Recently, I was approached by a budding author who, after the usual polite introductory remarks, said, “Ms. Wrede, I’ve been wondering – how did you develop your voice?”
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.
I used to fret about this, because while I could imitate almost any other writer’s voice with fair accuracy, I never really felt like I had my own voice. Then I stopped fretting about it and realized that each story that I write has its own individual voice. They differ as much from each other as they do from any other writer’s work. For me now, it isn’t so much about finding my voice as it is about figuring out the story’s voice, and letting it flow from there.
As an acquisition editor, what I meant by voice was a writing style that felt natural and comfortable to the reader. Many, many people adopt the style of writing that they were taught in school: academic, formal, stiff, stilted. It’s not fun to read.
“Voice” is when they lose the artificiality of the writing form as a means of communication and write fluidly, easily, so that reading almost becomes hearing the words and having them sound natural. There are also generic ways of phrasing and structuring the work that would lack voice — opening with a question, beginning with two pages of history lesson, using common cliches — anything that immediately bores the reader might indicate a lack of voice (or a bad voice), while anything that immediately intrigues the reader might indicate a good voice. In our edit meetings, “he has a good voice” was a strong indicator that the editor would like to sign the book.
If I was answering the question of how to develop a voice, I’d suggest that the questioner spend a lot of time reading their work out loud. It should flow smoothly for them, they should be ably to read it without stumbling or halting, and if they start to get bored with their own words, they should probably cut and tighten. Because — and I say this from the perspective of an editor — most people do not have perfectly good writing voices. Our schools create barely functional writing voices, and most people don’t ever exercise their writing voice after they get out of school.
I hope that doesn’t sound too cynical, but one year I sent over 500 rejection letters, so my cynicism was developed with practice. Plenty of people who want to write books would do very well to work on developing a stronger, clearer voice in their writing — not something unique, but a style that flows smoothly and comfortably to the reader’s ear.
My writing voice has gotten a lot better once I started writing in the genre I actually liked. For a while i tried writing in dystopian, because all my friends wrote it, and I read some, and it just kind of happened. But I found I didn’t enjoy writing that nearly as much. Then I started writing my current book that is sort of a fractured fairytale set in a fun world where unicorns are evil and dragons are in hiding, and things clicked. When I enjoy what I’m writing, more people are apt to enjoy reading it. I think that goes for voice as well.
Speaking of special things like needing to be heard in the back row, I have a story in the works that is in first person, from two POVs that switch off every chapter. This is one book where I do have to worry about `voice’ since I don’t want my POVs to sound identical. Usually, though, I tend to go with the idea that voice is something that just happens when you write a lot.
I think the link between voice and speech is really key here. One of the things people do is speak differently in different contexts. If we’re writing, we write differently when we have different target audiences. The whole idea of reading a lot in your genre is a way to learn their register. The idea of reading widely is to learn a broader register or one that you can handle consciously.
When writing children’s fiction, one of the major problems with voice is attitude. If you’re talking to children from the perspective that they’re nice, and not very smart, and rather like fluffy bunnies, you’re going to use a different register than if you think they’re rather suspicious aliens plotting to take over the world – which they do, on a regular basis, once per generation. If you write in the first way, you probably won’t have a lot of people actually enjoying your book. And that’s still a voice problem.
I worry about “my” voice only because I am a chameleon with writing – I tend to take on characteristics of the style of whichever author I’ve been reading last/most, just as I have a chameleon tongue – I pick up the spoken accent and cadence of those I’m speaking with, if it’s strong enough. But I can also turn either of these tendencies off if I think about what I’m doing.
I think I’d agree with this to a T, even though it’s definitely something I’ve worried about. I just try and tell myself… everyone has preferred ways of phrasing things, and favorite words, and tendencies toward metaphors or not. So there’s no point in being worried about it at all; it’s just natural to who a writer is.
@Sarah Wynde — I think that’s the most helpful definition of ‘voice’ that I’ve run across. Thank you.
@Louise, I was a good imitator also, years back. And I worried about how to develop my own voice. I can’t say I consciously arrived at a solution. Nor did I consciously stop worrying about it. My concern just faded away without me noticing. Strange.
@Gillian Frank, great phrase: chameleon tongue. I have one too. When I visit the UK, I come home with a British accent, etc. Of course, it came in handy in high school French class!
I encountered a blog post last winter about voice, and I realized then that I have one. Like @Chicory, I think it just coalesced as I wrote and wrote and wrote.
I was a member of Toastmasters International for about five years. I definitely have a speaking voice of my own. Its most notable quality is the pause. It got commented on several times. You can take someone’s head off with a well-placed pause. Sometimes, it is better not to state anything and let the listener/reader sort it out himself.
“What did you do that for? You idiot!”
vs.
“What did you do that for? [long pause]”
“…and so that is why this is a good thing to do. You should try it.”
vs.
“…and so that is why this is a good thing to do. [long pause] You should try it.”
I recently had to scold someone. I made my statement while projecting anger and then paused. The target of my wrath get very scared. I made no physical motion toward him. I made no threatening motions. He still got quite scared.