Guest Post : Voice
"Sometimes it’s better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness." Terry Pratchett
Guest Post by the brilliant Myfanwy Fox, poet and science fiction enthusiast
What is voice?
Authorial voice is the overall texture – vocabulary, tone, pacing, quirks – of a piece of writing. If the voice is uncertain or slips, the reader will almost certainly lack confidence in the story – a bit like when a novice magician takes the stage and you feel embarrassed on their behalf as they fumble their tricks. Hold any illusion, don’t let it fall.
One of the things that confused me when I first started writing was a social media discussion about voice. What do we mean, as writers, by voice? A poet explained he was sure of his voice. It turned out that all his poems were in the same form. Form is not the same as voice though it might chime with it.
Many writers switch between fiction genres (popular and literary), poetry and non-fiction yet their voice is consistent within any piece – and across many books in the case of series authors.
Within a short story, novel or memoir, characters also have voices. We want those character voices to bring the characters to life, to be recognisable and distinct, adding depth to the story. Again, each character needs to be true to their individual, recognisable voice.
In most genre novels, the story and characters are paramount so the author keeps their narrational voice minimal, with no frilly vocabulary, entertaining (or not) quirks, digressions and showing off. The narration aims to share the story without taking centre stage.
If you’re an experienced writer, you’ll already know your voice and how to wield it: hurrah. If you’re starting out, play with voice. Fan-fiction is fun practice. Try on the voices of authors you admire – or hate. How do they construct their tones? Poetry can also be useful: it stretches vocabulary, sentence structures and voice.
Now for some examples.
I’ve only read The Constant Gardener once because I was a sobbing mess by the end. (I could not watch the film; I fled ten minutes into it because I knew too much.)
John le Carré was a master of understated elegance and sometimes barely suppressed rage at injustices in his prose, despite being shelved in the thriller genre section.
A rusting steel door stood closed against them and Banda hammered on it in a commanding manner, leaning back on his heels and rapping four or five times at calculated intervals as if a code were being transmitted. The door creaked open partway to reveal the haggard, apprehensive heads of three young men. But at the sight of the surgeon doctor they reeled back, enabling him to slither past them, with the result that Woodrow, left standing in the stinking hall, was treated to the hellish vision of his school dormitory given over to the Aids-dead of all ages. Emaciated corpses lay two-a-bed. More corpses lay on the floor between them, some dressed, some naked on their backs or sides. Others had their knees drawn up in futile self-protection and their chins flung back in protest. Over them, in a swaying, muddy mist, hung the flies, snoring on a single note.
John le Carré
I am in awe of this appalling, vivid description. You’ll note he tells us that the lads have “haggard, apprehensive heads” because he is speeding us to the main message, the reason why they are haggard and apprehensive.
Read the passage aloud. Feel the words on your tongue, the pacing, the long and short sounds, phrases and sentences. It’s pure poetry. (Reading aloud is always useful.)
Le Carre is not afraid of complex vocabulary and expects his readers to cope with it, but his sentences are always so perfectly constructed that he is easy to read.
Next, here’s a snippet from Inventing Elliot (Graham Gardner) a YA (young adult) story loosely inspired by Orwell’s 1984. Elliot, badly bullied at secondary school, reinvents himself rather too well when he has a chance to change schools.
Abruptly [Richard] jumped down from the wall. Elliot thought he was going to come up to him as he’d done before. He held his breath, fighting the tremor that threatened to seize him. His pulse banged inside his skull.
But this time Richard held his distance. ‘My God, Elliot, look at you! Not a flicker. You’ve got it made. You’re going to rule this place when we’re gone.’
Elliot’s breath escaped between his teeth. His shirt was wet on his back. His stomach knotted and unknotted. […] Now they were waiting for him.Graham Gardner
Simpler vocabulary, no clutter or frills, fast paced and emotive.
One way to avoid authorial narration is to write in first person, letting your main character(s) present their story. Except of course, then that character’s voice has to be shiny and consistent and perfect for the task.
I blogged for Ann about why I love The Murderbot Diaries (Martha Wells) and that included the first paragraph of the first novella, but story openings are a special case, so here’s a section from well into Network Effect (the fifth published instalment).
