What happens to your creativity when you're in pain or sick, and can you ever get it back? How can you find and sharpen your author voice? J. Daniel Sawyer talks about voice mastery, writing with chronic pain, and building an eclectic author business.
In the intro, leaning into your Strengths and deciding what you want to achieve by the end of the year; and Bones of the Deep by J.F. Penn.
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J. Daniel Sawyer is the author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book for authors is The Pitch-Perfect Author: Voice Mastery for Writers.
You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.
Show Notes
You can find Dan at JDsawyer.net or on Substack.
Jo: J. Daniel Sawyer is the author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book for authors is The Pitch-Perfect Author: Voice Mastery for Writers. So welcome back to the show, Dan.
Dan: Hello, Joanna. It's good to be back.
Jo: 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. When I saw your book, I was like, “I can't believe we haven't talked for that long.” For anyone who doesn't know you, tell us a bit more about—
Dan: 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. 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 got worse and worse, putting me in more and more pain.
I hit a point around 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 again. Then suddenly, what I was sick with went acute. I went to the emergency room, and they're like, “Oh, if you don't have surgery in the next 24 hours, you're going to die.”
So I went and got surgery, and there was one bed in the whole state. There was a three-hour drive to get to the one that was available in the time window. I get there. They wheel me into the OR. I wake up afterwards, and I realise that I'm not in pain, and that I had never felt that before in my adult life.
Jo: Wow.
Dan: Just the walls of my whole reality came caving in. 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.
Jo: I think a lot of people will be interested in this. A lot of writers have chronic pain issues or chronic health issues, and yours sounds like it was a sort of down, down, down, down—and then more of a sudden up.
Maybe just talk a bit more, because I feel like a lot of the time people are too hard on themselves about, “Oh my goodness, if I can't write fiction, is it the end of everything?”
Dan: 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. I assumed it was just really bad stress that would pass with time.
So I had the despairing feeling, because when you write fiction, it tends to occupy a central place in your self-concept. I'd also been through very tough times before, so I was like, “Well, got through that then, maybe I'll get through this now.”
I just made sure to keep writing something, because at least you keep the discipline of the words flowing. There was still thought going on, so I would have ideas for novels and write them down. 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 it would be 10 months before I could do that again.
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 paralysed 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 for creativity.
That doesn't necessarily mean that if you're sick or injured, or you've got chronic health problems from birth, that you can't write. It just means that it really is one of the factors that goes into shaping your experience of the world, that goes into shaping the way you process things and they come out on paper.
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 going to get darker.
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.
Jo: Well, don't say that to a dark writer like me. I have a sense of impending doom the entire time.
Dan: Well, there's a cognitive sense of impending doom that you get if you're modelling systems and you see how things can go wrong.
But the sense 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.
Jo: That is really interesting. You mentioned there you are reacquiring the ability to write fiction, or that's what you've been focusing on. You also talked about having to reboot the business.
Dan: 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.
Pay is 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.
Getting paid for the weekly column is quite nice, and a 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 nonfiction books, but it gives me a good place to announce new releases, to promote book bundles, Kickstarters, and all that sort of thing.
It's a 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 the email list as well.
Jo: You used to do a lot of audio. That's how we connected way back, like 17 years ago, I think, when we first connected.
Dan: 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.
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.
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.
Jo: I know. So you mentioned there bundles and Kickstarters and things, and we reconnected because I bought a StoryBundle, and your new book, The Pitch-Perfect Author, was in the StoryBundle, which was part of why I bought it anyway. So let's get into the book and what's useful. Let's start with—
Dan: 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.
When all of that combines, it creates in the reader's mind an emotional fingerprint, a gestalt that says, “This is a Joanna Penn book. This is a Dan Sawyer book,” or whoever.
When you bring the focus down further, author voice is fundamentally an auditory phenomenon. 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 Asimov's Guide to the Bible, and you read Isaac Asimov's The Robots of Dawn, they're all Asimov. You can hear him talking to you through all of those different venues.
So 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 of 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 sing-song you were hearing corresponded to ideas. 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 you've read and heard, because that's how you develop your voice.
There comes a point at which all the various influences on you, and who you are, and how they pass through you, crystallises into something definite.
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.
This is why new writers who revise a lot tend to revise their voice right out. 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.
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.
Jo: 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. 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.
You mentioned there some patterns. You talk about music. So what are some of those angles? In the book, you have different chapters on all of these things, but maybe just talk more about some of the elements.
Dan: 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. 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. When 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 to the way you want to do it.
So 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 that you guys have a different way of speaking.
When you speak of a difference between one thing and another, you talk about how this car is different to that car. And Americans say this car is different from that car. It always marks out a British writer versus an American writer.
There are 100 little things like that. They happen not just between major countries, but within regions in every country. 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 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 analyse poetry or to write poetry, you learn something called scansion.
How a poem scans is—what 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 metre, a specific number of lines, and a specific rhyme scheme, and the metre is iambic pentameter.
An iamb is “bum-bum,” if I remember right. It's the rhythm of the heartbeat. It's “bum-bum, bum-bum, bum-bum.” And you can hear it in the name of the metre, the iamb. The iambic pentameter is 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 iamb is “bum-bum”—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 iamb has the sound of the heartbeat. It's a very reassuring speech rhythm.
The trochaic is a much more rapid one—it 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 metre.
You're going to find that you will 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.
Once you know what it is, you can start to use it on purpose. Quite a lot of developing your voice is learning to recognise these latent, existing qualities in the way you communicate, and sharpening them up and making them conscious tools that you can pull in whenever you want.
