There's the voice of the novel...

Yes. I mean, I see it, I can recognise it and I can see when it's not there, or not consistent, but I'm not sure I could explain it very well, if at all.

It's just sometimes it seems like Debac says, a convenient peg to hang all sorts of things on. Or maybe voice is the part which, if you get it right, other things seem less of an issue?

a convenient peg to hang all sorts of things on.

Yes, I think it is - a label, as it were - a whole collection of things both to do with what it's saying, and with how it's saying it.

Which is what people really mean, I think, when they say you can't teach voice. Voice is the product of something, not a thing in itself, if you like, and so you can't engineer it directly. You have to work with the things that produce it, and the means by which it's produced.

I'm looking for an analogy....

A singer's voice isn't a thing - an object - a phenomenon. All what we call a singer's voice is really, is just a way of disturbing air molecules in a controlled fashion.

That process of disturbment is the product of her diaphragm and vocal folds and tongue and soft palate and lips and so on. Those physical things are controlled by her brain, drawing on her mental sense of pitch/rhythm/volume.

But at a higher level, and when she's more experienced, what she does with pitch/rhythm/volume is controlled by what she's trying to express in the song - the basic meaning to make sense, and then the expressive, emotional, meaning (which may even be a characters', not hers).

So the singer may think in terms of "I'll place those Ts further forward which will encourage my soft palate to rise and then make the following vowel rounder."

Or she may think up a level: "I must make it sound rounder and more mellow", and the physiology will follow (assuming her training has linked up mind and body properly).

Or she may think up another level: "Mimi's feeling rather mellow and affectionate here", and the physiology will obey (assuming it's in training), and produce the rounder sound without her thinking directly about it at all.

And at some unconscious level the audience will feel that this is more genuine - more authentic - a performance, because it's happened the way things happen in real life: a situation, an emotion, has direct consequences on how our bodies speak and move.

So, a rather lengthy analogy to illustrate what I'm prodding at: if voice is the product of the combination of what you're trying to say, and how you're trying to say it, then you can think about it - and find and strenghthen it - at various levels:

- you can be clearer about what you're trying to say (the story you're telling - thinking about Mimi as a character at this moment)

- you can be clearer about how you want to say it (the tone of the piece, the 'take' on events - thinking about how you want Mimi to sound)

- you can consciously perm and con possible combinations of words to strengthen those effects (thinking directly about how to produce those sounds. When actors and singers talk about "relying on technique" they usually mean they've lost or not found the direct imaginative/emotional connection with the music or the character, which pushes technique into their mental background.)

- or you can do your writerly yoga and enrich your word hoard, and trust that once you're really, really clear about Mimi as a character, then the equivalent of your larynx and diaphragm will just respond.

That's actually the bit I left out of the posts further up: "finding your/the voice" also needs you to be really clear about what you are trying to say, and how you are trying to say it.

If the voice is fuzzy it may not be because you haven't done your yoga. It may be because at some level you don't know or haven't decided what you're trying to say or how you want to say it. I know that's true of my writing - when the writing is bland it's a sure sign that I haven't, really, connected properly with the life of the story.

Brilliant posts, Emma!

I like the definition of voice used in 'Finding Your Writer's Voice: a guide to creative fiction' (which co-incidentally, I just began reading yesterday). It suggests your writer's voice is

"the way you, the writer, project yourself artistically. It's the way you draw on yourself as you write - your sense of humor, irony, the way you see people and events, use language, and entertain. And it's the way you use these parts of yourself to tell a story - just the way a singer draws on vocal chords diaphragm, stomach muscles, and emotion to sing."

And it distinguishes between natural voice, which everyone has, whether you recognise it yet or not, and your writer's voice:

"Natural voice is like a finger pointing at the moon, but it isn't the moon itself. It takes time, patience, and work to refine this voice into a polished voice that can tell a story. But when your natural voice is allowed to lead the way, the result is a story with fire and spirit."

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?

This isn't quite how I understand it. The way I see it, in close third the narrator is close to your main character - sitting on his/her shoulder, if you like. So what the reader sees is skewed to that character's perspective. But it isn't actually that character - the narration is not actually coming from inside that character as it is in first, which is why close/limited third is more flexible than first.

The narrator could go one step closer than this sitting on the shoulder position; it could go inside the character's head and reflect their thoughts using the character's own characteristic words and expressions, embedding these in the narration by changing the person and tense. The thought and the language belong to the character, not the narrator, but the narrator reflects them - holds a mirror up to them, you could say.

