Yesterday, Anne Gallagher, Michelle, Scott and I tried an experiment that involved having readers try to match the writer to the writing for 4 short excerpts. (If you still want to guess, feel free to comment on the post before reading further.) The idea to do this stemmed from a discussion over at Scott's place about voice. We had several ideas running. The first was that the narrator's voice may vary with the story, but does writing also have an underlying "authorial voice" or style that a writer can't necessarily hide? Does this authorial voice always peek through? Is it limited by, say, the writer's own vocabulary, intellect, and experiences?
I was surprised to see the wide range of guesses we got. Only one person, Alex, got the right answer (woohoo!), although Scott and Michelle would have also guessed correctly. (Anne, would you have gotten it right as well?)
The correct answer is:
1. Scott
2. Anne
3. Michelle
4. Domey
Honestly, I was surprised by what a hard time everyone had on it, including myself. My own guess was wrong, as I switched Scott's and Anne's samples. I realize, then, that the elements I look at in someone's writing are not necessarily what other people, including the writers themselves, look at.
My reasoning behind my guesses will probably seem odd, as your reasoning will probably sound odd to me...although we would love it if you would describe that reasoning. For me, I easily identified Michelle as the writer of 3 because of the description "long, thin body lying limp" and the word "fluttered". I didn't need to read much further than that. Naturally, I knew which one I wrote. I had a harder time trying to decide between Anne and Scott for the first two samples, and I finally decided Scott didn't write the first one because of the use of the words "foolishly" and "foolish", a form of repetition that I personally use a lot, but one I wouldn't have guessed Scott would like. I credited it to Anne.
As I was trying to decide, I also considered things like sentence structure, as well as logic. I am more familiar with Scott's writing than Anne's, and I have seen a certain extended logical thought process in Scott's writing exemplified by lines such as "Algiers is a dangerous city, especially for men who take employment with the French oppressors". But, I detected the same kind of logic in the extended metaphor in the second paragraph of sample 2.
What this makes me realize in myself is that what I consider to be that "authorial voice" has to do with vocabulary, sentence structure, explanations of logic, and rhythms. I didn't pay much attention to subject matter, or to character. But, of course, the criteria are apparently different for everyone, given the different answers. And, so, I'm still left wondering, What makes up an authorial voice, and is there really such a thing?
Granted, this experiment had some flaws to it. The writing samples are short, and if the authorial voice has more to do with the limits of the writers ability--which I tend to think it does--then the short sample probably doesn't yet reach the boundaries of those limits. What would happen if you read multiple books by any of us? I'd bet those limits would become much more obvious.
And, how exactly did we choose our samples? I bet if any of us had wanted to, we could have picked writing samples that were more misleading and/or random. I can't speak for the others, but I'll say that for me, there was no value in that. I decided to choose two writing samples that I felt reflected polished work in its final state. Often times my early drafts are much more tainted by other writers' voices, and I hoped that these samples of mine were rid of such things...although I still see some McCarthy in my second sample. What was important to me was to show what I considered to be my best work in the hopes that people would reveal commonalities in it that I didn't necessarily see before or that people would reaffirm that the elements I consider to be mine were actually apparent. Neither one seemed to be the case.
The other complication is that voice comes on many levels. As we discussed at Scott's blog, there's always the narrative voice or the narrator's voice. This probably varies with the story. If there's also an authorial voice, the extent to which that authorial voice makes itself visible will also vary. In my own work, I personally try to hide that, aiming more for the invisible author. I would have said that in the books I've read by Scott, his authorial voice is more visible, more poetic. Michelle is more visible and poetic to me as well. I would have said Anne was less visible, based on these samples.
Do we care? Well, you tell me. If you were the one to put two samples up, would you prefer that readers could pick your work out right away or that they couldn't? I'm very much on the fence with this question. I do like the idea that I can write broadly. One of my favorite compliments is hearing someone say that they thought one of my stories was written by a woman or by someone other than who I am. At the same time, I was honestly a little disappointed that only three people assigned the 4th sample correctly to me. Those stats, in case you are interested are below:
For sample 1:
6 people correctly assigned it to Scott.
