I find it confusing that Voice is used to mean so many different things.

Some people say it's your natural writing style as a writer, when you progress beyond copying another writer's style.

A published author told me last night that she thinks you only find your voice when you also find your genre.

And then there are agents who say that Voice is the single thing which is most likely to grab them and convince them when they read the start of a new novel. But some say it can't be taught. So what is it that they actually want?

I recently heard a lecture from a respected creative writing tutor who said that you don't need to find your voice because everybody has a voice. You just need to ditch any bad habits you've learned, perhaps from business writing.

And then there is the Voice that you need to use in the prose when writing your character in 1st person or in close 3rd. In 1st it's fairly clear that you are writing as they would write/speak - although you might want to moderate it a bit if they would actually write in very poor sentences and grammar.

In close 3rd, I was discussing with somebody last night, perhaps what you need to produce is a voice which is a bastard child of your own narratorial voice and the way that the character would speak. Do you agree with me here? Is 1st actually the same, for the reason I give above (moderation of poor grammar/writing that the character would actually write)?

I'd love some input on this, since I like things to be clear cut, and Voice seems like a term used in so many different ways, which bugs me.

TIA, Deb

I'd love some input on this, since I like things to be clear cut

But they rarely are! One thing I've learned to resist is explanations, advice, etc, which is too prescriptive where something like this is concerned. Because, it seems that where true creativity is concerned, it's more a case of learning as much as you can about a subject but at the point, not exactly ignoring it but using it more as a leaping-off point. And if you do leap, and if you do connect, it's actually quite hard to then describe how to do it to anyone else.

I recently heard a lecture from a respected creative writing tutor who said that you don't need to find your voice because everybody has a voice. You just need to ditch any bad habits you've learned, perhaps from business writing.

I don't agree that everybody has a voice, at least an attractive voice. And I'm not sure about 'bad habits' unless they mean too rigid an approach that will prevent you taking off into the creative unknown. Now I think about it, voice is perhaps the substitute for baseline techniques: a more advanced platform that allows your writing to have lift to it rather than be just competent.

I found my voice simply by writing and writing, Debs. My first novel was quite serious. My next was humorous and i got a report done - the reader felt i was very near to finding my voice, with that novel - she could obviously pick up that i was writing naturally, it didn't feel forced.

I think that's the key - if it feels forced, you aren't quite there yet.

My writing now is fun and a bit sparky (i like to think!!) and this has even transcended genre. As you know, i sell to the People's Friend, - nothing like chick lit - and until recently, the fiction editor though i was a 20 year old girl living at home with her parents. She said i had a very young writing voice.

Just keep practising and it'll come naturally.

Yes, each character has its own voice, but that is partially shaped by the author's overall authorial voice imo.



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I am very jokey in real-life.

I wonder how many other people feel their authorial voice reflects their personality?

My biggest piece of advice, Debs, for finding voice, is to completely 'let go'. When that reader said i was near to finding mine, i still thought i should follow some rules about grammar, couldn't bring myself to put any swearing in, etc etc - and i think this was holding me back.

Now i just write what comes naturally into my head. If a little voice says 'should i/am allowed to write that' (stylistically) ignore it.

You've always got the rewrite.

No, it's not clear cut. And we do use that term in lots of ways.

The thing about cutting away everything (second-hand language, for example) that's getting in the way of your native voice is only half of it.

The other half is developing your word-hoard and flexibility of expression, so your writing can respond to whatever your imagination and sense of storytelling asks of it. It can be about reading widely in both time and genre - but it's also about doing your five-finger exercises with, for example, sentence structure, such as my 60 different ways of writing exactly the same words into a sentence - and Pascal did something similar with the same meaning and different words. I would say that if you can't perm and con the same basic elements of a sentence at least - I dunno - five ways, you haven't done enough work on this kind of thing. Debi Alper's collecting verbs, workshop by workshop, which mean the same as "ran slowly" and she's up to sixty plus...

It's the same spirit in which actors do yoga and Alexander technique: not to learn a specific set of skills and techniques as a swimmer or shot-putter does, say, but so that there's nothing in the way of whatever their imaginative inhabiting of the character demands: the body will just do what that inhabiting dictates.

And yes, this kind of getting out of your own light - doesn't, of course, guarantee that it IS a good voice. What it will be is yours, because it's responding freely to what you want to say and how you want to say it.

