Do you want to improve your writing, quicken the pace, and engage your reader? You can by avoiding one of the most common mistakes made by writers: the use of author’s voice.

You haven’t heard of author’s voice and you wonder why writers need to avoid it? Well, imagine you are reading a suspense thriller and arrive at an exciting scene, but suddenly the story departs from the action and dialog and launches into a lengthy description about the surroundings, followed by an explanation about why what is happening is happening, and concludes with drawn-out backstory telling you unimportant and unrelated details. You want to scream, “Get back to the story!” You skim over the boring part and search for the action and, when you don’t find it, you close the book. The boring part is author’s voice.   

Where does author’s voice originate? Many writers create a profile and backstory for the main character and some of the minor characters when the idea of a story begins to take shape. In other words, the author creates a prior life for the characters and uses it when writing the book.

In Editor-Proof Your Writing, author Dan McNair warns, “Don’t be an information dumper.” It isn’t necessary for the reader to know everything the writer knows; information dumped into the flow of the story stops the pace and frustrates the reader. It is up to the writer to weave the character’s profile and backstory into the book or let the reader fill in the blanks, which sometimes works even better.

Another glitch is that it is easier to tell the story than it is to show it, but that doesn’t work for the reader who wants to visualize the story as it unfolds, much like watching a movie. Yes, movies often employ the use of voiceovers, in which a disembodied voice tells the audience vital information, but if the voiceover rambles on for several minutes, the audience loses interest. The same holds true for books. Sometimes author’s voice is necessary to redirect the story, but writers need to contain it to one or two sentences, not paragraphs, and certainly not pages.

Even memoirs have the potential of being information dumps. Narrators need to include only information pertinent to the story and leave out the irrelevant. For example, I recently tried to read a memoir in which the narrator included every tiny, boring, insignificant detail about her dull, uneventful life. Of course, if she were writing her memoir exclusively for her family and friends, they would probably be interested, but I stopped reading.

How does a writer eliminate author’s voice and prevent the reader from closing the book? The author needs to incorporate descriptions, explanations, and backstory into the action and dialog and not be afraid to use the delete key. Like actors in a movie, the words and actions of the characters communicate the story. Writers discover that when they delete the author’s voice, their writing improves immediately, and their book becomes a page turner.