4 people assigned it to Domey.
3 people assigned it to Anne.
0 people assigned it to Michelle.
For sample 2:
5 people assigned it to Michelle.
4 people assigned it correctly to Anne.
4 people assigned it to Scott.
0 people assigned it to Domey.
For sample 3:
6 people assigned it to Domey.
4 people assigned it correctly to Michelle.
2 people assigned it to Anne.
1 person assigned it to Scott.
For sample 4:
4 people assigned it to Anne.
4 people assigned it to Michelle.
3 people assigned it correctly to Domey.
2 people assigned it to Scott.
One strong point in terms of identifying the components that make up voice might be to look at the writers who were ruled out of certain samples. No one thought Michelle wrote 1. No one thought Domey wrote 2. Obviously, there are elements there that people don't associate with these writers.
What about spread? Is there significance to there being slightly less spread in sample 1 versus sample 4? Does 1 maybe have a more prominent voice compared to 4? Is the author of 1 more visible than the author of 4?
I also wonder if factors like credibility came into play. Did people assign their favorite passage to the writer they respect the most? Their least favorite to the writer they respect the least? Did our personalities have anything to do with it? Did our past blog posts have anything to do with it? Can I possibly ask any more questions?
So, tell us your thoughts!
Showing posts with label Voice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Voice. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Heather Or Eels? An Experiment!
We have cooked up a little experiment for you here at the Literary Lab. It's been some time since we've done anything like this, so hopefully you're rested up and ready to participate, because you are an integral part of this experiment.
Here's the deal:
1. We will present prose excerpts from four writers, and tell you who wrote what.
2. We will present prose excerpts from the same four writers, in a different order, and not tell you who wrote what.
3. You will compare the examples and tell us who wrote which of the unidentified excerpts.
4. We'll talk about this tomorrow, based on the results. We have no idea what those results will be or what conclusions we'll draw, but we're Very Excited to find out!
Here we go!
From Michelle Davidson Argyle:
The light along the gulf’s horizon melted twice before the search for Edna was reconciled. She was found bruised and naked amidst a tangle of bright green seaweed. Along with the sand and crushed shells crusted against her salted body were creamy white feathers, twisted and broken. Two mornings before, the search began when Edna did not show for the meal she had so discourteously requested. After Edna’s clothes were found, the beach was scoured for hours on end, night and day, without the help of Mr. Pontellier who, although returned from business because of Edna’s disappearance, believed his foolish wife had simply run away for a few days. “I have no worries,” he replied. “She will return. It is only a spell she is passing through, and if this is what it takes to get it out of her system, then so be it.”
Mariequita was alone when she found Edna sprawled across the sand with her arms and legs flung in uncanny contortions. The woman who had once been a wife and mother was now broken along the shore, comparable to a small child lazing innocently in the weak sunlight— perhaps too stubborn or deaf to obey its mother’s orders to put its clothes back on. Mariequita stared only for a moment as she dug her muddy feet into the grainy sand, wondering whether Edna had really only dipped her toes into the water and been carried away by surprise, or if she had voluntarily swam out to sea in hopes of being carried away.
From Scott G.F. Bailey:
It was not far to the General Post Office on Sackville Street, but because he knew that Mr. O’Hagan would have left the office before his errand was done, Malone took his time walking through downtown. The weather had turned hot and humid and he had no desire to be soaked with sweat by the time he returned to work. In fact, Malone had no desire to return to work at all. Finnerty’s funeral had soured his thoughts for the day. He wandered at random through the crowded streets for some time, paused briefly to look up at the afternoon sun and then carried the package into a pub a block north of the post office.
Malone ordered a pint of stout, paying out of O’Hagan’s half-crown. The parcel lay on the table before him, addressed to Finnerty’s nephew in London. He remembered now that Finnerty had, before dying, written to this nephew but had not posted the letter and that the parcel contained something he’d left to the nephew in his will. He should have remembered the contents of both the letter and the parcel; he’d sat and listened as O’Hagan read Finnerty’s will aloud not a day earlier. But for the last several months Malone had been sleepwalking through his days, acting more out of habit than will. He frequently took breaks from copying or filing documents to scratch out short lists. In his coat pocket, in fact, was one such list he’d scribbled that very morning.
