I muttered something relatively innocuous and vague, and stewed about it all the way home. Because while I’ve put a considerable amount of thought into the voices of my characters (especially when I’m writing first-person), I haven’t ever thought much about my voice.

So I did what I usually do when somebody comes up with a question like this: I did some googling. After an hour or so of browsing through articles full of solemn (and mostly contradictory) advice on the vast importance of voice, I did what I should have done in the first place. I pulled out my trusty Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, which defines “voice” as “a rather vague metaphorical term by which some critics refer to distinctive features of a written work in terms of spoken utterance…assessed in terms of tone, style, or personality.”

Which begs the question: if “writing voice” is simply a vague and convenient metaphor, why do so many people seem to think it’s vastly important?

Answer: I have no clue.

So I did some more thinking, and what I thought about was the foundation of the metaphor. That is, one’s actual spoken voice.

Most people I know don’t spend a lot – OK, any – time developing their speaking voice. They just talk. The voices they have are a combination of genetics and life experience, of the accents (regional, cultural, ethnic) they heard growing up and the ones they’re living with now. And all those voices change over time, depending on lots of things (not least of which is whether the person has a horrible cold or not).

Yet most of those spoken voices are easily recognizable. When I pick up the phone and hear “Hi!” or “Hello” or “Hey,” I know right away which friend or family member is on the other end of the call. None of them had to work at having a unique voice. It just happened.

The people who do work on their speaking voice tend to be either those who have some particular difficulty with speaking, like a speech impediment, or those who are doing something more advanced with their voices than most people need to – actors, singers, public speakers of all sorts. All of whom, I point out, already have a perfectly good voice for doing normal, everyday talking. They don’t need to start doing exercises to improve their speaking voices until they want to project to the back row of the theater, or play a character whose speech is different. They certainly don’t need to “find their voices.”

At this point, I went back through some of those articles on writing voice. About half of them offer specific advice on “developing your writing voice.” The top three items always seemed to boil down to 1. Read a lot, 2. Write a lot, and 3. Do/don’t imitate other writers (about half the advice-givers thought that imitating a bunch of different voices would help; the other half thought it would just muddy the waters). In other words, general stuff that most writers and would-be writers are going to be doing anyway, the same way most people talk and listen in the course of their normal lives.

The only real difference I can see is that there’s a large contingent of folks out there who are really worried about “developing their writing voice,” in a way that normal people do not worry about developing their speaking voices. Like the beginning writer who came up and asked the question that started me off on this post.

It therefore seems to me that the best thing for the majority of writers, especially beginners, to do is to stop worrying about voice unless a) they have some specific identifiable problem with their writing voice that, like a speech impediment, needs exercises in grammar or syntax or whatever to fix, or b) they are trying to do something with their writing voice that’s more advanced than most stories or most writers need. Pastiche and parody come to mind as a possible equivalent of actors pretending to be other people; there are almost certainly other things like that that I’m not thinking about.

Mostly, though, “authorial voice” is one of those things that may, just possibly, be useful for critics to talk about, but that (in my not so humble opinion) mostly just gets in the way if you worry about it while you’re writing.

When I got my first word-processor, I was immensely pleased by the way it let me go back and tidy up at the last minute. The “search and replace” function was especially helpful for getting rid of words and phrases that I’d overused. The only catch was, I had to know which words I was overusing, in order to search for them.

Over the years, I’ve developed a search-and-destroy list of words and phrases that creep into my rough drafts no matter how hard I try to avoid them. Some are things I’ve noticed; some are things my first-readers have called to my attention enough times that I have to reluctantly admit that what I think of as a charming or evocative phrase has been overworked, to say the least. The list changes a little from book to book, and from viewpoint character to viewpoint character. Daystar had a terrible tendency to overuse “really” (and we won’t even talk about the semi-colons); Eff doesn’t have a problem with “really,” but I have to watch that she doesn’t overuse “a mite” and her sentences sometimes go on for whole paragraphs and need some breaking up.

