# Voice



## M. LeRenard (Feb 6, 2008)

I'm all about trying to tackle the hard subjects...


One of the first things you hear about when learning to write fiction is this enigmatic thing called 'voice'.  People tell you you're supposed to have one, but they never really tell you what it is.

I think that's because no one really knows, which is what makes it so difficult to find your own.  Loosely defined, it's the kind of vocabulary you use, the syntax of your sentences, what rules of grammar you choose to forgo.  But it's a bit more complicated than that; voice is more the thing you hear in your head when reading something.  It's the thing that lets you know, without even looking at the cover of the book you're reading, that this was written by Author X and not Author Y.

Any more detail than that, though, and we approach the realm of the paranormal.  I'm not a big traveler in that realm, myself, so it's tough to come up with ways to describe what goes on there.  But I'm going to try anyway.

I've read in a lot of different places that in order to have a good voice, you have to be able to tell the truth in your writing.  Despite that this might have been your first thought, it doesn't have anything to do with facts; fiction is still fiction.  A novelist's occupation is lying.  Telling the truth, rather, means that you should not write what you think other people want to read.

Example: this is a random sample taken from a random story on FA (if this is your story, I apologize profusely.  If you're embarrassed, just don't tell anyone it's yours).



> Marching past a small village and its brightly colored pagoda, the force was to cut off the line of retreat into the fortress.  The true battle this day was elsewhere as the Shogun had brought a large contingent by sea across from Honshu.  The samurai had no other objective than to prevent the dastardly mongol warlord from making it back from the field and to the fortress.  While the fortress was not in the mongol's control it did not have a strong garrison.  The Shogun's instructions were clear.  The local daimyo would not take kindly to the Shogun seizing the fortress either.



Now, to begin, this is actually not bad writing.  It has emotion, imagery, and good grammar and spelling.  The only thing it's lacking is personality; or rather, an original personality.  Read it over again, and think about the word choice.  'The true battle', 'dastardly Mongol', 'would not take kindly to'....  ClichÃ©s mostly, yes?  You hear this stuff in the narration of Saturday morning cartoon shows.

So what does that have to do with truth?  In a sense, this: the author of this story was writing this for a certain audience, and, as such, was only telling them the details he thought that audience might like to hear.  He wasn't telling the story as he heard it in his head; he tried to decorate it, to beef it up with fancy expressions and powerful words.  It has no voice of its own; you could compare it to a million other pieces of amateur writing and hardly be able to tell the difference.

How, then, do you tell the truth in your writing?  Let me give you another example, this one from one of my favorite authors, Ray Bradbury, who has a very distinctive voice.



> So along the road those flowers spread that, when touched, give down a shower of autumn rust. By every path it looks as if a ruined circus had passed and loosed a trail of ancient iron at every turning of a wheel. The rust was laid out everywhere, strewn under trees and by riverbanks and near the tracks themselves where once a locomotive had gone but went no more. So flowered flakes and railroad track together turned to moulderings upon the rim of autumn.


(excerpt from Farewell Summer, as printed on 
this website)

Look now at this example, at the choice of words, the style.  'A shower of autumn rust', 'as if a ruined circus had passed', 'flowered flakes'....  You ever hear those before?  I have, but only because I've read this book.  It's original, it's distinctive, it's clearly Ray Bradbury.  That's just his voice.  Do you know exactly what 'autumn rust' looks like?  No, and I'll bet neither does he, but he used that phrase because it was right to him.  He told it just as he saw it in his own head, truthfully.

That's what voice is all about, really.  If you want to write with a singular voice, tell it like it is.  Pretend you're just telling a story to your readers, and you want to make sure you let them know exactly what you think happened, in your own words.  This means using your own experiences to back yourself up; if you work a day job in a hose factory, for instance, maybe you can describe a foreboding cloud as looking like the haze of rubber dust that constantly hangs in the air near the sawblades.  Only you would have thought of that.  And that's the point.


That was a bit more poetic than I usually write, but hopefully it gets the message across.  I'm on my way to getting my own voice, I'd like to think, but it's not something you can just figure out overnight.
I guess now I leave it to everyone else to add things or dispute things.


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## Stratelier (Feb 6, 2008)

> If you want to write with a singular voice, tell it like it is.


...in which case, thank God for NaNoWriMo.  Where you don't have _time_ to stop and consider whether it's what the audience wants to hear.


