Describing an author’s voice is a lot like describing a small town’s charm, or the dominant flavor in a great soup. As writers we need to understand what voice is and be careful to build and preserve a clear and consistent voice our readers will recognize and appreciate. So, what is voice?
Voice is what makes your writing unique. It’s that quality that conveys your attitude, personality and character. When it comes to voice an author needs to be consistent. Editors cringe when the voice is fragmented or not evident at all. It’s easiest to get a handle on voice when we think about authors we’ve read over the years. What is the author’s essence that comes through, book after book?
Like you, I read lots and lots of different authors. I’m a huge John Irving fan. I read Stephen King and Ken Follett, and numerous others. I’d read more of Stieg Larsson if he hadn’t left this life way too soon. I binge-read everything that Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald and Wolfe ever wrote. From book to book I know how John Irving or John Steinbeck feels about cops and hookers, honest people and scoundrels. They don’t hold back on where their sympathies lie, or who and what pisses them off. If Harper Lee ever writes another book, I expect we’ll see the world she creates through the eyes of an innocent yet wise, straight-shooter like Scout Finch. The values will be there regardless of setting and plot.
One of the best sessions I attended at the recent AWP meeting in Boston was on the subject of an author’s voice. The panel, which was moderated by novelist Dawn Tripp, suggested that voice is one of those slippery terms that shares much with style and tone. Some say that voice is the author’s style. I say, I’m not really going to worry about a definition. The AWP panelists never got down to a hard and fast, agreed-to definition. One panelist said that Voice is the X-Factor in a piece of writing. Another described it as a book’s Sex Appeal. That’s sort of helpful, but not really.
I wrote notes and nodded in approval to nearly everything that was offered from the panel, but I didn’t come away with a clear idea on how I was going to apply this newly acquired wisdom to my own writing. Then came a conversation and emailed to-do list from a literary agent I have been working with. Suddenly striving for a consistent voice became Job #1 for my (hopefully) last revision.
Over the course of two major revisions my timeline changed from a linear, chronological one, to a new one that opens with my main character at age 40, rather than a high school boy. After fifty pages the story flash-forwards ten years, and then settles down into real time, other than bits and pieces of his childhood which are told through flashback.
Through all of the changes that really do make for a better, faster-paced story, my voice got lost in the shuffle. My agent considers the majority of the book, the part that takes place in coastal Maine, and the opening, where the main character deals with a friend’s suicide and works closely with a sympathetic newspaper editor, to be “beautifully written” and “written from the heart.” The part that takes place in a high-pressure corporate setting seems “shallow and contrived” by comparison.
Okay, this is a voice-fixing challenge up close and personal. What’s my goal? I want a consistent voice. Do I want everything to be shallow and contrived? Nope. I want the book to be packed with that written from the heart stuff. Fortunately, that’s a much smaller fix than going the other way. All I have to do is figure out what makes the lesser part of the book shallow and contrived.
In the corporate pages I was trying to convey huge amounts of information—scientific, geographical and political—in as few pages as possible. The result was two or three chapters that were mostly information dumps. My main character wasn’t relating to all of these facts and figures, he was mostly hearing about them, reading on-line data, and telling others. There was nothing visceral, even though the facts were horrendous. The reader wasn’t having much fun.
So, how to write the corporate piece from the heart? Simple, use the friend’s suicide and the terrible news of innocent lives being lost in field tests to send my main character on a mission to make the bastards pay. That really was the first stage of my story rocket. I didn’t need for my readers to get a masters degree in chemical crappola. So good-by information dumps. Now my main character sheds tears, throws up, runs for his life, hides, and then fights back. Bravo, now it’s from the heart from cover to cover.
All of this bears out the fact that our stories aren’t just written. They are shaped, reshaped, and enlivened as they evolve. Long live the iterative pain-in-the-ass process of revision!
Till later,
Ken
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