Murderbot could easily be YA but its concepts and humanity soar: it’s a great crossover.
I forgot where I was going with this, except that ART apparently has no concept of fairness, or minimum level of response, because the sense of ART’s almost full attention was overwhelming. Then the door opened and Ratthi walked in with Amena right behind him. ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded. ‘[ART] said you’re trying to copy yourself for a variable viral what?’
So I had to tell the humans my plan and then they had to argue and talk to each other about it and ask me questions like was I feeling okay.
Then half an hour into this fun process, Thiago woke up and they all had to explain to him what was going on. It was during this part that I realized Amena was (a) missing and (b) ART had cut me off from her feed.
I found her in a small secondary lounge area near Medical. As I walked in she was saying, ‘—because it thought you were dead. It was so upset I thought—Oh hey, you’re here.’ [….] ‘ART should know how you really feel about it! And this is serious, it’s like—you and ART are making a baby just so you can send it off to get killed or deleted or—or whatever might happen.’
‘A baby?’ I said. I was still mad at Amena telling ART about my emotional collapse behind my back. But I really wish ART had a face, just so I could see it right now. ‘It’s not a baby, it’s a copy of me, made with code.’
Martha Wells
It’s also worth noting that Wells has written other series too, and the feel is quite different in each. They are good but don’t own my heart like Murderbot.
Here’s a very different first-person voice from Piranesi (Susanna Clarke). Piranesi is a masterclass in creating an entire universe explored only through the eyes of one observant but quite possibly unreliable narrator. It’s a superb cross-over of genres too, morphing effortlessly from fantasy to mystery to romance to police procedural and probably more.
Do trees exist?
ENTRY FOR THE NINETEENTH DAY OF THE FIFTH MONTH IN THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS
Many things are unknown. Once – it was about six or seven months ago – I saw a bright yellow speck floating on a gentle Tide beneath the Fourth Western Hall. Not understanding what it could be, I waded out into the Waters and caught it. It was a leaf, very beautiful, with two sides curving to a point at each end. Of course it is possible that it was part of a type of sea vegetation that I have never seen, but I am doubtful. It’s surface repelled Water, like something meant to live in Air.Susanna Clarke
With just one character’s point of view (POV), the reader’s vision is limited to that character’s understanding. Like form in poetry, any limitation can be a surprisingly powerful way to build. If we know too much too soon mystery falls away and a text is less exciting.
(Ann wrote more about Piranesi here)
Multiple POVs can work but there are suggested rules about “head-hopping” (switching POV mid-paragraph, for example) for a good reason: the reader may be confused. Confused or irritated readers may give up.
Remember what I said about being confident and slick like a good performer so readers can relax and trust your illusion?
Of course, rules are there to be broken and many skilful masters head-hop for a pastime (I’m reading A Suspension of Mercy (Patricia Highsmith) and she loves describing one character’s thoughts on another and then the opposite as she dissects her victims).
But it’s generally safer to leave a break or start a new chapter to switch POVs. Even with multiple POVs most writers keep the number to a few, especially for first person narration.
But talking of masters breaking all the rules, George Saunders was awarded the an Booker Prize in 2017 for his experimental multi-voice novel Lincoln in the Bardo. It’s a fantasy imagining the President’s grief after the death of his young son, Willie. It is told – described – by a selection of the numerous ghosts (from eras recent and ancient) that haunt the cemetery, along with articles of the day, and very weird in parts as well as richly poetic. Here there is a visitation:
XXIX
They entered in lengthy procession.
[hans vollman]
Each of us apprehending them in a different guise.
[the reverend everly thomas]
Young girls in summer dresses, brown-skinned and jolly, hair unbound, weaving strands of grass into bracelets, giggling as they passed: country girls, joyful and gay.
Like me.
Like I had been.[mrs. Abigail blass]
A swarm of beautiful young brides arrayed in thinnish things, silk collars fluttering.
[hans vollman]
Angels, attentive to strangely corporeal wings, one large wing per woman, that, upon retraction, became a pale flag, tightly furled, running down the spine.
[the reverend everly thomas]
Hundreds of exact copies of Gilbert, my first (my only!) lover. As he had looked on our best afternoon in the carriage house, gray horse-towel wrapped carelessly about his waist.