Jo: On the one hand, there are a lot of technical words there that are really interesting, and maybe poets know a lot more of those words than most other writers. The book is really interesting in that way—kind of learning about these different things.
I guess I want to reassure people as well that, as you said, some of this can be unconscious. So often 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.
So many of these things we almost know instinctively, just from reading so much.
Dan: Oh, yes. From reading so much and talking so much, and again, from the way you acquire language. That gives you a template in your head of what sounds right.
Language is inherently musical. So if you've ever listened to a song—especially one that wasn't recorded by a professional, but someone singing in a church choir, or your kid practising for a recital, or you practising 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 are 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 that and rewrite so that it feels good, or feels great, which is even better.
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 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 and the author does something with the language that makes the whole piece fly. So you want to be paying attention for those too, because those you'll commit without intending to.
When you're reading back and you find those, you want to make note of them, because that's you seeing where you are at your strongest with your voice.
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.
Jo: Then there's a difficulty around where the line is, especially when you're an early-stage writer. Many people work with editors, and you mentioned the problem of revising your voice away, and that may also happen if you're working with an editor.
Like you said, as a Brit, I work with an American editor, Kristen, 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.
Dan: 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.
Jo: Mm.
Dan: One of the things they would talk about with editors is when you've got a story editor or a beta reader who says, “Hey, something here 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.
As a writer, 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, is a really important skill to develop.
That's regardless of whether the feedback has to do with voice or plot or characterisation or whatever. Some editors are really good at back-tracing and actually spotting the real problem.
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.
Jo: Yes.
Personally, I think it was around book five when I really felt, “Okay, now I see what my voice actually is.” Like, it had to be five novels, and then I was like, “Okay, now I know.”
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, that kind of thing.
Dan: Yes, and that's actually about right. If you look at writers with a big catalogue, 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. Listen to them until you are sick of them, and then listen to them until you start to like them again.
Jo: That's a lot.
Dan: 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?
Jo: Not really.
Dan: Okay. Have you seen the Monty Python Spam sketch?
Jo: Yes.
Dan: 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.
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—they keep it going on long enough that everybody gets there.
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 goddammit it really does.
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.
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.
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 legs, 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.
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 an echo of the voices that are in your head.
That's why music students practise 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.
Jo: I mean, I think that's terrifying, because I just don't want to listen to my books over and over again. I think it's very interesting that you think it could shortcut that voice process.
Staying on audio—since we last spoke, I have done a lot of my own audiobook narration, mainly for nonfiction, but also my short stories. I haven't done my full-length fiction.
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.
Because that's kind of strange.
Dan: So what's happening is that there's a much wider latitude of things that work on the page than what works with voice. The reason is that with voice, all of those rhythmic elements 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 a really close-in feel—I'm trying to scrunch my face up—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 the sensuality of the body.
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. 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. When you're reading, 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.
Then the rhythm comes in hard, and you suddenly realise that—hey, that conveys the thought, but it doesn't feel right. So you wind up retooling a bit. There's also occasionally tongue twisters, which you have to work your way around. So that's why that happens.
Jo: Then I guess another thing—I hear quite often, people say, “Oh, I don't like my voice.” 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.” I wonder—
Dan: Yes, for sure. There are a few things that go into that. One is basic self-loathing. A lot of people carry it around. Most people learn 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 exercises. That's something you fix with —
Jo: Therapy.
Dan: Psychological work, or spiritual work, or that kind of thing.
Jo: Yes.
Dan: 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, 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. That's because all the consonants are being filtered out by the wall in between, but the bass is being resonated through. The 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.
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.
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. It is tuned for singers to sound as good as possible without any other help from the sound engineer, which means that 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 quickly, to the extent that you can technically. 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.
Jo: Oh, good. Well, hopefully that's fixed it for people. And of course, there are lots of brilliant things in the book, The Pitch-Perfect Author.
Before we finish up, I did want to return to your Substack. I was having a look at it, and it includes some really interesting things. Like, you're doing this metalwork, which is really cool.
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.
Dan: Well, I suppose it kind of winds up being the latter, but basically it's that I get bored easily. 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 not out on the market yet, but it is serialised on Substack—is a guide to self-education. It'll be coming out later this year on the general market. It's called Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact's Bible.
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 gunsmithing.
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.
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 there.” It's tremendously creatively fertile.
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.
Jo: I love that.
Dan: 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.
Jo: Me too, and I was actually quite inspired by your Substack. Because I think this happens when you've been in the writing industry long enough.
People are going into specific niches, very much like blogging did, and then podcasting had to be on a specific niche, and all this.
Of course, we know logically that, marketing a book—you know, if you had just a Substack on voice mastery, then for sure that would be a better marketing vehicle. But, as you say, how boring.
Dan: Well, 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're really happy writing that kind of stuff, then a narrow column supporting it is not a bad idea.
Especially when you serialise old novels, once you've 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 regularly.
If I were to get a reader who wants one thing and wants it regularly, and finds it, say, in my Clarke Lantham 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 I write a mystery plot, then 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 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 Every Day 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.
The people who 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.
Jo: Yes, which is why I find you interesting.
Dan: Oh, why thank you.
Dan: Well, you can find pretty much everything at JDsawyer.net.
I've got the weekly column at jdanielsawyer.substack.com. At jdsawyer.net there's a page with all of my podcasts on it, and there's also a store with all of my books on it. Of course, everything is also available on Amazon and just about everywhere that the distributors take you.
Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Dan. That was great.
Dan: Thank you, Joanna. It was great to talk to you again.
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