Evolution of a Voice
One of the most “educational” things I’ve taken from tackling the Strange & Deadly project has been seeing how much I’ve developed a voice and style in the last seventeen years.
I wrote the first draft of my debut novel in 2009. It was the first novel I ever finished, and it wasn’t very good.
I knew it wasn’t very good back in 2009, so I spent a year educating myself on craft, rewriting as I learned, and working with critique partners. (I also spent that year heavily learning how the industry worked, writing + polishing my query letter, and researching agents.)
I got my agent in October 2010, then I was fortunate enough to sell the original Something Strange & Deadly to HarperCollins shortly after. Hooray! My career began because of that book, so I owe it...
Well, everything.
I also owe everything I have now to that stubborn 2009 Susan who stuck with a book she knew could be better with enough time and effort.
As many of you know, Something Strange & Deadly didn’t “meet expectations,” as they say in the industry.
In other words, it didn’t sell.
The sequels especially went nowhere.1
And look: I don’t blame my publisher for the series’ failure. No one can make readers buy books, and HarperCollins not only published the entire trilogy when they could have easily cancelled due to low sales, they actually gave the books a second shot with a cover repackage after Truthwitch performed well.
Alas, no one could make fetch happen. The repackages didn’t save the Something Strange & Deadly series, And a few years ago, the sales were low enough annually for the books’ rights to revert back to me.
Cool, I thought. I’ll take these three finished books and the prequel novella, and I’m throw them up on Kindle Unlimited.
Fast forward to winter of this year: I still hadn’t gotten around to the “throw them up” plan. Mostly because I knew I wanted to at least give the books a light edit to address some sensitivity issues. And a lovely editor (hey, Kate!) even went so far as to comb through the books for me to help me find areas I could improve.
So in March, I opened the Word document she sent me for book 1…
And this was the face I made immediately: 😱
To be clear: that face was for my own writing. Not Kate’s minor notes.
Because oh no. Oh no. THAT was my opening sentence? My opening paragraph?!
It didn’t even read like a Susan Dennard book. The sentences were clumsy, my main character did whatever the plot dictated without any real cohesion in her motives or emotions, and all the characters were two-dimensional stereotypes.
Oh no.
So I started from the first sentence, thinking I’d just go line by line and try to improve the prose.
Well, that plan derailed before I was even finished with Chapter One. Because by the end of Chapter One, I had a new Eleanor with a completely different voice and personality. She suddenly had different motives, far more depth, nuance, and calculation to her character, and whoopsie! That meant the plot had to change in turn…
So over the next three weeks, I wrote the first two thirds of a completely new book.2
Thus was Strange & Deadly born.
And thus was one of the most fun books I’ve ever written born. I had so much FUN writing that book. Just pure joy, even when I inevitably got stuck in the final 40% and spent two months in a quagmire. Even the usual “quagmire” of my intuitive process became a joy.
New Eleanor was just a total blast to hang out with.
If you plan to read the new Strange & Deadly (coming out soon! Details to come!) and you ever read my debut Something Strange & Deadly back when it was in print, you probably will just say, “Oh, okay. Same story. Cool.” Because you won’t remember enough to recognize how much I changed.
The vibes with necromancy and 1876 Philadelphia are the same, after all. And the same character names populate the book (Eleanor, Daniel, Jie, etc.). I still send Eleanor to many of the same broad locations like the Centennial Exhibition or a dynamite factory. And I do still have the same bones of magic built in (necromancy! ghosts! animated corpses!). And oh yes, even the opening premise is the same: her brother doesn’t arrive on a train.
But if you’ve read the original SS&D recently and were to then compare it to the new S&D, you’d say, Holy smokes, these are completely different books.
You’d also—more importantly—point to the new S&D and say, Oh yeah, that’s a pure Susan Dennard book right there.
The Humanness of Human “Generation”
So what is a Susan Dennard book? And why do I care about defining one?
As mentioned at the top, I started thinking about this a lot after I dove into the reboot.
But I’ve also been thinking about it a lot because we now exist in a world where we are inundated with AI writing. It’s in the emails we get, the articles we read, the books we pay for. Sometimes authors disclose their use, and I frankly respect their honesty. But most of the time, people just slip in AI-generated prose and hope the rest of us don’t notice.
Fine.
Whatever. I can get angry that people are laying claim to a “stolen valor” they haven’t earned.