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## TakeWalker (Feb 6, 2008)

Well, one problem with voice is it's extremely difficult to define. It's not the sort of thing you can teach, only give examples of and hope the details are gleaned.

I know the voice (?) of my own writing has a tendency to change drastically depending upon what I've been reading. I'll adapt to the style and tone of the author I read last; this is bad when I'm doing nothing but reading scholarly articles for class. I know enough to force myself away from the drier writing style, yes, but it still creeps in.

By the way, the way you're defining it, is voice the same as tone? I think I just used three different words to refer to the same thing in that above paragraph. I really don't know.


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## Poetigress (Feb 6, 2008)

I'm not sure, but I think style and tone can change from piece to piece (at least tone can), as a conscious choice made while writing, while voice is more unconscious and personal, like a fingerprint -- it might develop and evolve over time, as the writer gains confidence and some of the imitation falls away, but it doesn't change drastically unless the writer does.

I could have this all wrong, though.  I still get all those terms confused.  >0_o<


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## M. LeRenard (Feb 6, 2008)

Uhhh... I guess I was thinking of 'voice' as being was PT said, whereas 'tone' is more like... the tone is gloomy, or cheerful, or horrifying, or what have you, and 'style' is the academic part of writing well (like saying 'he was conceited' instead of, say, 'he was full of himself', or something like that).
Hold... let me look up the words.

*Style*:the mode of expressing thought in writing or speaking by selecting and arranging words, considered with respect to clearness, effectiveness, euphony, or the like, that is characteristic of a group, period, person, personality, etc.: to write in the style of Faulkner; a familiar style; a pompous, pedantic style.

*tone*: a particular style or manner, as of writing or speech; mood: the macabre tone of Poe's stories.

*voice*: expression in spoken or written words, or by other means: to give voice to one's disapproval by a letter.

Well, I can't really find a good literary definition of the last one.  Maybe I should have talked about 'Style' instead of 'Voice'?  Or maybe they're interchangeable....  Bah.


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## TakeWalker (Feb 6, 2008)

Style might make it clearer.

I only asked because someone recently accused one of my more recent prompts as having no tone. To which I was all "OH SHIT MUST GET TONE" and didn't really know what that meant, exactly. <.< I had also compared the tone (this time using the word properly!) of my first two PCA stories and was dismayed to see that the first was playful and silly, while the second was fairly bland by comparison. I don't know, it just got to me.

I apologize for the derailment, I just had to get that out. c.c


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## lobosabio (Feb 6, 2008)

I really don't believe in this "voice" thing.  I've come to the conclusion that it's just something concocted by high school english teachers to annoy their students.  

I think that style would really be a better way of putting.  It encompasses the most important parts of writing; that is, the distinct vocabulary, the grammatical methods, the way in which the dialog is written (e.g. do you simply say a character has an accent and leave it, or do you actually write their dialog to reflect it), essentially all the things that let you tell one author from another.


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## M. LeRenard (Feb 7, 2008)

That is style... maybe voice is, like I said in the article, the more metaphysical aspect of it.  Because, like, for me, I get feelings from things; it's like, if I read The Lord of the Rings, I get a certain feeling, and then if I read The Lord of the Rings fanfiction, even if it's by an author who really worked hard to get the characters to act as they do in the original, to get the world and the people and the style down to a T, I get a different feeling from it.  The style might be similar, but it doesn't have the same 'voice'.
And from generic works, I get no feeling at all.
That's the problem with describing 'voice'; you really can't pin down exactly what it is, I don't think.  I thought the 'truth' analogy was the best description I'd heard, so I repeated it here, but it's still kind of an abstract concept.  It definitely is something that depends on the writer; different people think differently, so they have different voices when conveying their ideas.  The problem is learning how to get that way of thinking to appear unshrouded on the page.

Or you could be right.  High school English teachers suck at teaching creative writing, I've discovered.  I learned so many wrong things from mine....


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## Poetigress (Feb 7, 2008)

Yeah, it's like an identity thing.  You can imitate a writer's style, but voice is deeper than that.  Voice encompasses and influences style, but I don't feel that they're interchangeable, at least not completely.  I'd know Bradbury anywhere, for example, no matter what style or tone the story was supposed to be in.  It's not only word choice and sentence length and stylistic choices like that, it's... I don't know.  The individual point of view, shaped through experience and emotion... personality on paper.   Eh.  *shakes head in frustration*

I know I read something once that broke this down (voice vs. style vs. tone) pretty well, but obviously it didn't stick with me, and it must be a book I read from the library or something, because I can't find it on my shelves.

