Hi everyone...

As a newbie, I am quite intrigued and perplexed by the idea of voice, so I would appreciate any words of wisdom and or simple explanations!

Now, I get that with 3rd person omniscient, there is a very clear narrative voice and that is the author's and I can recognise certain author's voices that's for sure.

But what is making me fuzzy is the idea of there being a distinction between a character's voice and your authorial voice, especially when writing in 1st person (which I am). If everything you are saying should be coming from the brain and mouth of your main character, how on earth is your authorial voice supposed to resonate? Not that I am trying to make it, I am just pretending to be a 10 year old girl in my WIP....

Maybe I am getting too technical for my own good??

Any comments will be very well received....

Ta!
Rachel

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certain authors' .....in fact...:-)

If everything you are saying should be coming from the brain and mouth of your main character, how on earth is your authorial voice supposed to resonate?

I wouldn't say it has to resonate. I will automatically be there, like a fingerprint, (albeit, some 'fingerprints' are more distinctive than others), but it's the character's 'voice' that the reader will notice fist and foremost. Only when they've read a few books by the same author will they become familiar with that author's particular 'voice'.

- NaomiM

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oops, It will....

Ah....I see. The fingerprint thing makes sense....

Thanks Naomi!

One thing to watch out for is slipping into 'passive voice'. It usually shows itself with the overuse of 'was' in the prose.


- NaomiM

Rach, if you think about a character - a 10yr old girl, say - and imagine your five favourite authors writing a novel in the 'voice' of that girl, they'd all come out different, wouldn't they? Both in what they say, and how they say it. That's their writerly DNA - I love the idea of a fingerprint - showing through what we read at the simple level as the character's voice.

Just to complicate things, I'd suggest that even in a first person narrative, there are two different voices: the character-in-the-story (when she speaks, or her thoughts are quoted directly), and the narrator, who just happens to be the same entity as the character in the story, but (like any narrator) is standing outside and after those events.

This concept is clearest in the kind of story which is formed as an adult, or old character, telling the story of something which happened when they were young. The Go-between is possibly the most perfect example of this. But even when the character-narrator isn't much felt as a presence in themselves, they are in some ways a different entity from the character-in-action in the story.

'Voice' in the sense of passive voice is grammar - a different thing altogether. Although 'was' isn't, to my mind, a useful indicator:

"I was hot, he was impatient, she was a good cook and together we were going to take over the world before anyone was in a position to see us coming..."

Emma

When writing first person, I think the character's voice is about the tone of the sentences - the register, degree of informality, use of regionalisms / swearing / slang, amount of 'literary' language like use of metaphors and other things that are to do with the exact words you put down on the page.

When writing first person, I think the authors 'voice' comes in to it at the bigger level - the theme and topic of the story, the use of irony, the selection of material that is included and exluded from the tale.

I'm not explaining this very well, but I write almost always first person and my characters have different voices, but I also have a voice as a writer and that, I hope, is distinctive and to do with the themes and topics and situations and types of characters that I am interested in.

It might be different for you and others, but that's how my mind makes sense of it.

Hi guys, thanks for the replies.

Emma, I know what you mean about there being two different voices in 1st person, especially when as you say, there is a distinct passage of time.

So then, if the authorial voice is a culmination of everything that we as individuals add into the cooking pot when writing, is it something that you can control/work? I would think not, but I may be wrong, just an assumption?

Re passive voice: I was under the impression passive voice allows subjects to have something done to them:
The child was hit by the car, rather than,
The car hit the child.

Please correct if wrong!!

Rach

Re passive voice: I was under the impression passive voice allows subjects to have something done to them: The child was hit by the car, rather than, The car hit the child.

Yes, that's exactly right - nothing to do with the kind of 'voice' we're talking about.

I'm not sure 'authorial voice' is a terribly useful concept, to be honest: of course, your writerly DNA/finger-print underlies your prose, it can't help it, but the phrase 'authorial voice' suggests that there's a strong sense of the author-as-narrator, and while some writers and their books have that, others don't: either the characters' voices are apparently dominant, or each of their novels has a different narrative voice.

So I think you could work on it - study your most characteristic kinds of expression, and make them clearer and stronger - just as you could a character's voice. But I suspect that's quite hard to do and avoid sounding mannered and self-conscious (mind you - some readers will feel anything as mannered and self-conscious if it says anything fancier than the cat sat on the mat).

I think it's better to work on your writerly toolkit in general, like an actor being fit and flexible and alert in voice and body, so that their voice and body will respond naturally and without restrictions or inhibitions, to whatever the part demands. As a writer, that means knowing what your project is in width and depth, and then having plenty of technical control and understanding of your craft, ; and training your ear for the music of words, a big vocabulary and developing a mastery of grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure to serve that ear, so you don't just get it correct, you get it right for what you want to say... In other words, you can then concentrate on the project, and the right words will get on the page, so that readers read as you want them to and get what you're trying to say.

You wouldn't expect to survive a tennis match without having done tons of training - and not just by playing other tennis matches, but taking apart individual strokes and strategies. Same goes for writing a novel. There's a limit to what you can learn just by writing stories...

Emma

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If anyone doesn't know what I mean by 'your project', it's here:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2011/04/whats-your-project.html

I'm not explaining this very well, but I write almost always first person and my characters have different voices, but I also have a voice as a writer and that, I hope, is distinctive and to do with the themes and topics and situations and types of characters that I am interested in.

This for me gets close to nailing what is a hard to hammer topic. I don't think it's a contradiction to say, even if it seems like it on the surface, that your characters have a voice and so do you as an author, and by implication the writing 'voice' is a necessary combination of the two. What often isn't discussed is the subject of how attractive is the author as an entity within a story; in fact, the implication usually is that the writer is sort of separate from the writing unless he/she decides to interject in some way.

But in oral story-telling times/cultures, the story-teller was of course very much the voice of, if not a character in, the story. And while he would of course have been trained in the art, I suspect his degree of success with an audience would come down to how much they found him attractive as an entity/voice. With publishing and the steady globalisation of story-telling, we've tended to move away from the story-teller as key part of the voice. But I believe the 'magic' of a story - that hard to define something extra some writers have - is actually down to the voice of the author, whether or not he/she is directly interjecting it.

Of course, it's probably impossible to define the ingredients of what makes an attractive author voice. But I suspect it's helped when the author possesses a combination of deep interest in how people tick with warmth, humanity, humour and insight. Which is perhaps why Kurt Vonnegut frequently used the authorial voice - sometimes actually putting himself in the story. And why by the same token, it's probably advisable that someone like Jeffrey Archer does everything in his power to remove any trace of it from his stories.

Terry

Emma and Terry - thanks so much for your input.

You have both raised some really interesting ideas that I've never really considered before.

Terry - I totally get what you mean about an author's voice being attractive. It is that indefinable quality that gets me running to Waterstones every time Ian McEwan releases! A bit like what Simon Cowell calls the X Factor perhaps? Sorry for the terrible comparison....:-)

Emma- found your blog - how incredibly useful. Thank you.

Rach