherever Waldo is today (prison, I hope) I say, Thanks, creep. I think he learned that old nursery rhyme about sticks and stones just isn't true. Words can hurt you.

They can also help.

A lot.

Just ask Waldo.

Les Edgerton lives with his wife Mary in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he writes full-time and teaches creative writing online for Phoenix College and for a private class. He co-teaches a class on Story Beginnings with author Jenny Milchman for the New York Writers Workshop. He formerly taught online for the UCLA Writer's Program. For three years, he was the Writer-in-Residence for the University of Toledo and for one year for Trine University.

He has two daughters from a former marriage; Britney, who works in the computer industry in Louisville, and Sienna, an artist who lives in Indianapolis and who just gave Les his first grandson, the cute-as-all-get-out Logan. Les and Marys son Mike lives in Ft. Wayne and attends college for filmmaking and is a barrista at Starbucks and has one of those prized black aprons. Les writes short stories, articles, essays, novels, nonfiction books, and screenplays. His fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, O. Henry Award, Edgar Allan Poe Award (short story category), Jesse Jones Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Violet Crown Book Award, among others. One of his screenplays was a semifnalist in the Academy Awards Foundation's Nicholl Fellowships and a finalist in the Writer's Guild's Best American Screenplays competition as well as the Best of Austin competition. His existential novel, THE BITCH, was named the Best Thriller of 2011 by Preditors & Editors, and it was also a nominee for Spinetingler Magazines prestitious Best Novel Award of 2012 (Legends category).

I've written all my life (in my case, that began just about the same time as dinosaurs were put on the endangered list) and have also been privileged to teach several hundred writers of all levels and abilities as an online teacher of creative fiction writing in the famed UCLA Extension Writer's Program and these days for other venues. Even though I'd enjoyed success myself as a writer and teacher, I was much like most of my studentssearching for a secret that would guarantee for my work the light of publication. I hunted along all the canyons and woodlands wherein such a secret might lie ... workshops, writing magazines, how-to books, queries to published authors I met... and so on. Even though I'd been published, I was still convinced that others met success without as much blood and sweat as I had. There just had to be some kind of secret Tim O'Brien and Kurt Vonnegut and Barbara Kingsolver weren't sharingwere holding close to the vest, so to speak.