One of the things I’ve noticed recently is that “search and destroy” is really the wrong name for that list. The words and phrases on it aren’t things that always have to disappear; they’re things that need an extra look. About 80% of the time, I don’t need them, but the other 20% of the time, they’re exactly right.  For instance, the sentence “She seemed to be able to see a lot more from the high window” is a lot stronger and shorter as “She could see a lot more from the high window” (both “seemed to” and “be able to” are fairly high up on my search-and-destroy list; in combination they’re an instant kill).

On the other hand, the sentence “Even if he chose not to answer some questions, she would be able to tell a lot by which questions he refused.” is more ambiguous; here, the choice to change “she would be able to tell a lot” to “she could tell a lot” is as much a matter of voice as it is of over-use. I’d probably change it in most cases, but if I hadn’t used the phrase in a while (a couple of chapters, say) and my viewpoint character tended to be pedantic, I might very well leave it alone. And the sentence “He wondered if he would be able to swim all the way to the far side of the river” is almost certainly going to remain unchanged, because “he wondered if he could” probably isn’t going to imply enough self-doubt for what I want there.

The other thing I noticed is that “destroy” isn’t exactly accurate, either. At least half the time, I don’t just delete an overused word or phrase. Instead, I replace it with something else. “Would be able to see” often becomes “could see,” or even just “saw.” “Very red” sometimes becomes “crimson” or “scarlet,”  if the character’s voice allows it. Sometimes it doesn’t; one of my characters prefers similes such as “as red as my grandmother’s cranberry sauce” to terms like crimson or scarlet, so that’s what I change it to for her.

The point, as always, isn’t really to come up with a list of forbidden words (which won’t be the same for every writer anyway). The point is to make the writing more effective by looking at the standard words and phrases the writer comes up with by default, and then making a conscious decision whether to look for a clearer or more vivid or more succinct way to say the same thing.

The first most important thing to remember about dialog is that it is a model of speech, not a transcription. I’ve talked about that before on this blog, so I won’t repeat myself in detail, but I think it’s worth at least mentioning here.

The second most important thing to remember about dialog is that it is communication between two or more characters. This means that it is almost always made up of short exchanges, back and forth. Unless one of your characters is giving a lecture, like the detective in a classic murder mystery doing his summing-up, you should expect a page of dialog to have paragraphs that are mainly one to three lines long. There’s usually lots of white space as a result; in fact, one of the classic tests for whether the characters’ speeches are running on too long is to print out a page and tape it to the wall, then walk across the room so that you can see the pattern of the paragraphs and how much white space there is on the page. These days, you can get the same effect by reducing the font size:

Description vs. dialog

Above is an example. On the left is a page of descriptive paragraphs; on the right, a page of dialog. Shrinking the font makes it instantly obvious which is which – and you can see immediately if your dialog is bogging down in long speeches, and take steps to break it up.

The second classic trick for checking your dialog is to read it out loud. This lets you know whether it sounds right in general; it also is an easy way to identify tongue-twister phrases that no one would actually ever say.

If you’re having trouble figuring out how to do dialog generally, try reading some plays or screenplays. Out loud, so you are seeing and hearing the words at the same time, and can get a feel for how the words-on-the-page work when spoken aloud and vice versa. If you really want a workout, get hold of the screenplay for any movie that has lots of dialog, read it aloud, and then watch the movie while following along with the script. Even if you’re not having trouble, paying a little extra attention to passages of dialog in your favorite movies and novels will very likely give you some useful ideas.

The next thing to think about is the difference in the speech patterns of your various characters – the way each particular person phrases things, depending on their individual personalities and backgrounds. You can do this either by consciously coming up with speech tics (like having a character who never uses contractions, or who always ends their sentences with “yeah?”), which can be effective in small doses but which gets really annoying to read when every character in a story has one, or you can come up with broader ways of distinguishing your characters’ voices (Shakespeare had all his noblemen speak in unrhymed iambic pentameter, and their servants and more ordinary people just any-which-way. The lyricist for Man of La Mancha gave Don Quixote complex sentences and syntax ["I am I, Don Quixote, the Lord of La Mancha; destroyer of evil am I!"] and his servant short, simple sentences and no words of more than two syllables  ["I'm Sancho! Yes, I'm Sancho! I follow my master to the end!"])