There are techniques that let you get closer still (direct interior monologue & stream of consciousness - think of Virginia Woolf or Joyce, for example) just as there techniques you can use to position the narrator further away from the characters (objective viewpoint, think of Hemmingway). It's all to do with the level of distance and the question of where the language is coming from - whether it's the narrator's language/voice, or the character's language/voice (words, style, diction, grammar etc.)

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?

Sort of.

To me, it all comes clear if you don't think in terms of the either-or of "close" or "not-close" or whatever the other one is, which is too binary, but think in terms of degrees of psychic distance, combined with what James Wood calls narrative mode.

In normal, realist fiction, the thoughts/voice of a character are reported, as if they were dialogue, by the narrator, who may also tell us about the character:

God, how I hate snowstorms! Henry thought. He had done so ever since he was a child.

In free indirect style, we get closer in, and the thoughts/voice of the character begin to colour the narrative itself (you can tell the difference because the narrative stays in the person and tense of the narrative) The two voices interpenetrate:

God how he hated snowstorms! Ever since that time at Gran's he'd hated them.

And in stream of consciousness, the sense of a narrator's voice fades out altogether, and the character's voice is dominant:

Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, like Gran's and the time he nearly died.

And of course you can do exactly the same in first person - where you still have a narrator and a character, who just happen to inhabit the same body, and their voices are distinct, and interpenetrate to varying degrees.

<Added>

I prefer "stream of consciousness" as a term to "interior monologue" because SoC can include sense data, whereas IM tends to imply no more than what the character actually says to themself.

To students I often describe SoC as a "brain dump" - though obviously in fact an artfully selective one - evoking the actual sensation of existing in time, moving through whatever each moment contains.

I prefer "stream of consciousness" as a term to "interior monologue" because SoC can include sense data, whereas IM tends to imply no more than what the character actually says to themself.

Yes that's true. But IM used within third-person narration - without alteration, comment or any attribution by the narrator - it's fuses the narrative to the character more than free indirect, doesn't it? In terms of controlling distance moves in and out from the character, it's another fine grain of control - fully inside and direct but not the 'everything in the moment-ness' of SoC?

The example Jauss gives is from Elizabeth Bowen's The Demon Lover:

"As a woman whose utter dependability was the keystone of her family life she was not willing to return to the country, to her husband, her little boys, and her sister, without the objects she had come up to fetch. Resuming work at the chest she set about making up a number of parcels in a rapid, fumbling-decisive way. These, with her shopping parcels, would be too much to carry; these meant a taxi-at the thought of the taxi her heart went up and her normal breathing resumed. I will ring up the taxi now; the taxi cannot come too soon: I shall hear the taxi out there running its engine, till I walk calmly down to it through the hall. I'll ring up-But no: the telephone is cut off. She tugged at a knot she had tied wrong."

Yes, I see what you mean. They're both just tools in the toolkit, aren't they.

Because of course instead of this:

these meant a taxi - at the thought of the taxi her heart went up and her normal breathing resumed. I will ring up the taxi now; the taxi cannot come too soon:

Bowen could have done this:

these meant a taxi - at the thought of the taxi her heart went up and her normal breathing resumed. She would ring up the taxi now; the taxi couldn't come too soon:

I assume she didn't because she wanted the jump into present-tense-first-person, directly quoted thought. Maybe something to do with the fact that the character is actively saying these things to herself, if you see what I mean: "I will ring up the taxi now" is a conscious decision, if you like.it wouldn't take much before she'd be saying these things aloud: a flavour of awareness of self which there wouldn't be at other.

I do love Bowen.

Yes, exactly.


Picking up on something from back on page one:

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.

Is there anything that's like a writer's equivalent of Hanon's piano exercises? I'm generally not very good at doing exercises, but I can see they might benefit - if I could find some interesting & useful ones.

Although ...

60 different ways of writing exactly the same words into a sentence

I do this one all the time...every time I sit down to edit!

LoL!

I do keep meaning to make a proper collection for my book-of-the-blog, if I ever get the breathing space to write it. There is the 60 ways one, which I did it here:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2011/11/a-million-little-versions.html

and another exploration of word order:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2009/09/the-right-words-in-the-right-order.html

And there's a series of exercises for your describing muscles in this post about description:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2012/06/how-would-you-describe-it.html

Thanks - I'll give these a go, the description one in particular will probably be good for me (as I already do a lot of varying sentence order, length & rhythm). And I'd completely forgotten until it was mentioned in one of those posts that the Art of Fiction has exercises in the back.

I'm hoping I can use exercises to help keep my writing muscles supple on days when I don't have time to work on the wip, of which there are many at the moment. 15-20 mins is not enough time for me to get anywhere with the wip, but is enough time for an exercise or freewrite...

Sorry for the slight thread derail.