And TakeWalker, I'm a little confused about what somebody meant by what you wrote having no tone.  I would think everything has a tone -- unless they meant it changed or was uneven, or not the right tone for the action in the story...?

I never took creative writing in high school, personally.  That class happened to be taught by the only English teacher I ever had that I couldn't stand, so I took journalism instead.  

I have to admit, though, that the whole issue of voice reminds me a lot of something my art teacher mentor used to say (which is something her mentor used to tell her) -- don't worry about expressing yourself; you can't help it.  Even if you're trying to imitate someone else -- as, for example, I imitated Kipling's style in one of my stories on FA -- your own voice still comes through.  

I think it comes down to things like trusting what you have to say, trusting your right to say it, and learning that what you have is valuable no matter how you think it compares to others' work.  Once you begin to get to that point, you can begin to really write what you're meant to write, with your own authentic voice, not because you think you're supposed to be writing some other way, or sounding more important or "deep" or witty or whatever.

Or, as this quote from J. D. Salinger: "One day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you.  That's when you'll finally produce the work you're capable of."

Still a long way to go, myself... :/


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## M. LeRenard (Feb 7, 2008)

> I never took creative writing in high school, personally. That class happened to be taught by the only English teacher I ever had that I couldn't stand, so I took journalism instead.


I never did, either.  It was just lumped in with my English lit/grammar class for a couple of days.  But everything my teacher taught us about creative writing, I learned later, was horribly wrong.



> I think it comes down to things like trusting what you have to say, trusting your right to say it, and learning that what you have is valuable no matter how you think it compares to others' work, so that you can write what you're meant to write, with your own authentic voice, not because you think you're supposed to be writing some other way, or sounding more important or "deep" or whatever.


Yep.
Reminds me (for some reason) of something else I read.  If you don't think your voice is coming through, you can always describe your story into a tape-recorder like you would describe it to a friend, then read a few passages from the story into a tape recorder, then listen to them and compare.  The goal is to get them to sound similar.  I don't actually know if that's useful or not, but it's another suggestion.


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## TakeWalker (Feb 7, 2008)

Poetigress said:
			
		

> And TakeWalker, I'm a little confused about what somebody meant by what you wrote having no tone.  I would think everything has a tone -- unless they meant it changed or was uneven, or not the right tone for the action in the story...?



Well, I never said it was a _constructive_ comment (given the context of the other comments provided me at the same time), just one that got to me. You know how that is. :|


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## Poetigress (Feb 8, 2008)

Yeah, I hear that.  Sounds as if the person might have meant to be constructive in some weird way, but didn't know enough of what he was talking about to get anything across.  Or you never know, it might have been somebody trying to show off with "lookit me, I know all the big writing terms... even if I don't really have a clue what they mean."  :?


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## TakeWalker (Feb 8, 2008)

Either or, madame. Either or.


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## osfer (Feb 14, 2008)

It's an interesting question, one that I've been asked in a number of the writing classes I've given over the years, but I rather feel that focusing on creating a taxonomy for the extremely abstract concepts of 'tone', 'style' and 'voice' is something of a distraction from the actual craft of writing.

Like any artisan, a writer must master his tools. This has a higher priority than writing 'truth' or finding his 'voice'. Just as an artist, in his education, learns to produce works in different styles and with different materials, a writer has to develop flexibility and productivity.

Only when you have experience with a variety of genres and modes of expression, when you can produce a locked-door mystery as competently as a piece of gonzo journalism, should you really be concerning yourself with finding your voice, finding what it is that you want to write about.

Novices in any craft, whether it's writing, art, music, even computer programming, often have a desire to follow a narrow path to the skills they want to master. A young guitarist wants to excel in flamenco, a young artist wants to be able to mimic his artistic idol and a young writer wants to write a masterpiece for a genre he adores.

The disappointing truth is that for all these endeavours, the narrow path is absolutely the wrong one. To truly excel in even one aspect of your chosen art, you need a breadth of learning that allows you to draw on other movements and interpretations, using them as the building blocks of your own products. 

But there is great pleasure in taking the wider path. Instead of trying to figure out what your voice is -- I'd recommend forgetting about the question for a few years. Challenge yourself to write in a variety of styles, genres, on a variety of topics. Some, of course, will be closer to your heart than others, and more enjoyable to write, but all of them are excellent exercise.

