Your Voice
Developing Your Authorial Voice
By Julie Tollefson
Longtime fans know what to expect from Nicole Baart: lyrical prose, relatable characters, tough situations, and above all hope. Her 12th novel, Where He Left Me, will be out in November. Here, Nicole shares five tips for finding and refining your own unique voice.
1) Listen to your heart — One theme ties Nicole's work together, whether it's her contemporary fiction, a new adult love story, literary fiction, mysteries, or domestic suspense: “At heart I want a redemptive story,” she says. “We have so many awful things that we have to deal with on a daily basis. And I write mysteries, so there’s a dead body or missing person or some sort of tragedy. But I want that story to arc toward justice, toward hope, toward redemption. I believe that there’s still beauty in the midst of all this brokenness.”
She’s been lucky, she says, to work with editors who understand and support that vision.
Not that it’s always easy to pull off.
She wrote her 10th book, Everything We Didn’t Say, during the COVID-19 lockdown, when finding beauty among brokenness became more challenging. All five of her children were home, and her family, like so many others, struggled to deal with the resulting isolation and losses.
During that time, Nicole says, “I wrote a very bad first draft of that book. I gave it to my agent and she was real quiet for about three weeks. Finally, when she reached out, she said, ‘we need to talk.’”
The verdict? Nicole needed to rewrite the book.
“It didn’t adhere to the standards I set for myself,” Nicole says. She knew, though she didn’t want to admit it, that her agent was right.
“I deleted almost 70,000 words of that manuscript and started again,” Nicole says. “I put away my computer and went back to notebooks and I went back to craft books and I plotted.”
Then pandemic restrictions eased.
“I got to rewrite it when the world was coming alive again, and I think that really helped,” she says. “I love how it ended up. A good lesson to learn, but not fun at the time.”
2) Aim high(er) — “With every book I write I’m always trying to make it better, to bring something new to the table that I haven’t done before,” Nicole says.
At the beginning of her career, she knew she wanted to write but didn’t have a firm grasp on the mechanics or craft of writing. Writing meant being creative.
Now, “I’ve refined my voice in that I know the work that has to go into it,” she says. Before she begins drafting a new book, Nicole spends about a year conceptualizing characters, point of view, and story structure.
“There’s a lot more intentionality behind it than there ever was,” she says.
Along the way, her goals for her work have shifted.
“I think when everybody starts out — and I felt this way, too — you want to win an Edgar award, hit the New York Times list, something really big or flashy,” she says. “That’s really kind of quieted down for me. I love what I do. I love telling stories, and I want to continue to reach an audience that resonates until I’m 85 years old. Those other things would be wonderful, and I still hope for them, but it’s a quiet hope.”
3) Do what you need to do to let creativity flow — For Nicole, that means nailing the narrative structure before she begins writing. Now drafting novel number 13, she’s weaving together multiple points of view, nonlinear storytelling, multiple timelines, and a historical aspect that she’s never attempted before.
“I like to experiment,” she says. “I’m really into unique narrative structures. I very rarely tell a book in a linear fashion. I like lots of different narrators. That honestly is one of the trickiest parts for me, and I have to get that down before I start drafting.”
Above all, she says, keep going.
“Get there every day and put something down. My goal for myself is 1,000 words a day, but if I only get 100, I’m okay with that,” she says. “I don’t believe in writer’s block. There’s always something you can do to move forward creatively. Write a character sketch. Outline a plot. Pick up a craft book and teach yourself something new.”
Twice, Nicole has taken ghostwriting gigs that required her to churn out 60,000–70,000 words in a matter of weeks, assignments that challenged her and meant she had to set aside her own voice to serve the needs of the work.
“It was a little like playing dress up,” she says. “I really did enjoy it.”
She also learned an important lesson for writers: Take the work seriously. No excuses.
“I didn’t have the luxury of writer’s block,” she says. “You do it because you have to. I think that’s the approach I have to writing now. This is my job, and I have to do it.”
4) Show readers who you are — When Nicole started writing 20 years ago, author websites and a presence on social media were low priorities. Publishers thought readers would find what they needed on publishing websites. But a few years later, everything changed and, though she feels like she’s spent the last 10 years catching up in digital spaces, Nicole’s social media accounts (Instagram, Facebook, Goodreads) are filled with books and lovely photos, reflect the same themes found in her writing, and give readers a window into her personal life.
“I’ve really tried to be intentional about talking about my books and my love for books and also showing my audience a glimpse of myself because that’s what I appreciate in other people’s sites,” Nicole says.
When she reads and loves a book, she seeks out the author on social media. “It’s so fun to read something about them,” she says. “It brings me so much joy.”
She pays attention to accounts she admires and tries to bring similar vibes to her own accounts.
5) Never stop learning — One of the perks of being a writer is the job requires you to cultivate curiosity, from researching the intricacies of the law as it applies to your plot to diving into the social and cultural aspects of 18th century England to visiting Greece to add authentic details to your setting descriptions.
Research is as much a part of writing as the act of drafting, as is reading widely. Nicole’s list of inspiring writers includes fellow MWA Midwest member William Kent Krueger (including his “beautiful literary pieces that take my breath away and make me cry”); Tosca Lee (“her prose just makes me swoon”); and new work by Sarah Crouch (Middletide), Amy Jo Burns (Mercury), Charlotte McConaghy (Wild Dark Shore), and Kimi Cunningham Grant (These Silent Woods).
“I think everything we read influences our writing,” she says. But she notes that she reads outside her genre while drafting to avoid undue influence creeping into her own prose.
For a break from the solitude of writing, opportunities for learning from community abound.
“Come to Thrillerfest. Come to Bouchercon,” Nicole says. “I think getting plugged in is so important. There is always somebody you can get advice from and somebody you can help.”