Yes, I always forget those Gardener exercises. They're great. I love the 3 x 250 word sentences one.

I'm always interested how many new writers are surprised by the idea that you might do exercises completely separate from the WIP - and that it might be better that way, because you're not tied in to the things that the WIP has already pre-decided for you, as it were.

Thank you very much everyone for your posts. Emma's are fab as usual.
Terry's comment:

I don't agree that everybody has a voice, at least an attractive voice.

seems to marry up with Emma's comment:

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.

and I guess this is what I've been struggling with the most. I think I've found my voice, at least the first two stages of it as defined by Terry:

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.

I def feel I've got the first two (maybe I'm wrong, but I feel that), and I have a consistent voice, but I do worry that it's not zingy enough, and so perhaps I need to consciously innovate to make it so.
Emma said:

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

And Petal:

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

I guess this is what I want to focus on more consciously. As Emma says in a later post,

When actors and singers talk about "relying on technique" they usually mean they've lost or not found the direct imaginative/emotional connection with the music or the character, which pushes technique into their mental background.)

So I think I do the subconscious part of that, but I also need to learn some tools to sometimes apply the conscious bit, perhaps, to make it more of a compelling voice?
This is really useful, and reassuring:

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.

and this:

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

I know I will never write like Roddy Doyle. My natural voice is too cool and logical. But I guess I can learn to reach a middle ground when appropriate for the character, or perhaps I should always do it (but in different ways for each character)?

I really appreciate the discussion and everybody's contributions, cos it's helped me to see how Voice really can be used to mean a load of very different things. At least I know now that I'm not bonkers that people were all using it quite differently. It's all looking a lot clearer now, and many thanks.

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?

Yes, I agree with that idea but had not thought of it as Voice till someone said it to me three days ago. I think of it more as having found your forte in the writing world. For instance, I thought I wanted to write literary fiction and screenplays, but I was wrong about the first and the second was not my strength. Thrillers seem to be where I am most comfortable, which is odd cos until recently I hadn't been an avid thriller reader.

Oh yes, my authorial voice reflects my personality. People said that one of my vp characters - Sophie - came over as cool and intellectual. Well, that's not wrong for her at all, but it's actually how I am (in approach, not saying I know lots). I worry therefore that my other characters also come over as cool and intellectual when they shouldn't necessarily. I need to bury my own voice a bit more and reflect the voices of my characters more effectively in the prose.

Dialogue is a different issue - not sure how distinctive I make their dialogue cos I have a cloth ear. I wish I didn't, but I do. I can make dialogue sound natural, but not sure I can capture differing speech rhythms. I do it all by "going into the character" but not consciously. I want to have more conscious control over this.

Although Emma's analogy with the singers suggested that it was better to be working subconsciously, it's probably also important to be able to analyse it consciously and gauge how effectively it is working.

What an interesting discussion. I feel that 'voice' is something that begins to emerge as you get a handle on technique. You stop thinking about technique so much and your mind is free to let your voice come through. It's much easier to trust your instinct when you know you have a certain command of technique and your voice grows from instinct, I think. Sometimes I feel like I'm pushing through a big load of fur coats trying to find Narnia and just when I think I'm there - it's getting colder, I can see the gleam from the lamp-post - there are yet more coats to get past. But I do believe Narnia is there to be found and that it's not too far away.

Emma's analogy with the singers suggested that it was better to be working subconsciously, it's probably also important to be able to analyse it consciously and gauge how effectively it is working.

I think the goal is for it to be working unconsciously/intuitvely most of the time - but

a) you need to train your unconscious/intuition by working consciously (like driving, or reading. Once upon a time you had to spell out c-a-t...)

b) even when it works well(ish) intuitively quite a lot of the time, knowing how to tackle the problem consciously is essential, for the days when it's not working. (which is how the "whole word" reading method works well for "cat", but leaves you at sea when you're trying to read - or spell - "chrysanthemum"...)

and c) - yes, if your instincts, or another reader, says it's not working, again, you need to be able to bring it up to a conscious level and work with it deliberately.

I feel that 'voice' is something that begins to emerge as you get a handle on technique. You stop thinking about technique so much

I think this is often true: what appears to be learning technique is also about stretching your writerly capacities and repertoire of ways to write things. But some people have a great voice without ever having thought about technique at all. The problems start when they meet problems, and have no consciousness of how it all works to help them overcome those problems (see 3 above)

TVM Emma. That really chimes with how I feel. I have learned technique and do write subconsciously, but I now feel I need to learn more technique to improve further, and also for when I think something isn't working well enough.

You're a star - you always explain things so clearly and lift the fog. X