Not to plug, but I'd like to advise any readers of this thread to check out the Bad Dog Books podcast at www.baddogbooks.com, or go to iTunes and search for Bad Dog Books. 

The latest episode features a recording of one of the panels I gave at FC last month, and two more recordings will be forthcoming, which may prove interesting. These panels are quite... frivolous, since it was a con and people were there to have fun more than anything else.


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## M. LeRenard (Feb 14, 2008)

Well, that's useful advice and all, but I happen to be of the opinion that finding a unique voice or style or whatever you want to call it is one of the steps to mastering the craft of writing.  In another discussion on this forum, people got into an argument about whether or not a certain artist was great; the style was extremely realistic and detailed, and obviously the art took a lot of time, energy, and talent to produce.  But the pieces didn't have a great deal of personality, so, in fact, numerous folks didn't like said artist.  The same thing can happen with writing; you can write a mystery, a romance, a science fiction story, and a thriller, but if they're all generic, no one is going to read any of them.
So... yes, it's good to expand your ability to write different genres.  But you also want to come up with some reason for people to like your work OVER somebody else's, which, I would say, is voice.  That was more my point.  I think it's good for people to work on something like that during their whole writing careers, because, really, you have to.


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## osfer (Feb 14, 2008)

Oh, certainly. I wasn't arguing that the 'voice' is a negligible aspect of a writer's development, I just noted that it receives far too much attention in general. Like a novice guitarist spending months selecting, saving up for, and finally acquiring a very expensive, top-quality instrument -- instead of spending that time taking lessons, since even the finest instrument will still sound as dull as a cheap one until he masters some technique.

And I'll argue that maintaining reader interest doesnt necessarily have to do with writing truthfully. The truth is obviously best of all, but the next best thing is a very convincing lie. Fooling a reader into being interested, through careful manipulation and astute dramatic structuring, is a skill unto itself, entirely separate from innate talent. 

Which, again, isn't to say that the voice is unimportant. It's just something that can benefit much less from advice. If you don't know what your voice is, nobody can help you, because nobody can truly understand your mind except you. And while you're exercising various other techniques, you might notice certain habits creeping into your writing, certain tendencies, and very gradually, you'll discover who you are as a writer.

The reason I 'shot down' the question, for which I do apologize since it really is a legitimate one, is that I've seen too many young writers pine about their quest for their voice. Actually, a writer's voice can be likened to the fine, expensive guitar in my earlier analogy. It's great to know what it is, and it's absolutely required for excellence, but if your basic, fundamental writing skills aren't honed, your hard-fought voice won't benefit you in the slightest.

And I'll admit, I have a particular love of the *craft* of writing, as opposed to the art of it. While I admire the quality and sincerity of writers who write what you call 'truth', I have far greater appreciation for the craftsmen, the liars. People who write to make money, and do it excellently, displaying a sensitivity to their audience's desire, and an innovative sense of mass manipulation. 

I like that because I know how hard that work is. Finding your voice requires a lot of soul-searching, but it's a private, philosophical undertaking. Honing your skills is a question of hard, daily practice, unrelenting discipline, which shows a dedication to writing worthy of respect.

And therefore, in closing, I second the earlier poster's praise of NaNoWriMo


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## TakeWalker (Feb 14, 2008)

Whoa-hoa! Speak of the devil, Osfer's here!  </tangent>


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## osfer (Feb 14, 2008)

Well now. You wouldn't happen to be a guy who once went by a name that could be initialized to D-T-S?

Daniel?


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## Poetigress (Feb 14, 2008)

Eh, I guess I'm more of an "art" person myself, or at least equal in my appreciation of art and craft...  Then again, I haven't personally heard a lot of young writers pining about voice; I've mostly encountered people working on some aspect of craft.  *shrug*



> And I'll argue that maintaining reader interest doesnt necessarily have to do with writing truthfully. The truth is obviously best of all, but the next best thing is a very convincing lie.



I'll take a slightly different tack there: I do think it has to do with writing truthfully, but I also think writers lie convincingly in order to get at and express that truth -- a bit like wearing a mask that reveals more than it conceals.  I would argue that there has to be some kernel of truth at the core of the story in question, some truth that the reader can relate to, to make the story truly feel "real."