Or, you can just look at different speech patterns in real life.  Take the same sentence of dialog/information, and rephrase it in as many different ways as you can:

“I think you’re making a mistake.”

“That’s wrong, dumbo.”

“I believe, sir, that you are in error in this instance.”

“Um, do you think…I mean, is that really the way you want to do that? Because it doesn’t look quite right to me.”

“That ain’t no way to do that there thing.”

“Kiddo, you got that upside down and backward.”

“I’m afraid that’s not going to work.”

“A guy could have some problems, doing things that way.”

“You’re screwing up again! Honestly, can’t you do anything right?”

…and on, and on.

I was on my third book before I started trying to do this consciously, and my first few efforts were exaggerated (Telemain in Talking to Dragons, Amberglas in The Seven Towers) because it was the only way I could be sure I was keeping them consistent. More subtle variations took me longer to get the hang of. Most of the time now, speech patterns and character voices are automatic  for me – I know when I’ve used a word or a turn of phrase that a particular character just wouldn’t say, that’s all, so I fix it immediately. But at the beginning, it required a lot more conscious attention. So don’t worry if it takes a while.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Every writer has strengths and weaknesses, and there’s a lot to be said for playing to your strengths.

After a while, though, doing the same thing over and over can get boring. Also, once you’ve polished those particular aspects of your writing to a high gleam, it can be more difficult to improve the things you aren’t as good at doing, both because you never give yourself the chance to practice them and because when you finally do try them out, your skill levels are so far behind your strengths that they make everything new you try look terrible compared to whatever you’re used to doing.

Which is why I’m a big fan of knowing what your defaults are…because if you know them, you can change your automatic choices, consciously and deliberately.  This means that if you don’t like writing exercises (which I mostly don’t), you can learn how to do new things while you’re also writing pay copy. (This doesn’t work for everyone; some people learn better and faster from exercises, and they should use them. That’s part of figuring out your process and your defaults – figuring out whether you get the most out of learning specific pieces and then putting them together later, or from just jumping into the deep end and not drowning.)

Career writers are constantly torn between playing to their strengths (which often means writing the same kind of story over and over) and developing their weak points so as to have a broader range of possibilities available. Different writers make different choices about how to deal with this. Some are perfectly happy to never stretch too far beyond their current basic strengths…and sometimes that works really well for them, especially if they’ve developed a large fan base that is perfectly happy to have the same thing over and over. Others start off that way, polishing their strong points for their first few books, and only later begin pushing themselves. Still others begin pushing their limits as hard as possible right from the get-go, striving to get their skills up to some arbitrary level before they allow themselves to relax a little.

Me, I’m a slogger, and I don’t mean just the day-to-day grind. I don’t normally tend to push every one of my limits to the absolute max all at once, but I do try to stretch in a new direction with every book. My current default values are for plot-centered, tight-third-person, single-viewpoint, stand-alone stories that take place over a relatively limited time period, usually a few days to a couple of months. (Yes, I am indicating that they’ve changed over time.) So I’m currently writing a character-centered, first-person, memoir-style trilogy that takes place over the course of years – thirteen years for Book 1, two more years for Book 2, and probably two to three years for Book 3.

That’s an unusually large number of defaults for me to upset all at once…but the main default that I’m currently upsetting is my habit of only making onestretchy writing-technique change per book. I don’t recommend swapping absolutely everything around like this the first time you decide to shake things up, unless you already know that you need to do that kind of thing. But for me, it was time for a major shake-up…and while I did deliberately switch a lot of my defaults, not all of them were terribly stretchy, one at a time. I’ve done first-person before, in a couple of different flavors (letters, over-the-shoulder narrative), and I’ve written things that were longer and more character-focused. It’s certainly been stretchy trying them all at once, which was part of the idea (the other part being that once I got the story idea, particularly Eff’s voice, I wouldn’t have been happy telling it any other way.)

When your first-person narrator looks at the street outside his house, does he see Fords and Chryslers and Saturns? Or does he see red vans and silver cars and a blue pickup? In other words, is he the sort of person who knows all the makes and models and maybe even the year, or are they just all cars to him? When she sits on a rock under a tree, does she notice that it’s metamorphic limestone and a fine specimen of  Acer saccharum, some kind of unpolished marble boulder and a sugar maple, or just a rock and a tree?

