Last night I started reading a new novel. Now, this is not a beta read for a friend, or an ARC (Advance Review Copy) but a published and successful novel by a writer I enjoy and follow on social media.

Of late, and by that mean the last two years, my pleasure reading has been rather limited. After signing with the Virginia Kidd Agency I pretty much devoted all the time I could spare to working on my writing to the detriment of past time reading.

A side note here: back in the early days of this blog you can find book reviews; I have decided to not do those anymore. I think there is a question of conflict in striving to be both a writer and reviewer. As I have friends who are professional writer it would be difficult to avoid the issue of bias and there is always the potential to poison working relationships with fellow writers, editors, and so on. If I discuss a book by title and author here it will be positive because it’s something I thoroughly enjoyed and want to share. I will not be posting critiques or criticisms of those titles that do not work for me.

Anyway, back to the subject. So here I was reading this book, enjoying the story, but damn it I could not stop the impulse to look at the prose and want to change it around. I could not stop the desire to ‘fix’ it.

People in my writing group have said that there is a distinct style or voice to my writing, but I have always had a hard time seeing it. I think I can see vague outlines of my voice now. It’s certainly there in sentence construction and how I think they are best assembled for dramatic effect. This is what I was doing with the novel. Looking at a sentence and saying to myself, ‘oh, that would be better with those clauses reversed.’ This inner editor voice is making it difficult for me to drop into the story and forget myself. It is also making me doubt my feedback to writers in my critique group.

How much of what I am saying is good critique and how much is just me trying to force my voice on things?

Dang, I don’t think anyone warned me of this when i set out to write.