VOICE. There’s a word writers often hear. Agents always claim to be seeking writers with a “new, fresh voice.” What the heck does that mean? Voice always struck me as a sort of fleeting, intangible, indefinable concept, one of those things you’d only recognize if you saw it.
But it’s really pretty simple. Voice is merely a distinctive way of looking at things.
Which often begins with viewpoint. There are lots of different ways to tell a story. Are you writing your story from a single point of view, or from multiple? Past tense, or present? Is it told from first person or third, or do you switch off? Do we experience your story from above, from a distance, up close, or immersed within? Do you have a separate narrator to tell your story, or does it come from inside a character? Is the point of view (POV) stable, or unreliable? Do you tell a linear, chronological story, or do you skip about, with flashbacks, bits of memory, or surrogate scenes? Or do you structure your story from a different perspective, maybe as a question-and-answer session, a single long monologue, or the POV of an animal, child, or object. Viewpoint is one way to give your story a unique voice.
More frequently voice comes through the voice of the characters. We all have our own way of looking at things. What about your characters? Any character can stand out. It’s only a matter of excavating into that character enough to find out what makes him/her distinct and different.
Your character may speak differently than others. That could be an accent or dialect from a different time or place. It could also be lingo from a class of people, like the choppy rawness of street slang, the pointed eloquence of high society, or the verbiage and word usage of any job or profession. (Any study of language in dialogue, or even voice as a whole, should begin with an examination of Elmore Leonard’s work.)
Even more important to a character’s voice is the way s/he looks at things. What details does your character notice? The bank president, the paid-by-the-hour teller, the hurried customer, the janitor, and the bank robber will all spot different details when they stride through the bank’s front door. The details important and meaningful to your character shout out his/her voice. That’s why you should consistently search for specific details in your scenes that only your POV character would notice.
Sometimes the details a character sees say enough. Other times, the details are not as important as the way they are expressed. Your characters’ attitudes, more than any other single thing, gives voice to—SPEAKS—your story. Want an example? Let’s look at the way these two people, a young slave-warrior and an old Muscogee woman, experience the same snowstorm in my book FRONTIER ON FIRE:
Snow flew like cotton in a tornado, narrowing Shad’s world to a few blurry feet. Under the rock ledge, he huddled close to a tiny fire of dried grass and buffalo dung. Starved for its meager heat, he snatched a few moments’ tortured slumber before leaping sparks singed him awake. His backside near frozen, ice crystals in his lashes, he watched his breath form clouds of pulsing steam. He closed his eyes and screaming soldiers rolled through his head. Faced with that terror, he ran. What else could he have done? The best among them did the same. Even Charlie Bowlegs, were he not dead, would have saved himself. Shad pulled closer to the fire, his insides as hollow as a gutted fish. Had Bowlegs lived, he would be gathering men, planning bold ways to strike back. Shad just wanted to be warm.
And the old woman:
Wrapped in her blanket, her tortoise shells rattling with every step, Epose Sasakwa marched with purpose, careful to step where the tall grass peeked above the snow. As long as she kept her legs moving, she stayed warm. The refreshing, brisk air and wondrous white landscape fortified her. A few bites of jerky and a handful of snow could keep her going all the way to Kansas.
What does your POV character love, hate, loathe, believe, find ridiculous in a scene? What grudges, biases, prejudices, and opinions do they have in the scene? About other characters in the scene? About the place itself, or the world of your story? And how do they express it?
Would your POV character deliver Susie’s sorrow this way: Susie felt betrayed and heartbroken?
Or like this: You don’t know Susie. You think you know Susie, but I know Susie. Her love comes from deep within. She gives all of herself, to the full, when she loves until she can give no more. She doesn’t—she can’t—hold back. That would not be Susie. The betrayal shook, then ripped her heart leaving her to dangle in shreds like the roots of a fallen oak torn out of the ground. If you know Susie, you know it can’t be otherwise?
Voice is not magic, a lucky accident, or a chance event. It comes from the writer’s skillful use of these four aspects: 1) viewpoint; 2) dialogue; 3) detail; and 4) attitude.