In a third-person viewpoint, the writer can fudge the narrative a bit even if she’s doing a tight third-person point of view, and let the reader know that it’s a sugar maple even if the viewpoint character has no clue. In first-person, you can’t fudge. If the viewpoint character says “I sat under a sugar maple,” then obviously she knows it’s a sugar maple.

This seems like a small thing, but it can come around and bite you when you least expect it. You have your viewpoint character describe a tree or a car or a horse in specific terms, because you know what it is and you want the reader to get a clear picture of the scene…and then four or five chapters later, the character says he doesn’t know the difference between an oak and an elm, or a Saturn and a Lexus, and any reader who’s at all noticing goes “hey, wait a minute, he used to know that…” Or worse yet, you turn out to need him to know (or not-know) something as part of a major plot-point. If it’s first-person, the only thing to do is go back through everything and hope you catch every place where you might possibly have said something in the narrative that indicated differently.

Of course, this can work to your advantage, too. If the first-person narrator describes elms and sugar maples by name, but just “red cars” and “blue cars,” then when the plot requires him to not be able to identify the robbers’ getaway car, he doesn’t have to say that he can’t tell one car from another. It’s already there, in the word choices he’s made every time a car came up in the narrative.

Furthermore, this cuts both ways with the worldbuilding as well as the characterization, especially if you’re a fantasy or science fiction author writing in a completely imaginary world. The reader builds up a picture of the world from what the narrator says, and how she/he says it. In first person, you have to be a little more careful, because the reader can’t tell whether the first-person narrator is omitting details about the trees because they’re unimportant and/or the same as in our world, or whether she just doesn’t know what sort of tree it is. Yet you can also use things like the way the narrator takes purple carrots for granted, or thinks of lemon-flavored streams as rather commonplace, to tell the reader things about the world that are a lot trickier to get across in third person.

In fact, one of the things that is, for me, the most fun about writing first person is that the narrator can have attitude. Her opinions about people and things don’t have to be implied or shown; she can just say them straight out. “I hate pickled beets.” “Donald is stupid.” Because of this, though, first-person is almost inherently unreliable. That is, the reader is predisposed to believe what the first-person narrator says, so if the narrator lies or doesn’t know what she’s talking about, it’s a lot harder to let the reader know that she really does like pickled beets and is just grousing, or that Donald actually could have been a rocket scientist if he’d wanted to.

Every type of viewpoint has advantages and disadvantages like this, and eventually, I’ll probably get through most of them.

First-person viewpoint is the “I” viewpoint: “I hate pickled beets. I’ve always hated them. But Ma thinks they’re good for what ails you, so whenever I’m sick, I get pickled beets.”

A lot of people jump straight to first-person when they start writing, because it looks easy. For quite a while, first-person was so over-used by beginning writers that it got a really bad reputation as something only an amateur would try. There are still traces of that around, some places.

But first-person isn’t as easy as it looks, and there are a lot of possible varieties. “Plain” first person is the most common – something written as if the reader is riding along in the narrator’s head. There’s the subtly different form in which the narrator is writing everything down immediately after the fact (or years later). Then there’s the as-told-to, where the first-person narrator is telling the story to someone (possibly the reader; possibly another character) and the reader is listening in. Diaries, letters, memoir, stream-of-consciousness - all different formats requiring slightly different approaches, but all first-person.

The thing that’s most difficult for a lot of writers to grasp about first person is that they are not the putative narrator. When I say “I did this or that” in normal everyday life, I mean me, the person currently sitting here typing. But when my first-person narrator says “I did that,” the “I” doesn’t mean me-who-is-typing. “I” means the character.

This is so obvious that to most folks it goes without saying. But if one doesn’t say it or think it or pay attention to it, one is likely to find that habit takes over. All my life, “I” has meant me-who-is-typing, and that’s a lot of habit to overcome. It’s no wonder that a lot of first-person narrators sound (and think and act) a lot like their authors. (It is also no wonder that a lot of readers leap to the conclusion that anything written in first person is autobiographical, or at least reflects the writer’s opinions and errors of knowledge, rather than the character’s – but that’s a rant for another time.)

