Happy New Year! And what a better way to start than tackling one of the knottiest issues in writing: voice.
We were born with a voice. So why is it many manuscripts get rejected because an agent/editor says there’s no voice? Then we authors go off frantically searching for our voice as though we’d misplaced it somewhere.
The truth of the matter is that you have a voice. It’s just that, often, an author’s voice doesn’t work for a number of reasons. Either the voice is so faint it can’t be heard, or it’s unsettled and can’t be pinned down, or it’s inappropriate to the subject matter, or it’s just plain grating on a reader’s nerves.
Getting out of your own way
Really, all this searching and floundering about can be resolved by simply getting out of your own way and sharpening what you were born with. Thaisa Frank and Dorothy Wall, authors of Finding Your Writer’s Voice say “You don’t have to be comfortable with who you are to let your presence suffuse your writing, nor do you have to know yourself in the sense of being psychologically sophisticated. But you do have to be honest with yourself and your own sense of language and storytelling.” Okay . . . but how to begin to be honest, and how do you hone something you’re not sure you have a grasp of?
First, analyze your natural voice
Study your writing. Pull out old journals where you may have confided something just for yourself and no one else’s eyes. What kind of voice comes through when you’re just writing for yourself? Are you angry? Full of self-pity? Sad? Frightened? Sarcastic? What kind of phrasing do you use? Short unadorned sentences, or long sentences that riff with asides, explanations, or descriptions? What kinds of words do you use—scholarly, plain, poetic?
This next step may be hard for some of you. Have a writer friend(s) you trust study your naked writing. Ask him/her/them to describe the voice coming through. And even touchier, ask him/her/them how do they feel about that voice? Is it comforting? Does it make them feel cheerier? Depressed? Anxious? Wanting to spend time with that voice?
Also, write fast and often. Do a series of quick automatic writes. Perhaps one a day for a month. Subject doesn’t matter. Time yourself. But always, always, write fast. Then put those writings through the same analysis that you did your journal writing—give it to others for a perspective on it other than your own. The point of all this is to get yourself out of your own way and write the raw you—not as you assume an author should.
Finally, pull out some writing that you polished for publication. Send it to a couple of readers and put that writing through the same process. Is your raw voice coming through? Have you hidden it? Is a different voice coming through?
But wait! Shouldn’t there be different voices?
The point of the above exercises is to determine your starting place—your natural voice. Of course, you will need to mold that for the kind of writing you are doing, creating multiple voices. If you write for a wine connoisseur magazine and also for a family weekly tabloid, the voice should be different for each. But you need to know from whence you start.
And starting requires some preparation. In addition to all the preparation you may make about plot, inciting incident, characters, and setting, you need to think about voice. To do that:
- Don’t write like you think an author should. Write like yourself, but . . .
- write with intention. That is, know what kind of voice you want to project. Do you want to be intimate, distant, professorial, homey, sly, cynical, jaded, silly? You may discover that this changes as you go along, but stop and think about it before launching in.
- Know who your narrator is and how your narrator feels about what is going on. Who is telling the story and how close that person/object/animal/abstraction is to the action is one of the most important decisions you’ll make about voice—even if the storyteller never appears in the story.
Every story has a teller
Even if you want your narrator to be invisible, little signals of your presence can creep in. What are those signals? If you’ve analyzed your writing you will recognize your phrasing, word choice and presence or absence of lyricism. And more—do you have a habit of using outdoor settings? Of whispering? Of not revealing facts until absolutely necessary? Of letting sentences trail off . . . . All this is fine! That’s you. But is it a deliberate voice? Or simply your default? It should be a decision you have made with intention.
Take some time to study two or more works by the same author to see how masterful authors change voice, but still retain a personal stamp on the piece. I suggest comparing the openings of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and Fahrenheit 451. You’ll find metaphor and similes in both, and sensory detail. You’ll find beautiful language in both, interiority, and foreshadowing. But the voices are different.
When I’m deciding about the approach I want to take with voice, I find it is helpful to envision my narrator. I want to know how she/he is telling me the story. This is especially important if the narrator is not in the story, because it’s so easy to forget his/her presence when the plot gets revved up. So before I start, I want to know if my storyteller is leaning over my kitchen table and relishing telling me this story. Is he drinking beer and leering at me? Or is my narrator my sweet next-door neighbor relating all that happened in a fluttery voice? If my story is in first person past tense, how old and what kind of person is my main character now, when he/she is relating this story? Or if you’re writing a first person POV but the narrator is not the main character (as in The Great Gatsby), what part is this narrator going to play in the story? And am I hearing it for the first time as the reader does? Or has this narrator stopped by my house before to relate this tale to me while he was mowing my lawn? This kind of visioning of who is channeling my story not only helps me to pinpoint a narrator’s voice but helps me be consistent.
More about voice to come!
Come back next month for a follow-up to this post about three important elements of voice: attitude, authenticity, and authority.
In the meantime, I’ll be doing a program that touches upon some aspects of voice for the Ponte Vedra FWA chapter on Saturday January 23rd at 10:30am via Zoom. It’s called “Sound, Shape & Sense: The Work of Our Words” and is open to all writers. Check here later in January for the details: https://fwapontevedra.blogspot.com/.
Recommended reads on voice:
- Finding Your Writer’s Voice, by Thaisa Frank and Dorothy Wall
- Writing Voice from the Editors of Writer’s Digest
- The Art of Voice by Tony Hoagland