Or I can just keep my eyes on my own page like I’ve always done and work to make my writing so clearly HUMAN you know exactly what you’re getting when you open a Susan Dennard book wide.
I jump genres a lot. For better or worse (mostly worse, let’s be real3) I can’t seem to stay in one lane.
This makes sales reps miserable. Especially since I’m also always mashing genres together, so they can’t easily pitch the book when they’re out talking to bookstores.
Erm, it’s cozy horror mystery romance? And yeah, it’s funny too.
Uh, I guess it’s gaslight fantasy with some horror and steampunk thrown in?
My love of jumping around is not going to change. Ever. And I’m okay with that. I am what Becca Syme would call an Island, meaning I write whatever the eff I want and I do not give a single, solitary bleeeeeep if there’s a market for it or not. (My poor, poor, long-suffering agent.)
But I think this is a good thing in today’s world. I am leaning into the ME-ness of my storytelling. And ME likes a lot of genres, especially when they’re smashed together.
I mean, I’d love to see Claude try to write a 1960s-vibes cosmic-horror, closed-door mystery with an ensemble cast, heavy themes on mortality, and a monster that spits out fortunes printed on tiny tickets before it consumes your soul.
Claude will write something, sure. But it won’t be what I write.
And people come to me for what I write.
This brings me to the idea of a “writer’s DNA.” You could also call it a “fingerprint,” I suppose, but I like DNA because of the incredible complexity, detail, and scale contained in an elegant, predictable structure. DNA can be flawed, it can mutate, it can even lead to terrible pain...
But my DNA is my DNA; your DNA is your DNA; and AI just can’t copy it no matter how much it might try.
SIDE NOTE: I can already feel some of you adding the word yet to my last sentence. And sure. Maybe one day, ChatGPT will be able to create a book that reads exactly like something I would have written.
But then, all the more reason for me to lean into my ME-ness now. All the more reason for me to give you all the things I write now, and all the more reason for me to write, write, write in the most Susan Dennard way possible. Then, when the future comes and Gemini4 can copy Susan Dennard, you’ll actually know right away that it’s a copy.
Because you’ll be able to look over at me—the REAL HUMAN BEING who loves writing with every Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, and Guanine in her double helix—and say, Nope, Sooz didn’t write that book. I know because I follow the human, and this isn’t on her list of titles.
My Writer DNA
So finally, to end this, I want to share the DNA I’ve (so far) come up with for a Susan Dennard book.
And I want all of you to start thinking about your DNA. What are the unique “tells” that mark your writing? What are the story ideas or sentence structures you fall back on again and again?
Here’s what I have on my list thus far—in no order and with no organization at all:
All my characters have a very distinctive “superpower” which directly flavors how they see a scene, how they act in a scene, and what their thoughts look like directly for the reader to read.
Winnie (from The Luminaries) knows the Nightmare Compendium by heart. So even completely unrelated scenes and setups get compared to nightmares and their adaptations/ecology. Metaphors also rely on this imagery, and her obsessive knowledge saves her life many times throughout the series.
Eleanor (in the new Strange & Deadly) is a deeply devoted fan of Shakespeare. Much of her life is framed through her knowledge of the plays and what the many characters do in myriad situations. And, in a few instances, her knowledge is literally what saves her life (I won’t spoil how that works!).
Iseult has a literal “superpower” in her Threadwitch magic (from the Witchlands series), but her more character-based “superpower” is all her Nomatsi training that allow her to control her emotions, control her feelings, and rely on logic to move through the world.
I will wound, kill, and permanently scar my characters. SORRY, readers. But it’s true.5
I always end my stories with hope. Even the really intense and brutal ones have a note of hope at the end.
There are always moments of humor. Like, I love me a joke, running gag, and witty banter to lighten the shadows.
I love a “thinking spiral.” Like...this is maybe the most distinctive thing about my writing: I will take phrases that came before, then I will repeat them as italicized thoughts for my character. This shows where their brain is spinning/chewing while also keeping key details at the front of the reader’s mind.
Some characters do this more than others—it depends on their personality. Winnie and Eleanor are more “stressed-out” types, so they call back especially often.
I love a call-back for resonance.
If you go read the romance scenes in Witchlight between Aeduan and Iseult, you’ll see that many of the sentences are “mined” from early books. I reframed and rearranged the sentences, of course, but I want the reader to feel the resonance of their romance coming full-circle.