It can help to pick a first-person narrator who has a strong voice of their own – one that is unlike the author’s natural voice. It can also help to pick a character who is significantly different from the author in some way – age, sex, ethnicity, ability/disability, etc. But these things only help if the author thinks about them and the ways they’ll affect the character’s voice and opinions and attitudes; when the author doesn’t think, you get the young black woman protagonist who sounds oddly like a middle-aged white author (and who more than half the readers don’t even realize is black until nearly the end of the book. If then.)

A strong voice helps because first-person is written in the voice of the character – in a lot of the varieties, the narrative is supposed to sound like dialog, like the viewpoint character telling you the story. A question always comes up when the viewpoint character has an accent or uses dialect or pidgin as their normal speech pattern, because it is a writing truism that too heavy a hand with dialect or phonetic respelling can make something almost unreadable (the poetry of Robert Burns, anyone?).

But dialog in any book isn’t an accurate transcript of the way people really talk. Dialog leaves out the ums and ers and most of the sentences that trail off into nowhere and a lot of the digressions and speech tics that happen in real life conversations. It’s a model of the way people talk…and first-person narrative is even more so.

When you’re writing first-person, you are inside that character’s head (or nearly) all the time. People don’t sound to themselves as if they have an accent. Inside their heads, that’s just how everyone talks. I’m not the one with the accent; it’s my friends from the deep South, from New England, from Scotland who have regional accents. The French I speak in my head sounds just fine to me; it’s everyone else who knows instantly from my accent that I’m a native English speaker. So a writer can skip most of the phonetic respelling aspects of doing accent in narrative, which instantly makes everything a lot more readable, and stick with word order and idiosyncratic word choice to convey the narrator’s speech patterns.  (This also works well in many cases for the dialog of characters other than the narrator who have accents.)

Take the matter of narrative voice (which I define as the way all the stuff that isn’t dialog sounds). Theoretically, the writer has three basic options:  1) the narrative can be in her, the author’s, natural voice; 2) the narrative can be in the voice of the viewpoint character; 3) the narrative can be in the voice of an independent narrator who is not the author – essentially, in the voice of an imaginary character who isn’t the viewpoint character (an example of this would be the Paarfi novels by Steven Brust).

If, however, the writer chooses to use a first-person viewpoint, options 1 and 3 disappear. All of the various styles of first-person viewpoint, whether they’re memoir, diary, letters, stream-of-consciousness, etc., are told by the “I” character, so all of the narrative has to sound like that character. Word choice and grammar has to be the same – if the first-person narrator knows nothing about trees, he’ll say “I sat under a tree;” if he knows quite a bit, he might say “I sat under a white oak;” if he’s a botanist, he’ll say “I sat under a specimin of quercus alba.“ This is relatively obvious when the first-person narrator has a strong voice, especially if the character uses unique syntax, word choices, or grammar. It gets less obvious (and harder to do) the more the narrator sounds like the writer.

Where this really gets tricky is in the matter of dialog. A first-person narrator will sound more or less the same in both their dialog and in their narrative (though most people do have a slightly more formal writing style than they do speaking style, so there’s some variation). The dialog that is spoken by other character – the non-viewpoint characters – has to sound like them, rather than like the narrator, yet the first-person narrator’s voice may creep into the way he reports the dialog (unless he happens to be the sort of person who is obsessive about reporting exactly what everyone else says, rather than telling it all the way he remembers it).

In third-person, the writer can choose any of the three options for voice. If the narrative is filtered through the eyes and mind of a tightly-focused third-person viewpoint character, the effect will be almost the same as if the author were using a first-person viewpoint; if the narrative is in the voice of an imaginary character or in the author’s voice, the dialog and the narrative will contrast. How much they contrast is obviously a function of how different the voices of the characters are from the voice of the author or independent narrator.

Manipulating the narrative voice is usually a lot more subtle than, say, changing the tense or the viewpoint, but once one is aware of it, playing around with voice can be fun.