Do you have a little voice that talks to you when you’re writing?

I do. And my little voice always knows best. And sometimes that little voice says, “Uh, I don’t think so, girl.” Or, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Sometimes the voice is subtler and doesn’t even speak, but just shakes its head. (Yes the voices in my head have heads and faces too and mostly look like Clive Owen or Daniel Craig, which is why I sometimes get distracted. And that’s when I really need to listen to the voice. Or the voice’s head shake as the case may be.)

Because the subtler the voice is, the more important the message it’s trying to impart. And that message is often something simple like, “Are you sure this is working? Wouldn’t it be better if you did this or that?”

That voice was like a humming in the background when I wrote the first draft of the book that became The Mockingbirds and it was telling me something was just slightly off. It wasn’t til I finished the first draft that I knew what in fact was off. (The book was actually missing the Mockingbirds themselves, go figure!)

Now, as I am writing the sequel, I had a similar feeling all through December while noodling around in the early pages of the manuscript. I even made it as far as 13,000 words until I hit a road block. Something just wasn’t working and the voice was shaking its head again. (Daniel and Clive both were.) So before I went full-steam ahead and finished the entire draft, I stopped, stepped back and listened.

After two weeks of NOT writing and of outlining instead, I figured out what the problem was. Better yet, I figured out how to solve it.

So now the voices are saying, “Yes! Keep going! You got it!”

Thank you, Voices. And, let me just say, you look good…