And - this is THE elephant in the room, perhaps, in creative writing - if what you want to say is very ordinary and un-exciting and has been said many times before - and how you want to say it is just not very original... well, the voice of the novel will be unoriginal and unexciting. Somewhere in the middle of that little bit of a writer which we call their talent, is surely that: that there is something here which no one else quite sounds like, and is quite trying to say.

When you're working with characters voices they're always - underneath - going to be the product of that same writerly personality - yours.

An actor can't change how tall she is, or what race he is, and gender's fairly fixed too - but she can make you feel her as a small person, or a male person, or black or white or old, or whatever - if the imagination is strong enough, and the body fluent enough.

My version of a 1819 soldier isn't going to sound like Essie Fox's or Sally Nicholls'. The proportions of "our" voice and the "character's" voice will vary through the narrative, especially if we're working in free indirect style, but they blend together at the join between them partly, I'd suggest, because at bottom they are the product of the same imagination and sense of language and storytelling.

And as long as the audience doesn't get stuck in a literal-minded way on the outer casing, they'll come with you. Which is where that other imponderable quality that editors are always looking for - confidence - comes in. Another aspect of getting out of your own light is about not apologising or pulling your punches.

And when people talk about a voice really grabbing them, it's about that, too: we have a powerful sense of a personality here, whether it's the beginning of True Grit, as Angus Cargill was saying the other day, or the beinning of I Capture the Castle. It's the sense of a real, individual, particular human (whatever blend that is of author and character) being that grabs us.



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Crossed with Petal.

Yes, "correctness" is another kind of hamstringing that you're trying to yoga-stretch your way out of. The problem is, of course, that letting go of correctness isn't the same as not knowing it in the first place.

When you do know it, you instinctively make the right call about when you need it for the sake of the meaning getting across, and when you can bend or even abandon it in the cause of making the writing more expressive.

I think that's the key - if it feels forced, you aren't quite there yet.

My biggest piece of advice, Debs, for finding voice, is to completely 'let go'.

I agree but I think this is the second of maybe three stages. First, obviously, you have to learn technique, otherwise 'letting go' will just be a mess. Second is, well, letting go. But I think there's a stage after that, when you don't exactly force things but you do apply a more conscious kind of innovation to what you write.

Sorry to use football as an example, but the way Barcelona play looks to me as coming from that third stage. They're trained at a young age in skills; then they're encouraged to express themselves. But then they play at a level that's also very conscious, intelligent and unpredictable. Watching them play the other night, I was amazed at how often they would do something counter-intuitive (at least to someone still at stages one and two), e.g. play the ball to Messi, even though he was surrounded by defenders, and it would work and in working presented the other team with something that was just about impossible to contain.

Just crossed with Emma. Yes to everything she says - great post. Liked this especially:

It's the same spirit in which actors do yoga and Alexander technique: not to learn a specific set of skills and techniques as a swimmer or shot-putter does, say, but so that there's nothing in the way of whatever their imaginative inhabiting of the character demands: the body will just do what that inhabiting dictates.

letting go of correctness isn't the same as not knowing it in the first place.

Yes, absolutely - which is why i think we need to all got through that stage of wanting to follow the rules. Lord, it took me a long time to realize i could, but then i (feel) i really found my confidence.

I agree but I think this is the second of maybe three stages. First, obviously, you have to learn technique, otherwise 'letting go' will just be a mess. Second is, well, letting go. But I think there's a stage after that, when you don't exactly force things but you do apply a more conscious kind of innovation to what you write.

Yes, well put.

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to realize I COULD BREAK THEM

One more thought - which is perhaps more one for writers who do, basically, feel they've found their voice, and perhaps a working capacity to use other voices too.

However flexible you learn to be - however chameleon-like you want to be in your writerly persona - at some point, you have to let go of trying for the voices that you will never have; you have to forgive yourself for NOT being the kinds of writer you'll never be, in terms of voice as well as subject and tone.

I've seen potentially excellent writers get so hung up on a sort of completist, perfectionist sense of trying to be and do everything that our form can be and do (in voice but also genre and philosophy and form) that that they never actually make the best of their inherent writerly self.

I think the analogy with one's own body goes beyond likening it to an actor: however fit and flexible and adaptable you are, there are some fundamentals about your skeleton and your physiology that you can't change.

And you will only fulfil your own potential - be as gorgeous as you can be - when you actually understand what your body and self is, and work it, dress it, and live in it to make the most of it.

Just as trying to take this novel down every single road that it could go down is a recipe for a mess, not a novel, trying to fulfil all the other kinds of potential which you're not built for can be a recipe for never fulfilling any potential at all.

