JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #5
June 18, 2020
This week I want to talk about that ambiguous concept so many writing guides bring up when offering advice to new writers: Voice.
There are many definitions of authorial voice, but the one thing we can be sure of is that voice is a result of the concrete reality of words and sentences and paragraphs on the page. The metaphor of voice is strained, because, while the position of the larynx within the throat, the shape and contours of the oral and nasal cavities, and many other physical properties of the vocal tract in any individual person are fixed and unchangeable, absolutely everything we do with prose can be changed. Voice in prose comes from the choice of vocabulary, the selection of syntax on which to hang words, the flow of topic from sentence to sentence, how focus shifts and slides, how a sentence might step away and consider the object of our rumination from afar, how it might dive right into the experience and show us what it feels like from inside—all of this compounds to build a voice; and all of it is changeable by conscious choice. When we decide to remove all conjunctions and even compound sentences, we are building a voice. When we decide that in a paragraph four conjunctions is enough, but five is too many, it is because of the voice we are trying to create.
When we talk about authors “having a voice,” what we mean is that they have internalized a preferred selection among these choices to such a degree that they no longer make them consciously. They reach for the same words in similar situations. They rely on particular syntactic structures again and again. They’ve developed a prose rhythm that they prefer.
On the other hand, some writers do not have a particular voice, but change their style according to the needs of each new work. They try to fit syntax and word choice to situation and character rather than relying on habit. This is my own preferred answer to the question of voice: I want each story to dictate its own voice, and it is this that I strive for, even when I am quite often unsuccessful. The feeling of a story should dictate the words and syntax of its prose, the structure and rhythm of its paragraphs.
The advice to “find your voice” is really meant to address a common problem among beginners of stumbling about and letting your influences make the choices for you. If you read a lot of the work of an author with a strong voice, you might begin to feel as though all prose ought to feel like that author’s prose. You will use the words that the influential author favors and the syntactic constructions that gives that author’s prose its rhythm. Finding your own voice only means that you should pay close attention to every choice you make in the construction of your prose, from word choice to syntactic structure to length of paragraph or chapter length. Even the methods of characterization or the length of scenes and the style of plot can be attributed to voice and should be consciously considered rather than borrowed.
Once you do spend time paying careful attention to such considerations that create a voice, you might find that you will begin to fall into a pattern. If you want to have a distinctive voice common to all of your writing, this is when you will have begun to create one for yourself. Ultimately, it is up to you how you want to handle voice within each story and across all of your writing.
Next: On Plot and Character