Friday, October 30, 2009

Voice.

A strong narrative voice creates a feeling in the reader that the writer knows what he or she is talking about. It creates trust.
--James N. Frey


Voice is the quality of the narration, regardless of whether it's told in first or third person. Is the voice you choose to tell the story casual and friendly, or is it dark and scary?

Tone is the atmosphere of the book. Tone can be threatening, as in a thriller, or light and airy, as in a chick lit book.

Voice is a combination of many elements and involves many things such as word choices, sentence structures, and the mood and feel of a book. Tone is a strong indicator of voice. Some writing voices are said to be poetic, gritty, quirky, or sensual.


The best way to discover your voice is to write and keep writing. Try your hand at different genres and experiment with tones. Try to write passages in a very poetic voice, then attempt to be gritty and dark. If one seems to feel right, keep working on it. Many writers will note another author's voice before they will recognize their own.

Points to Ponder.
  • One important method of innovating comes from choosing and developing your plot, in deciding what you are going to say. The other method arises from deciding how you are going to say. Your writing style, or your voice, reflects your personality, your beliefs, your concerns. In writing, you are commenting on life, the human condition. What do you believe? What do you want to say?

  • How you say something is just as important as what you say. Critics today bemoan the elevation of style over substance, but style is critically important in powerful and innovative writing. In fact, much of the innovation in horror in recent years has come in the area of style. While Stephen King introduced a style that was immediate, concrete, accessible, and down-to-earth, post-King authors are introducing literary, postmodern, experimental styles.

  • Giving your characters attitude and passion and finding ways to show these two personality-forging qualities will cross half the distance of the voice problem. To help cross the other half, work hard at adding the following to your character dictionary: individual use of diction and syntax, vocabulary, metaphoric language, idioms, sayings, and dialogue tags.

  • A powerful way to develop the personality, voice, and full depth of your characters is to use metaphoric language that directly stems from all the factors that underlie our attitudes, beliefs, and values. As you build your character dictionary, you can look over the words and create similes and metaphors that directly reflect that character's experience. The customers were somewhat more consciously stylish, more aggressively au courant, and generally a shade better looking than the crowd in Paradise. But to Tony the patterns appeared to be the same as they were in Santa Monica. Patterns of need, longing, and loneliness. Desperate, carnivorous patterns. Dean Koontz.

  • Each of the elements of the definition of the novel has an effect on the psychological reading of the novel. For example, narrative voice is social, and so the psychology of the novel is a psychology of relationships, even if the novel is about an isolated loner such as Robinson Crusoe.

  • Narrative voice implies a teller, a listener, and other beings who are being told about and implies, therefore, relationships, and every reader comes to every novel with plenty of experience that bears upon the reading of the novel.

  • The qualities of the voice are automatically present--is it warm, friendly, knowledgeable, soothing, charming, intelligent, self-obsessed, droning, bombastic, mechanical, silly, beside the point, suspect?

  • The reader perceives and reacts to these qualities instantly, without thinking. If she likes the voice and feels comfortable with it, she may not actually think at any time, except to process the characters and events of the narrative, but such processing isn't exactly cogitating.

  • A novel that is a comfortable fit with the reader, whose characters and narrative voice the reader is drawn to and enjoys, whose jokes the reader laughs at, and whose insights the reader understands and appreciates, arouses a sense of friendliness. With such a novel--let's say Persuasion--the reader's responses feel harmonious and agreeable.

  • If the reader doesn't like the voice, though, she starts to think, should I keep reading this, or should I stop?

  • With a novel such as Vanity Fair, for example, where the tone of the narrative voice is very cynical and where the characters may be hard to like, she withdraws a bit from the experience of the novel and concocts an argument about whether to go on and for how long.

  • Of course, a reader may begin by disliking Vanity Fair but be won over in the end to liking it very much. The novelist has many pleasures to offer--the unusual pleasure of the exotic, the intellectual pleasure of historical understanding, the humane pleasure of psychological insight into one or more characters, the simple pleasure of entertainment and suspense, the exuberant pleasure of laughter and trickery, the guilty pleasure of gossip, the tempting pleasure of secrecy and intimacy, the confessional pleasure of indignation, the rigorous pleasure of intellectual analysis, the reassuring pleasure of identification with one's nation or people, and the vicarious pleasure of romance.

  • Each time a character speaks, he is likely to speak in a way that differs from every other character and also from the narrator because distinctiveness is one of the main methods an author has to organize his characters so the reader can keep them straight. The writer with a tin ear is at an organizational disadvantage compared with a writer with a good ear.

  • To dare to write about many different characters, and to keep them straight without the help of actors, is in some ways a bold endeavor. It imposes several duties upon the author: order, in the sense that the readers don't want to get the characters mixed up, but there is also the progress of the plot. Characters in dialogue are required to move the story along. If they are just sitting around chatting meaninglessly the characters are demonstrating.

  • The voices of the characters are also required to seem authentic. The captain of a whaling ship must talk as a captain of a whaling ship would talk--with characteristic vocal mannerisms and with typical knowledge.

  • Depending on his role in the novel, though, a character is also required to have something interesting to say that simultaneously deepens the reader's knowledge of him, deepens the reader's knowledge of the other characters, deepens the reader's understanding of the story, and best of all, deepens the reader's knowledge in general.

Bibliography.



  • Christie Craig and Faye Hughes, The Everything Guide to Writing a Romance Novel;

  • Meg Leder, Jack Heffron, and the Editors of Writer's Digest; The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing;

  • Elizabeth Lyon, Manuscript Makeover;

  • Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel.

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