[roger bevins iii]
George Saunders
You’ll either love it or hate it. I’m not a patient reader for the sake of it (as you may have noticed) but I found it utterly enthralling, rather to my surprise.
Finally, a Terry Pratchett snippet (from Men at Arms) purely for my own love of the passage.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
Terry Pratchett
And the Vimes Boot Index is now officially part of Jack Monroe’s campaign against poverty, backed by the Pratchett estate.
Myfanwy Fox -
Biologist now running a charity shop, interested in ecology, psychology and communication. Poet and writer of science fiction.
Check out her website here - Fox Unkennelled
This is my contribution - from Pictures of Perfection, one of the Dalziel and Pascoe series from Reginald Hill. The chapter headings are all from Jane Austen's letters. The voice is fascinating and, once one is aware of how the novel ends, significant.
"CHAPTER ONE
‘How horrible it is to have so many people killed! – And what a blessing one cares for none of them!’
It is the Day of Reckoning.
The sun is shining. The inhabitants of Enscombe will tell you the sun always shines on Reckoning Day, meaning it hasn’t rained much above a dozen times in the last twenty years. But this year they are right. After a week in which March seemed always looking back to January, suddenly it has leapt forward into May, and even in the shade, the air hangs warm and scented with blossom.
The village lies still as a painting, an English watercolour over which the artist has laboured with furious concentration to fix forever one perfect moment. What problems it must have posed! How to capture the almost black shadows which the sun, just past its zenith, lays on the left-hand side of the High Street, without giving a false Mediterranean brightness to the buildings opposite? And then the problem of perspective, with the road rising gently from the Morris Men’s Rest at the southern end of the village, widening a little beyond the Post Office to admit the cobbled forecourts of the sunbright bookshop and café opposite the shadow-dark gallery, then steepening suddenly into a breathless hill as it climbs alongside the high churchyard wall over which headstones peep as though eager to see how the living are doing in these hard times. Nor is the curiously slouching tower of the church easy to capture accurately without making the artist look merely incompetent! And that distant pennant of kingfisher blue which is all that is visible of Old Hall above the trees beyond the church, were it not better with an artist’s licence to ignore it as a distraction from the horizon of brooding moorland which is the picture’s natural frame?
But it is that blue pennant which explains the village’s stillness, for it betokens that the Squire is hosting his Reckoning Feast. And, more important still, for any daubster can paint a house but only the true artist can hint the life within, the pennant signals that behind this picture of still beauty there is warm pulsating humanity always threatening to burst through.
Now there is movement and the picture starts to dissolve. A woman comes hurrying down the shady side of the street. Her name is Elsie Toke. She is a slight, rather fey-looking woman in her forties, though her face is curiously unmarked by age. But it is marked now by anxiety as she looks to the left and right as though searching for someone. She catches a movement ahead of her on the sunny side of the street. A figure has emerged into the light, not very sensibly dressed for this place and this weather in combat fatigues with a black woollen balaclava pulled over his head so that only the eyes are visible. And crooked in his right arm he has a heavy short-barrelled gun.
He has not seen the woman yet. His mind seems boiling like the sun with more impressions and ideas than it can safely hold, a maelstrom of energy close to critical mass. He recalls reading somewhere of those old Nordic warriors who at times of great crisis ran amok. Berserkers they called them, responding to some imperative of violence which put them in touch with the violence which lies behind all of nature. He had found the idea appealing. When all else fails, when the subtlest of defence strategies prove futile, then throw caution to the winds, go out, attack, destroy, die!
The woman calls, ‘Jason!’
He becomes aware of her for the first time. She is hurrying towards him, relief smudging the worry from her face. He registers who she is but it means nothing. To a berserker, all flesh is grass, waiting to be mown down. If any thought does cross his mind it is that he has to start somewhere. He shifts the gun from the crook of his arm to rest the stock on his hip. The expression on her face is changing now. She opens her mouth to speak again, but before the words can emerge, he fires. She takes the shot full in the chest. She doesn’t scream but looks down in disbelief as the red stain blossoms and the sour wine smell of blood rises to her nostrils.
The berserker is already moving on"