Finding a Voice

 

I heard some writing advice lately about how to find your voice:

Imagine you’re telling the story to a captive audience at a dinner party. The voice will naturally follow.

I can’t remember where I read this advice, but the dinner party analogy doesn’t always work for me.

(Everyone seems to attend more dinner parties than I do. I don’t remember the last time I was captivated by anyone at a dinner party.)

The dinner party situation leads to a very particular, oratory sort of voice, and would not be the right choice of voice for many tales. What other scenarios might we imagine in order to find an appropriate voice?

What else is there?

CONVERSATIONAL VOICES

1. Grandfatherly figure in front of a fire

Middle grade novels are sometimes written in this way. (I’ll get back to you with examples once I can think of any.)

2. One woman confiding in another woman

I think much women’s fiction reads like this. In order for the narrator to get into the really personal details, there needs to be a confessional tone.

3. Client to Doctor / COUNSELOR / Psychotherapist

To clarify: the doctor/counsellor/psychotherapist may not actually exist as a character or as a named narrator in the story, but when hearing the voice, you might imagine a character explaining things in the detail generally only offered to someone whose confidence is ensured by law.

The Other Place by Mary Gaitskill springs to mind. (Published this year in the New Yorker.)

4. Chatting to a mate at the pub

This would achieve a masculine voice. I think of Frank Sargeson’s short stories here, or the stories of any number of masculine writers who penned stories in the first half of last century, when it became okay (trendy) to write stories in your own vernacular.

5. Your Grandmother’s Tea Party

The short stories of Penelope Lively

6. Kids in a Playground

7. Workmates Around a Water Cooler

8. Two Aliens Hovering Over Earth

9. A Fly on a Wall, Commenting on Proceedings, or those two old men from the muppets

Now I’m warming to the topic I realise the list is endless.

(There seems no need to make a list of ten simply because primates are blessed with ten digits, so there you have it: a list of nine.)

WRITERLY VOICES

The distinction between ‘conversational’ and ‘writerly’ may seem a bit odd, since the nature of a story is that it has all been written down. But do you imagine the story as heard or as read? Sometimes the plot of the story provides a reason for a writerly voice. Writerly voices tend to use more formal and correct grammar, include more description and other, more overt literary devices.

1. Diary/journal/letter

An epistolary work, in other words. Next question to ask: Was it ever meant to be read by anyone else? This may affect the voice.

2. A Character Has Written Your Novel (first person point of view)

If a novel is written in first person, I have to believe, as reader, that the viewpoint character is able to write a novel. Not many people can write a novel, so if a generally lazy school kid writes one, this is a leap in itself — a suspension of disbelief. But the character chosen to write the novel must be at least literate, and ideally of a reflective disposition. This narrative choice offers other interesting options up though – such as unreliable narration.

In Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller, the entire story has been written by an unreliable character, and it is up to the reader to decide how much of what she says may be true.

3. An Unseen Somebody Has Written Your Novel

This person isn’t you, exactly. The narrator is not a character in the novel either – they know too much.

Apropos A Distinctive Voice

We hear a lot about voice, to be sure. The gatekeepers of publishing are always looking for the next fresh voice, which they only know when they read. I do think that the best voices are also the most divisive, in that they create strong fans in some readers, and strong aversions in others.

Alan Bennett writes in a diary entry from 7 May 2000:

I’m coming to the end of Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s novel supposedly based on his friend and associate Allan Bloom. I’m never entirely comfortable with (and never unaware of) Bellow’s style, which puts an almost treacly patina on the prose — designer prose it is, good, tasteful and self-evidently rich.

So: narrow your niche, widen your audience.

Tune your voice, widen your readership.

And now, to leave you with a Johnny Farnham earworm for the rest of the day…

You’re the voice, try and understand it!
Make a noise and make it clear!
Oh Oh Oh Ohoooo
Oh Oh Oh Oh Ohoooo

he he he he heee *beevis and butthead type sniggering*

Write like you write, like you can’t help but write, and your voice will become yours and yours alone. It’ll take time but it’ll happen as long as you let it. Own your voice, for your voice is your own. Once you know where your voice lives, you no longer have to worry so much about being derivative.

- from Chuck Wendig: 25 Things Every Writer Should Know

*

My first writing job was on a TV show called Get a Life. … I was frustrated with the results, but it occurred to me that there was no solution as long as my job was trying to imitate someone else’s voice. The obvious solution was to find a situation where I was doing me, not someone else. The major obstacle to this is your deeply seated belief that “you” is not interesting.

- from Charlie Kaufman, here.

 

Related Links: Does Your Voice Change?; Voice in YA Fiction.