From Anne Gallagher:
As they drew closer to the old house, William hobbled the horses in a small clearing about twenty feet off the path. The two men moved stealthily through the remaining brush and came to rest in the back of the house.
"There’s someone in there, smoke from the chimney," Peter whispered. He pointed to a single stack.
Downstairs, the curtained windows hid any signs of life. William kept his eye on the second floor and was rewarded by a slight movement from the corner room.
"Up there," William whispered and pointed to the window. His heart almost broke when John appeared at the pane. How were they going to get his attention and where were the others?
"Now what, sir?" Peter looked to William for the answer.
"I don’t know. I'm going around front to see what that holds, then we'll come up with a plan. You stay here and if there’s any way you can get John's attention without being seen, do it." William crouched and made his way on his belly through the underbrush around to the front of the house.
Heavy curtains draped the front windows as well. An overgrown garden stood off to one side of the manison. A barely discernable drive led through another wilderness in the opposite direction. Two horses grazed in a field a short distance from the house. There was no barn, any outbuildings to use as cover, or people.
From Domey Malasarn:
The abductions started around the same time Trish met Scott. The first night it happened, Trish had been driving home on Interstate 7 after the couple’s second date. They had gone to a seafood restaurant, a place where Scott’s family celebrated all of their major milestones. She associated Scott with the aliens for a time, so blurry was her memory due to the lack of sleep. All of it had seemed extraterrestrial, not just the aliens, but the idea of being in love with Scott...the idea of being in love at all. On the night she lost her virginity to Scott, she knew that the aliens were watching.
There were two types of beings on the spaceship. (She hated that she now used words like "beings" and "spaceship".) One was a translucent humanoid form, the other like deshelled oysters: small, globular, mucoidal. The oysters slid around on the floor in glossy heaps, sometimes gathering in the corners as they conferred with one another. It was these oysters that seemed to be in charge of everything. The humanoids did all the work, but they were dumb. When they wanted Trish to raise her arms, they would raise their own arms. If she didn’t comply right away, more of them would raise their arms. In her most frightening moments—climbing onto the table, parting her legs for the probes—she felt as if she was surrounded by a tai chi class. She wasn’t even sure they were actually alive, these humanoids; they could have had motors inside them for all she knew. The oysters were the patient watchers. The oysters were the masterminds.
And now the Mystery Excerpts!
Number One:
I am homesick, Olivia thought. I miss Ali, his breath sweet with dates and almonds and his hair foolishly scented with English pomade like a cheap mobster. I miss the gap between your front teeth, she thought. What am I to do with you, Ali Ali Ali? Your name sounds like the wailing of Arab mothers at a funeral, and I hope you are being cautious. Algiers is a dangerous city, especially for men who take employment with the French oppressors.
A wind came up and Olivia made to snatch the wine glass from the window but she mistook the distance and knocked the glass off the ledge. It tumbled away out of sight to shatter on a paving stone below. Well, it had not been much of a glass.
Olivia stood and leaned out of the window, into the wind. The nights here were not as warm as she’d imagined they’d be. Her skin constricted in the cold air and she felt brittle, useless anger and the urge to scream out, to howl at the sliver of moon. She pushed her shoes from her feet and was about to pull off her dress and lean naked and foolish out into the frigid salt breeze when she heard the children laughing.
Number Two:
Richard stood on the fore deck of the triple-masted clipper, the spray of the water stinging his face. His heart filled with an immeasurable joy. There was nothing in the world like standing on an ocean-going vessel. The smell of the salt as it stung his nostrils, the heavy wetness encompassing him, almost womblike. The vastness of the water mesmerized him, what was on the other side, what treasure could be found there? He loved the ocean the same way he loved a woman.
As comforting as a mother’s hand with the gentle ebb and flow of the tides, the bob and sway as the vessel moved through the water, almost like sitting in a rocking chair suckling on a breast. The sea could also be as furious as a woman scorned, ranting and wild, a tempestuous fury. As beautiful as any woman he had ever seen, with her myriad of effervescent colors, shimmering or dull, the ever-changing hues of virulent blues and purples to chartreuse and moss to grey. And formed like a woman; the swell of a breast, the curve of a waist, the sway of her hips as she walked away. Yes his only true love was the ocean.