You have to make your peace with what you are, and what you aren't.

Can I crash into Deb's thread with a query I had about voice and prose (I was going to start a thread and saw this), please?

I want to add an incomplete sentence as the second sentence in my WiP. It's the character's voice, but it's not grammatically correct.

Is it suicidal to put an incomplete sentence on the first line of the MS? By this I mean that I am constantly told that the agents look for every opportunity to put the WiP down if they think that this signifies poor writing/what is to come.

So, the question is, how do you get away with voice over prose, especially a new writer on the slushpile and very early on in the WiP?

I want to add an incomplete sentence as the second sentence in my WiP. It's the character's voice, but it's not grammatically correct.

Why not? It's right - right for the - well - you know.

Okay. You don't.

That's -

Well, let's ... You know it's difficult for me to concentrate because I should be doing my accounts.

Okay, I'll start again. Let's be sensible about this. If it's right for the voice, then it's right for the voice. People don't talk grammatically complete sentences, so you don't have to write them. If you're nervous, I'd suggest, do it more: be confident enough that the voice is right to do it fortissimo. Make the first sentence go beyond correct to right, as well, and/or the third.

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You can also quote Bakhtin, if you want a five-star literary theorist. Fiction is polyvocal: it always partakes partly of the human, spoken voice, as well as the written literary tradition. And speech doesn't conform to written rules, and fiction always has one foot in speech patterns.

It's a parallel case to why I frequently come to blows with copy-editors over commas, but I have David Crystal on my side. Punctuation has two jobs: articulating meaning, and articulating expression, and sometimes those two sets of rules - of what commas are for - are mutually exclusive.

In non-fiction, meaning in the factual, logical sense wins. In creative writing, meaning also encompasses feeling, emotion and sound. So we need the punctuation to do that.

Similarly, in grammar: it's about meaning in the logical sense, but it's also about evocation: the meaning of fiction also lies in how it brings human voices alive...

Thanks, Emma. I thought as much but, well, you know, I wasn't confident that the agents would know I intentionally took out the 'It was'.

Thanks so much for all the comments, and I'll come back and comment later when I haven't got to make my m-i-law's 80th birthday cake...

Just wanted to say quickly that I do feel I've found my voice as an author. My issue is about the variance in what people mean by it, and also, how to integrate character and authorial voice (which I think has been addressed so I will read that in detail later - thanks Emma).

This is one of the questions that gives me brain-freeze - I don't know what 'voice' is, and sometimes I'm not sure it's helpful to try and work it out.

But I sort of understand the comment about genre - I think there is a 'best fit' for people's writing, if you like, where their ideas and writing style feel most at home.

I wonder how many other people feel their authorial voice reflects their personality?

Hah! The novel I've just finished is part psychological thriller, part Scots gothic with touches of black humour....yes, you might be right

My issue is about the variance in what people mean by it,

one of the questions that gives me brain-freeze - I don't know what 'voice' is,

Does it help to think of Voice as a handy label for a whole bunch of issues?

(Rather as Showing and Telling is made up of all different kinds of technical things - verbs, say, but also vocabulary and senses and psychic distance and sentence structure... But it's handy to have the labels Showing and Telling to talk about the broad effect all those different things have working together)

We call it a voice because it uses words, but also because it's the product of a human being: a particular consciousness which shapes the words that tell the story in a particular way because of who that human being is (both personality, and age/gender/education/dialect/etc etc.

And because we connect better with other humans as one individual to another, it's the voice of the novel - the sense of an individual - which forms the human interface between the writer and the reader.

Which is why it's so crucial: it's the first thing that catches the reader, before they can be possibly be involved in the plot and characters. I don't think it's altogether true that you can't teach it: you can certainly help writers to find it, by all the techniques we've been talking about.

Although it remains true that if that consciousness only says ordinary stuff about ordinary things in ordinary ways, then - well - it's going to be a rather ordinary book.

And though it's most obvious in first-person openings (I've just looked up True Grit - fab!), it's also present in third-person.

There's likely to be more author in there, though not necessarily if it's very close 3rd person.

Think of the opening of Pride and Prejudice. There, in one sentence, is the whole novel, setting forward the theme of the novel (marriage as economic survival for women) but doing so by channelling her characters' voices - "[he] must be in want of a wife" - but framed by her authorial voice which puts at a slight distance between herself and her characters, with the slightly over-the-top and therefore ironic, "It is a truth universally acknowledged".

There's the voice of the novel...