I'm sure I've asked this before, but it is still bugging me, and I am still searching unsuccessfully for enlightenment. What I can never understand - and maybe there is no answer to it - is how you can write either in the first person, or third person but from the close-in POV of your main character(s), and yet still have your own ‘voice’ as an author?

I can see that an author who uses an intrusively omniscient (non-vanilla omniscient) voice to move the story along and comment externally on events - like Dickens, for example - has a distinct authorial voice. But these days - and especially in romance and women’s commercial fiction - that’s meant to be outmoded and not the thing to do, except very sparingly. We are told that it blocks enagagement, and in this genre especially, engagement is all. Yet we are also told that our characters should each speak in their own distinct voice - not only their dialogue but their internal monologues should be written to their own distinct rhythms, refelecting the patterns of their speech and thoughts, their syntax and vocabulary. And all our characters are meant to be new and different, right? So how, if we are speaking in our characters’ voices almost all the time, can we at the same time have/develop our own distinctive and individual ‘voice’ as an author? The more we are ourselves, and establish our own trademark style, the more we are failing (surely?) to immerse ourselves properly in the expression and thought patterns of our characters?

It’s a mystery to me! Can anyone elucidate?

Rosy

Rosy, I know exactly what you mean (though I'm still not really here...) about this question, but I think it probably solves itself, in that you can't help sounding like yourself, even when you think you're sounding like your characters, just as an actor is as once a character and themselves, or as a forensic handwriting expert can recognise someone's writing even when they're trying to disguise it. There are things you don't even know you do: an underlying quality to how you string a sentence and a paragraph together, the pace and rhythm, habits of punctuation. They're probably more obvious to others than they are to you. (I think I look very different from my sisters and my mother because it's the differences that I notice: the rest of the world thinks we look quite comically similar...). I suspect that if you mixed up some extracts of different voices from your work, say, with some extracts from someone else's, someone familiar with your work could pick them out. I think once you've absorbed tons of good writing, and moved beyond it into your own synthesis, your voice becomes individual quite naturally.

But I think when the trade talks about 'voice' in this way they're often also talking about something even harder to pin down, and less to do with the arrangement of individual words and sentences. It's about what you're saying, and how you're saying it, what you chose to tell of a story, as well as how you chose to tell it. And, again, I think that comes about quite naturally, once you're trying to say your own thing.

I think these two kinds of voice are one of the most important reasons for a writer trying to find their writing, and why I bang on so tediously about it on WW (and elsewhere). Come to think if it, maybe teachers and editors should talk about finding your own writing, not your own voice.

An analogy could be with handwriting. When I was growing up my mother taught us italic handwriting, partly in defence against the standard curly commercial copperplate our American school taught. At my primary school they taught us Marion Richardson, and working to a different model was a matter of virtuous family rebellion. It was only in a little book called Teach Yourself Handwriting - aimed at adults who disliked theirs for one reason or another - that I came across the idea of handwriting as something that should be free of a model: that you have a natural, personal way that you write, and that the goal - through exercises for relaxation and then control, and then a model alphabet specifically for this purpose - was to find that ease through which your individuality of slant, joins, heights, and so on could emerge.

Sorry, longwinded, but you take the point. And I'm not really here - surely you've realised?

Emma

That's really interesting, Emma. And kind of helpful. So you'd say, basically, try to write in your characters' voices, and your own individuality as an author (which could be the underlying slant/approach of the story as much as the micro-level style) will come through of its own accord...?

R x

Yes, I think that's exactly what I'm saying - in other words, relax and don't worry, and your 'voice' will happen! I suspect in your case it has already.

Emma

Probably a wobble based on switching back to a very different type of story (very chick litty), after proof-reading H&M. The two were such poles apart, genre-wise - and I'd been thinking, anyway, about writing 'like' the characters, not 'like' me - and I may even have fallen into the trap of thinking 'right, better write in a chick lit style now' - and I suddenly had no sight of what, if anything, made both these books 'me'. But I guess obsessing about it doesn't help - it just freezes you up and makes you self conscious. Maybe the things which make a writer's work his/her own are only perceptible to other people. Nrrrgggh.

Thanks, anyway, Emma - and go back to enjoying not being here!

R x

How interesting, and also very reassuring. Thanks, you two, for such a good thread (especially given that neither of you are here!)
p

Isn't this something to do with your world view, that comes out in your writing and makes what you (one) writes different from what someone else does, too, as well as the stuff that's been mentioned above? Sometimes the reason I don't like a book is because there are some assumptions made that I just can't buy into. Can't think of a negative example, but maybe this will serve as a positive one. I'm catching a Winifred Holtby dramatisation of one her novels on WH this week and it chimes with my own particular brand of feminism so much that I can't help BUT enjoy it. Her world view is something she's obviously convinced about and it affects her characterisation and story line to the very core. I wonder if Voice and World View are part of the same thing, is what I'm struggling to say.

Yes, I think it can be to do with your world view, which is what I probably wasn't saying clearly enough in 'what you choose to say and how you choose to say it.' And it needn't just be the issue you think you're talking about, but can be your natural take on the human condition.

Though I do remember a literary journo (on bad satellite phone line) talking perceptively about the 'lost children' theme in TMOL, which is very important, and then saying, 'So what do you think about Lost Children?', and I didn't have a thesis, a principle, an agenda. It sounded so feeble to have to say the truth, which was, 'Well, I don't know, really, it just emerged as something characters had in common, a bit of a theme. I'm not trying to say anything,'.

Emma

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And I'm with you on Winifred Holtby, though I've only dipped into her: I suspect she's a really underrated writer.

Emma