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## M. LeRenard (Feb 14, 2008)

Well, this isn't a thread about the basic, fundamental writing skills.  But I definitely agree with you; you can't learn to run before you learn to walk.
Maybe you misunderstand what I mean by 'truth' in writing (and by 'I', I mean Ezra Pound and whoever else I stole that idea from).  It really is something you need to have, even if you are writing for a specific audience.  It doesn't really have anything to do with innate talent; if it was just that, I wouldn't have bothered trying to explain it in this thread.  My point was mostly that, after a certain point, you need to stop trying to emulate your favorite authors and do it your own way.  Because otherwise, you will forever remain a hack.
In which case, trying to write 'truthfully' (in this abstract, hard to communicate sense of the word) requires just as much, if not more, work than just plain ol' learning how to write.  If anything, I'd think of it as the next step, something you learn after you successfully learn how to manipulate people.  Because if you can do both, you'll be a powerful force, really.
I hope I didn't give the impression that I wanted beginning writers to concentrate all of their energy on this topic.  I think it's good to think about it as early as possible, yes, but by no means should you struggle with spiritual concepts in writing before you learn how to spell words correctly.  You're absolutely right about that.


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## osfer (Feb 15, 2008)

I do believe we fundamentally agree, monsieur le Renard 

The journey of finding your voice and the challenge of writing the truth are so deeply personal and inaccessible to others that discussing it results, on the whole, in confusion and philosophastry. Regarding Poetigress' point about her appreciation for the art over the craft, that's equally valid, which is why I'm so honest about focusing on the craft.

While it's true that anyone can learn to string words together and to emulate a particular style or genre, it is my experience that far, far too few writers actually do. And a writer who has found his voice and writes from the truth, but hasn't developed his writing skills is, by and large, indistinguishable from any emo kid spouting contrasentimental nonsense 

In our modern understanding of art, we appreciate the ground-breaking, the innovative and the sublime, but we often forget that almost all art in history, even the majority of that which is still appreciated today, was in effect a product. 

Rembrandt's Night Watch was a commission, and while we nowadays admire his innovative use of realistic lighting, his motivation for that was largely financial: the subjects of the painting would pay him extra for a more prominent position int he lighting scheme. 

Shakespeare, whatever theories may roam about who he was (or who they were!) wrote magnificent prose that still sounds through our hearts and souls today, but even while being brilliant and writing the most sublime material, he was still at his core an entertainer. As stellar as his art was, he still slipped jokes in to please the crowd, and had to excise subjects from his plays that were offensive to the sensibilities of his client. He's praised for inventing many new words, but do consider he only invented the word 'puke' because saying 'vomit' on stage would cause legal action, and most probably, the delivery of the word 'puke' was done with a direct wink at the audience,  who were well aware of that scandal, just for laughs.

The two, of course, go hand in hand. Finding the voice and writing the truth are generally more appealing subjects for writers, since they're so deeply abstract and intangible. My heavy emphasis on the craft of writing was in no way meant to dismiss their importance, though. Again, it seems we fundamentally agree


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## M. LeRenard (Feb 25, 2008)

Well, alright then.  So long as we agree that this subject isn't a wasted one.  At the very least, I wanted people to realize that the 'voice' they hear about in school isn't something clear-cut like people want you to think; give them a little guidance as to what it really is.  
I'll be looking forward to any threads you might make about writing mechanics, then.


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## twilightiger (Mar 31, 2008)

Huh, being completely self taught I've never really come across the issue of voice quite like that before. The closest paralel I can draw from experience is mercedes lackey's description of the three bardic gifts. The talent, the inspiration, and the voice. She described them as being one's technical ability, one's ability to commit a saga to memory or create a new one, and the other, the 'voice' as simply being able to make the listener/reader feel and see the images as you yourself did. 
To me this meant Voice was achieved through the application of the various elements of style and composition. (Since I can't use mind powers to make people feel the same things I did while writing I'll stick with manipulating their emotions through prose)
Some of the more notable techniques I used to develop my Voice I learned from the masters themselves. Hemmingway used Iceburg writing, Tolkien used mythopeia, C.S. Lewis used nonsense clauses that produced a logical result, (I love that one) Shakespeare used Iambic meter, etc. 
The Bradbury example even illustrates an effective application of the paralel clause as shown in the final sentence. You could take it out and still have a great paragraph, but that final line reinforces the previous sentence by repeating the same information in a similar but different way.


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