Voice is one of the most important narrative devices to compelling storytelling. Voice is what draws us in, and also what holds us, even when plot may be failing us as readers.
More than the other narrative devices, voice elicits an aesthetic response because it is more immediately registered through the senses. Plot, characterization, point-of-view are filtered through the intellect. Voice is the closest thing we have for casting spells, for luring readers (and ourselves) into our dreams.
But what exactly is voice? In talking about writing, the term "voice" is used to mean many things. Sometimes we're talking about the voices of our characters. Other times we're talking about the voice of our narrator or storyteller. Still other times we're talking about our own voice, our "writer's voice."
It's the latter one we usually find most difficult to pin down. How do we know if we have one, a distinctive voice that separates us from other writers? What if we don't? Can we develop one? Do we even need to worry about it?
Listen to Frank McCourt in the video below. It isn't just his wonderful accent, which we can audibly hear when he's reading aloud to us. Pay attention to the words he uses, and you actually begin to hear that lovely, hypnotic Irish accent, that voice, even if you're reading it from the page, which is all any reader ever has. This is a spell-casting voice, a voice that pulls you into the writer's dream.
When I'm writing, I HEAR before I SEE. Maybe you do, too. Some people get an image, a glimpse of something, a visible object that pulls them into their stories. This rarely happens to me. I hear voices long before I can see objects around my characters. Unless a voice names an object while it's speaking, it requires a deliberate act on my part to go back and describe things, to flesh things out. What comes first, without too much bidding, are voices.
Maybe it's because my favorite pasttime as a child was to sit under the feet of the adults in my family and listen to them tell stories. I grew up surrounded by great storytellers, all of them colorful and animated. I seem to be the only one who has never been able to tell a good story. That wasn't my role. I was appointed the listener. And I'm still the listener. Ask me to speak, and I make a mess of a good story. When I write something that seems to be working, when I'm not forcing too much, it isn't me at all who speaks but someone else entirely, someone separate from me. I love the video Katrina Denza recently posted on her blog where Elizabeth Gilbert talks about this very thing. The voices we hear, the images we see come from a source outside of us. Go check it out.
Here are some thoughts on what voice is and where it comes from:
First, what is it?
Voice is that "tribal narrator" E.M. Forster refers to in Aspects of the Novel, which I wrote about in an earlier post. The writer's job, Forster says, is to "transform the reader into a listener to whom a voice speaks, the voice of the tribal narrator, squatting in the middle of the cave, and saying one thing after another until the audience falls asleep among their offal and bones."
This is exactly what happens to the writer as well, BEFORE it happens to the reader. This spell of the tribal narrator is cast first upon the writer, sitting at her desk, eyes staring through the monitor in front of her as she listens to a voice, not her own, who begins telling a story.
This voice of the tribal narrator may be the same voice that appears again and again, recurring in one story we write after the other as a means of understanding what John Gardner calls "[our] tics and oddities, so that [w]e can present them to [our readers] by conscious art." These writers, Gardner tells us in On Becoming a Novelist, "write from a bold idiosyncratic vision." And maybe also we could add, from a bold idiosyncratic voice.
Or maybe we've noted that our work doesn't seem to have one recurring distinctive voice. I think when we speak of writers "having a voice," what we mean is we recognize a voice pattern in their work. If we don't have a clear voice pattern, it doesn't mean necessarily that we don't have a voice. Every successful story we write yields authentic character voices and also a compelling narrative voice. If they didn't, we couldn't count those stories as successes, could we? Because we don't have a signature voice pattern across our work may only mean that we have many voices, that we are the kind of writer John Gardner might consider of the higher order, those who "move like a daemon from one body -- one character -- to another. Rather than master the tics and oddities of his own being and learn how to present them in an appealing way," Gardner says, "he must learn to step outside himself, see and feel things from every human -- and inhuman -- point of view." In essence, he must speak for everyone and everything.
So where does voice come from?
Our voices, they say, are as distinctive as our thumbprints. None of us sounds like anyone else. We may share certain characteristics with others, but what we say and how we say it are based on all the qualities that make us unique beings. When a voice stands out to us in literature, it's often because the speaker comes from a distinct place and he transports us to that place and shows us a world we may or may not know.
Place plays a critical role in who our tribal narrators are or will become. Place, perhaps more than anything else, affects not just how we speak -- what we say and how we say it -- but whether or not we say anything at all. What we don't say. Place is not only about landscape but also about culture, for we know that landscape determines culture. Sometimes my own tribal narrator says "Mama." Other times it says "Mommy." Yours may say "Mother" or "Mum" or "Ma" or "Madre" or "Meuter," or "Ma'am," as Frank McCourt's storyteller does.
Time is also important to voice. Except for the voice of God, no voice exists outside of time and place. The specific details of any particular time and place will yield a very particular voice.
Finally, what I think of as mood is also closely tied to voice. Some may call it style, but mood is the resulting effect of style, I think. What kind of trance does the voice cast over you when you read? What mood does it conjure? Here's where exposition, narrative summary, comes to play. What is being described, and how is it being described? What kinds of metaphors are used? What thoughts are revealed? What particular words have been selected? How long are the sentences, and what effect does their length have on the story's mood? What connotations are being made? What allusions?
Point-of-view is not so much a determining factor of voice, I think. A writer can use any POV, even the omniscient viewpoint, and still maintain a consistent voice across his work because the particulars of time, place, and mood will still work, if the author chooses, to create a voice that may sound very similar to other work he's written in other POVs.
Try this:
Look back through a story you've written and underline words and phrases that seem distinct to a time and place or that capture the mood of a character or of the time and place in which the characters live. Try to isolate anything you think really sounds like voice to you. See if you can determine why this or that snippet of language sounds in your head like voice. Is it stylistic? Is it the sentence construction you've used? The figurative language? Is it the dialogue your characters speak? Is it the distinct objects and images you've selected that ground the story to a specific time and place? Now look through other stories and do the same thing. Are you repeating certain images, settings, character voices? Are you repeating stylistic choices you've used before? Does one story seem to have a stronger or weaker voice than another? See if you can isolate why. Is the language any less specific? Have you switched up something? Does anything ring flat in one story or the other? Could it be sharpened a bit more? Do you have a storyteller in any of your stories who casts a spell and pulls you into the story? Which ones do and which ones don't?
Voice, like theme, is one of the more elusive narrative devices. It's hard to teach and it can be tricky to study because it's the one element of writing that is fundamentally unique to every writer. It gets lumped in with POV often, which makes it even murkier. I think we "find" our voices by modeling other writers we admire, who seem to be speaking our language, and then by working to refine and distinguish our voice from the voice of the mentor or model.
No one wants to be a parrot. We all want to speak with our own authentic voices. But we don't always know exactly who we are when we first set out to write. We hear a trace of our own voices in Raymond Carver. A little in Joyce Carol Oates. John Updike. Toni Morrison. But not even those great writers can speak for us, say for us all that we have to say in the utterly unique way that only we can say it.
In the end, there's only so much we can do to develop a voice. It can't be forced. It's the sort of thing, we are told, that matures on its own. But what we can do is learn to be attentive, to sit quietly and listen.
