One of the challenges of a big writing project is finding a voice for it. I've blogged about what voice is here, but for now, the first question, of course, is the narrator is a character in the story, an internal narrator, or the story is told by an external narrator.

In my post 17 Questions to Ask Your Novel, the first three go a long way to forming how the narrator tells the story, which is what Voice is all about.

Who is telling this story?
Why are they telling it?
Where do they stand in time and space, relative to the events and settings they're narrating?

Either way, the voice of the narrative will be formed by who the narrator is, and so by your thinking about characterisation-in-action. But even when you have found a voice for the narrative, how do you keep it strong, and consistent, in the long haul? Characters change - change is the motor of storytelling - but how do you make sure that the voice or voices change convincingly, and don't just lapse into the bland default that you've taken such trouble to get away from?

So here are some specific questions to ask yourself about the voice/voices of your story. They apply to narrative but also to dialogue, and to any kind of novel but also to creative non-fiction such as memoir and travel writing. You could use them to focus your ears towards hearing the voices before you start the first draft, but they're equally useful - perhaps more so - diagnostically, later in your work, when you're beset by doubt, or get feedback that the voices aren't working.

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Aspiring writers are sometimes paralysed by the fear that they'll be using other people's ideas, words, stories, characters. It might be the simple desire to behave ethically, and a fear of outright plagiarism or even of being sued for breach of copyright. Or it might a more internal sense that your writing will be inauthentic, second-hand, second-rate, if it has whispers of someone else's work in among your lines.

It's an understandable worry, not least because our Western tradition of art lays such stress on originality. And yes, outright plagiarism does matter ethically, as breach of copyright matters legally (though I'm always surprised by how many writers don't understand the difference).

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Painters have paint, choreographers have bodies, sculptors have bronze, musicians have chords and tunes. Writers have sentences. Not words, sentences, because a word which isn't in relation to another word can only be something, not do anything. In a letter Flaubert once described himself as "Itching with sentences", that is, with chains of words connected up to make a meaning. Flaubert's itch wouldn't be cured until he got the sentences - the meanings - out, and heading towards readers.

I do love reading good sentences, and try to write them, and I know from the response to my sixty versions of exactly the same sentence that many who read this blog do the same. I've talked about the wonders of the long sentence, and thought about what happens to the storytelling in a sentence when you rearrange its elements. And now a couple of enjoyable and useful new books which are all about sentences, and the voices built into them, have landed on my doormat, so I thought I'd have a seasonal round-up.

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I normally try to talk about myself on this blog only when it might help to illuminate something for others, but I was asked to write a piece about why I write for the forum of the Royal Literary Fund Fellows. It occurred to me that it might amuse or, better still, get you thinking about your own reasons for writing.

I write, I used to say, because it's the only respectable reason I've found for not doing the washing up. Then my first novel was published, and writing became another kind of washing up: not an escape from the business of life, but part of it. Writing, as we all know, is a frustrating, unpredictable and generally badly paid thing to build your life round, but that's what I seem to have done.

I've always had a fierce drive to create things, but that doesn't answer the real question of why I write, rather than making photographs or singing or cooking or acting, all of which I've taken seriously at times.

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One of the things that happens, when you blog about Creative Writing PhDs, is that people ask you for advice - including the whole business of applying for the thing in the first place. As you'll know if you've read that earlier piece, a CW PhD is at once delightfully broad and free-form, and - well - nightmarishly broad and free-form. And, as ever, what gets said about other kinds of PhD often doesn't apply, or only applies in a mutatis mutandis sort of way, which wouldn't matter except that it can be very difficult to know exactly which bits of the normal way of doing things you need to mutate, and how.

So, for what it's worth, this is what I said to someone who asked me about their PhD proposal.

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... you put one thing in an essay - your agent says another thing in passing - you remember one of the lives you nearly chose to follow in one of those yellow-wood moments before you decided for something else; your agent says a second thing because of what you said; you remember one of the things you most loved when you were ten; you realise that another childhood love was a place which has been knocking on the doors of your brain for a couple of years now ...

- and you have an idea - the first idea for months - perhaps a year or two (it's astonishing how teaching and parenting and a novel that won't work suck up your creative brain) ...

- it's not a short story idea -

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The big, Tony-winning hits of the broadway writer Maury Yesten are at opposite ends of the scale: Nine, which works beautifully as a chamber opera, and the vast Titanic. So my ear was caught, the other day, when I heard him talking about the difference. Clearly he doesn't scorn the dancing sets and known movie story (Nine is based on Fellini's 8½). Nor does he reject the need to appeal to non-English-speaking tourists (the economic lifeblood of Broadway as it is of the West End). After all, spectacle has been part of the theatre ever since theatre existed, and I've no doubt that the first time an Ancient Greek director decided to use a real props, or - gasp! - a third actor, or a bigger chorus, the purists were muttering into their retsina that civilisation was doomed.

But, as Yestin said of Nine, "You just have one character who says to the other, 'Why did you bring me to this beach?', and you've saved yourself $250,000 of sand."

Lucky us prose-writers, on the other hand: we never need to spend a quarter of a million of anything - except possibly coffee and brain-cells - on our writing.

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This is the last of of three Highly Commended entries to the This Itch of Writing 500th Postiversary Competition. I liked this post because it made me laugh and it's probably more true - though arguably less detailedly helpful - than all the other competition posts put together with the rest of the whole darned more-than-six-years' worth of This Itch of Writing. Having said that, if you want to bag yourself a Highly Commended, then grossly flattering the competition organiser in the second paragraph is no bad strategy either.

"A blog post, 500 words at most, which is helpful, interesting or illuminating for other writers".

The temptation is simply to provide a link to emmadarwin.typepad.com and add no more than a perfunctory "what she said".

But that would be cheating.

OK then.

Something helpful:

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Dear Jerusha: I have to write a scene in my work-in-progress but the subject matter horrifies me. It’s a crucial scene - I can’t omit it or just allude to it, but I find it difficult to research or think about and I’ve been avoiding drafting the scene for a very long time. Do you have any thoughts on how best to approach writing it?

Darling, you're not alone. One well-regarded writer delivered the really-truly-finished-totally-this-time-long-overdue manuscript to her editor, only to get a phone call: "I love it, it's wonderful. Just one thing. That blank page 327, which just says 'Big Row Here'. What was that going to be?" And the answer was that the row was crucial to the story, but it was in and around an issue that was, personally, very difficult for Ms Writer. She'd done the right thing and decided she was willing to go there, but when it came to the crunch - or, rather, when it came to p.327 - she couldn't do it. She'd do it next time. In revision. In re-drafting. When she'd done everything else...

You know that working with material which is potent for you, as I was talking about to my last correspondent, is the key to getting your best writing out of you, but that doesn't mean it's always fun. Emma has a short story that she wants to write, but it's entirely built round one of her own personal horrors, and two years in she still hasn't psyched herself up. So how do you get yourself to write it?

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Last time I blogged about prologues, I did so under the title "Why you probably shouldn't, why maybe you should", and I do stand by that. A lot of the prologues I see are trying to do something which would be better done another way. At the worst, they're trying to solve a problem with how the rest of the book works, and even if they manage to do that, they only do so by swapping in another problem. So I'd suggest that your first reaction to wanting a prologue is to see if there's a better way to do what the prologue's trying to do..

But then I dropped in on Jane Wenham-Jones's pilot for a new YouTube series, based on her hilarious and also excellent Wannabe A Writer books. In Episode Two, the lovely - and seriously bestselling - Katie Fforde talks about how the reader "locks on to" the first character they experience, like a baby bird imprinting. (The other episodes are well worth watching, too.)

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