I LOVE including in-world fables and framing.
The Luminaries books have prologues told in a fable-like voice.
My project, Sector 26 (which is a weird post-apocalyptic dystopian horror with WWII vibes) is framed with in-world fables in the prologue. And those fables are then woven throughout the books, foreshadowing the tale (and its outcomes) ahead.
The Witchlands is truly rife with in-world fables and songs. And almost all of them end up foreshadowing the overall plot.
All of the Murder Quartet books and The Executioners Three use poems, Shakespeare, or nursery rhymes as spooky scaffolding for the plot.
SECRETS HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT. This is actually probably the most SOOZ thing, and sorry if I sound a bit arrogant here—but it’s also the thing I think I’m really good at: I hide the most important details right where you can see them. But they mean nothing to you. And yes, sure—any good mystery will do that. But I’d like to think I take it up to eleven.
Go back and re-read the Witchlands after you’ve finished Witchlight. You’ll see it’s all there. Every single tiny hint was planted in the first half of book 1. It might be hidden in a song or a random line by a wayward prince about Paladins and their big swords...But it’s all there.
Friendships! Epic, epic friendships and non-romantic relationships. Even in my more romance-focused books like The Executioners Three or the upcoming Four & Twenty Blackbirds (and the rest of the Murder Quartet), there are still vital friendships and non-romance relationships on the page.
I write slow-burn romances built on yearning.
The “fastest” romances are in my standalone mysteries, and even then, it’s all about the aching yearn...
I like to repeat things in pairs or triplets for rhythm and emphasis.
So I might say, She was running, running, but it was never fast enough.
Or, I slammed, slammed, slammed my heel into his face.
I really like to write about sleeping gods and/or awakening gods.
I love me a tortured immortal trickster character.
I write books that are “harder” to read. I love dense world-building, and I love to complicate, complicate, complicate a plot for maximum twistiness.
But there are plenty of readers out there who love this too. So they know they can come to me to find it.
I’m sure there are so many more pieces that make up my unique DNA.
In fact, I bet there are many things my readers would point out that I have never even noticed!
But the point is that the list is long. And it’s a list I am actively trying to LEAN INTO.
You might pick up a sci-fi by Susan Dennard one day, but you can look at the above list and know most of those things will show up in the tale. Or you can pick up a cozy horror mystery romance and much of it will be there too.
To wrap this up: At the end of the day, I’m tired of being afraid that AI will come for my job and my readers.
And I’m really freaking tired of seeing AI-writing in every newsletter or reddit post or social media caption I read.
But I can’t make other people not use an LLM to produce theirs words. All I can really do is lean into my own Sooz-ness as I generate with my own brain each word that appears on this page.
The characteristics that make me human are what also make my output human; the DNA that defines my genetics is what also defines my prose and storytelling.
And I urge all of you to do as I am. Find what makes your writing exclusively yours and do more or it.
I truly believe it’s the best way to stake a spot in this confusing world of art and creation, and I truly believe—in turn—it’s our best weapon for fighting back.
💚 - Sooz
A Darkness Strange & Lovely was my first experience with a book not leaving warehouses or reaching stores until weeks after its release. So my sales were unsurprisingly abysmal during the book’s most crucial period experience. Yes, I said my FIRST experience with a book not leaving warehouses. Welcome to publishing, friends. Learn to roll with the punches, or you will only make yourself miserable.
SORRY, EDITOR KATE!! You gave me notes on three books and a novella that I ultimately tossed entirely! 😬
It’s hard to build an audience if you don’t stay in a consistent lane. BUT THIS JUST MAKES ME LOVE ALL YOU DEN-NERDS EVEN MORE FOR STICKING WITH ME!!!
Hahaha, let’s be real: it won’t ever be Gemini.
I know, I know: fans of the original Something Strange & Deadly want to know if I’ll end the trilogy the same way as I did 15 years ago. And the answer is that I DO NOT KNOW YET. The story has veered so much already, I can’t guess what will come!
I love this so much. And it's fun to see the areas where I think our DNA overlaps (word repetition and **yearning**) and where mine is its own thing. Viva la humanite!
My fav Sooz DNA is giving each Witchlands main character their own book & somehow all their plots cross at certain points. I’m someone who loves knowing every detail about someone and a very specific item or something. It’s one of the unique things I can say is a Sooz book!