It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, so it feels a little odd to be back into it, but today I’m going to go back to the prose blip. In fact, I’m going to go all the way to an extreme and really get into a very nitty-gritty part of prose: the voice.
What is voice? Simply put, voice is word choice and sentence structure. It’s the conscious
choice and careful inspection of the way you say the things you say and write
the things you write. Everyone has a voice, whether they realize it or not.
When you say someone has a flat voice or a dull voice, you’re saying they’re being careless with their word
choices or their word choices are poor and dull. It’s hard to truly define
what makes a voice dull or not-dull, because there are so many ways to make the
voice of your writing not dull. In
fact, the easiest way to develop a not-dull voice is to keep writing. The more you write, the more refined your voice
becomes and its definition becomes imposing.
Everyone has a voice. You have a voice, I have a voice, the
kid down the street has a voice, the kid up the street has a voice. Your
characters have a voice.
Wait.
I’ve said before that characters are just you. They’re in
your mind, you made them up, you have control over them. So why do they get a
unique voice? Aren’t their voices just yours?
Let’s explore that.
Your Voice – The Voice of an Author
Before we really decide whether character have a voice
distinct from yours, let’s really find your
voice. If we can’t compare your character’s voices to yours, we can’t truly
decide whether they are the same. That’s like comparing a gala apple to an
invisible gala apple and deciding they’re different, even though the invisible
apple could just be a friend of Harry Potter pulling a favor while remaining
the same kind of apple.
Anyway…. What is your
voice? How does your voice affect your word choice? Where does this voice come
from and how do we develop?
First, your voice is
simply the way you write what you write. For instance, my personal voice is
a blend of poor analogies twisted out into excessive descriptions of something
that more or less make sense and short, snipped sentences that attempt to
convey inspiration, intensity, or importance through emphasis.
I’m not sure it works.
Oh well.
I have a friend whose voice is found in delightful, esoteric
words. She twists them into the sentence in such a way that even if you don’t
know the word, you get the abstract idea behind it. Her writings often come
across as poetic, even when she’s not trying. It’s wonderful to read, and so
engrossing. J. K. Rowling’s voice [to maintain the trend from the invisible
gala apple earlier] is clear in her books regardless of which character she’s
writing from: it’s simple.
I’m not saying her voice is flat or dull: quite the
contrary. Rowling uses simple phrases and words, simple sentence structure, and
simple description to create immensely complex scenes. She paints with simple
colors to create beautiful works of art.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s voice reminds me of my great-great
grandfather. It’s a slow voice, and his word choice almost begs you to read his
descriptions in your mind with a slightly gravelly voice, like that of an aging
veteran. He uses conceptual sentences and references to old things to present a
sort of photograph: it’s sharp and crisp at the focus, and blurred around the
edges. His voice pinpoints the detail he wants us to understand, while giving
an impression of infinite detail all around.
Our voice affects our word choice in a variety of ways. For
my friend, her voice leads her to choose big words, broad words, intense words. Where the phrase “the
smell after rain” would suffice, she’s drawn to “petrichor”. Where “kind” would
fit, she inclines to “benevolence”. For Rowling, it’s the opposite. For
Tolkien, perhaps these words aren’t the point at all, but something else and
these details are merely off to the side as unimportant words thrown into a
more complex and valuable sentence. For me, it means pulling together a conglomeration
of small, throwaway words and deeply meaningful words in a sort of
wide-reaching palette that brings me personal happiness, regardless of the
reader’s comprehension and enjoyment.
Whoops.
It’s hard to tell you how to develop your own unique voice,
because you already have it. Yup. Your
voice is already inside of you. However, your voice is also lazy. It’d
rather not come out to play, but stay inside and toss useless word at you. To develop your voice, you need to use it.
You need to consciously write and speak and act in ways that cause your voice
to stand up, move out of the house, and get to work. After a while, it becomes
second nature.
Their Voice – The Voice of a Character
But what about characters? What are their voices? Are they
different from the author’s voice?
First, imagine what your author voice is: what makes your
voice your voice? When you know that, you can easily spot a character’s voice.
Simply put, character voice is the resulting
changes in your author voice when you write from their perspective. It’s
when you usually write with formal sentence structure and then your character’s
personality suddenly calls for super short sentences and dramatically expressed
thoughts. Your voice is still there, peeking around the edges of descriptions
and thoughts, but the narrative is mostly dominated by the personal voice of
your character.
Character voice has
to be clear, or else your reader won’t be able to tell them apart. This is
especially important if you’re writing in third person or have multiple
characters you write from. They all need to be distinct, or else they’re not going
to stand out as worthwhile and unique.
How do you develop a character’s voice? Well, much like your
own voice, you just need to write them.
If you never write your character, you’ll never know what they sound like. You
need to be willing to dig in, dig deep, and discover what exactly they do when
they speak and think and express themselves. Much like actions and personality,
it’s a process of experimenting. You’ll know when part of their voice doesn’t
sound natural. They’ll come across as stiff or flat or stale, sentences will
lack variation in structure, and you’ll have this itch in between your shoulder
blades. Something won’t feel right, even if you can’t pinpoint it.
We’ve all experienced that, haven’t we? We write a scene and
it seems all right, but there’s something just off. Your beta readers may enjoy the scene or chapter; they might
not be able to see anything wrong with it that makes you feel like that itch
got scratched. What is that problem?
It’s voice.
The thing about voice, it’s
hard for readers to catch on to it quickly. In fact, they rarely ever
notice it consciously. Instead, they simply accept that you have a style and a
voice and let you run with it. If your voice is super distinct they might realize
that it’s there, but so long as it’s interesting, they’ll accept it and
probably love it. One that immediately comes to mind is Maggie Stiefvater’s Raven Boys Cycle. Her style and voice is
so distinct and each of her characters has such a rare and unique voice all
their own that you can’t help but notice and appreciate them.
When you force a scene, you drop the voice. When a scene
lacks conflict, you drop the voice. When you make a character do something they
wouldn’t do for the sack of the plot, you drop the voice.
How do you maintain your voice and the voice of your
characters?
Practice.
Practice a lot. It’s one of the reason I started this blog,
actually. I wanted to develop my own voice, so that I could tell it apart from
my character’s voice. I knew I had one, and I knew there was something similar
in all of my books that could be drawn to voice, but I didn’t really know what
it was until I started blogging. Not REALLY.
Now, I do.
Now I know that my voice tends to start off super casual and
awkward and then get rather intense in the middle, self-deprecating near the
end of the middle, and then either super sarcastic or inspiration at the end.
Regardless of what I’m writing.
Now I know that my voice includes repeating important
phrases for emphasis or artistic value. Now I know that my voice tosses in
random words that aren’t usually accepted as common words for use.
My voice is stronger now for all of that. Maybe for you, it’s
just writing novel after novel or poem after poem until you discover it.
Regardless of how you do it, you do have
one, and it’s worth finding. Then, you can begin to fully grasp your characters’
voices.
Yay! Prose blips are back!
ReplyDeleteHARRY POTTER REFERENCES! Sorry. Just... the apple. XD
I liked the way you described the different voices, it just made /sense/. First time it has for me, actually. People (well, my Dad) would talk about distinct voices, and how as people get older and write more they have their own voice, etc., but I never really got it in relationship to characters' voices. I also never thought of using blogging to find your voice. I'll now be paying a lot more attention than I have. Thank you!
YES the prose blips are back after a rather long break that I realized shouldn't have happened because I enjoy them too much.
DeleteEXACTLY. XD
Hey, that's great! It took me forever to really understand what people were talking about when they talked about voice, because it's such an abstract thing to have to try and describe. Glad my description made more sense.