Number Three:
As the cookies baked, she slept and I studied her long, thin body lying limp on the couch. Her eyelashes, frail and skeletal, fluttered against her cheekbones. She was wedged between dream and sleep, unconscious of the fact that I was breathing her in. My heart beat wildly at the remembrance of her taking me into her arms years earlier. I was eleven, and she had whispered into my ear that there would be times I would feel sad, but those times would pass. She caressed my forehead, her hand smelling of lilacs. That was the year he died, my father, her husband. That was the year she began to tremble, the year she hid her red hair behind golden curls, the year she put up the fence. Change advanced gradually—in layers so slight I was only now beginning to see them, and for a brief moment I caught a glimpse of how thick these layers, these gradations of change had become, but another moment of reflection brought me back to the deliberate acceptance I learned years ago.
From the window behind her, bars of yellow light fell across my mother’s closed eyes. For a moment, she was so hushed with some thought wedged in her mind that I could hear the leaves fall outside. It was autumn, a season of change, but with my eyes focused on my mother, I felt as if there would only be one season, one age that would stretch further than I could ever imagine.
Number Four:
He woke to a strange sound. Orange light from a streetlamp below shone up through the blinds and streaked across his bare chest and legs. He panted, as if waking from a nightmare, though he had no memory of any dream. His skin was pricked with heat. The bed sheets were damp. The stench of skunk came in through the open window.
He looked at his room, inverted as it was from his position on the bed. He had knocked over the nightstand and the lamp lay disjointed beside an empty water glass. The bulb had popped when he swatted it to the floor—this he remembered. Bright light and shattered white glass and the coiled fuse dimming from orange to red to black. His alarm clock was still plugged in and he could see the first red digit unobscured by the lamp. It was after two in the morning. He heard again the sound that had woken him. It was a cry in the night, half man and half animal. It was the sound of pain. He groped for his clothes. He stood and stepped over the mess, careful not to cut his feet on the shattered glass.
Below, the rooms were bright in the moonlight and the streetlamp light. He could make out the clear path to the kitchen. He turned on the faucet and cupped his hands under the running water and drank. He reached into the cupboard, found a bottle of aspirin, and took some pills with another swallow from the tap.
And now you tell us who you think wrote what. Save discussion of stylistic indicators leading to your decision for tomorrow, if you will. Please make your decisions before reading the comments! You will be most helpful if you are an unbiased observer! Thanks awfully much!
Here's the deal:
1. We will present prose excerpts from four writers, and tell you who wrote what.
2. We will present prose excerpts from the same four writers, in a different order, and not tell you who wrote what.
3. You will compare the examples and tell us who wrote which of the unidentified excerpts.
4. We'll talk about this tomorrow, based on the results. We have no idea what those results will be or what conclusions we'll draw, but we're Very Excited to find out!
Here we go!
From Michelle Davidson Argyle:
The light along the gulf’s horizon melted twice before the search for Edna was reconciled. She was found bruised and naked amidst a tangle of bright green seaweed. Along with the sand and crushed shells crusted against her salted body were creamy white feathers, twisted and broken. Two mornings before, the search began when Edna did not show for the meal she had so discourteously requested. After Edna’s clothes were found, the beach was scoured for hours on end, night and day, without the help of Mr. Pontellier who, although returned from business because of Edna’s disappearance, believed his foolish wife had simply run away for a few days. “I have no worries,” he replied. “She will return. It is only a spell she is passing through, and if this is what it takes to get it out of her system, then so be it.”
Mariequita was alone when she found Edna sprawled across the sand with her arms and legs flung in uncanny contortions. The woman who had once been a wife and mother was now broken along the shore, comparable to a small child lazing innocently in the weak sunlight— perhaps too stubborn or deaf to obey its mother’s orders to put its clothes back on. Mariequita stared only for a moment as she dug her muddy feet into the grainy sand, wondering whether Edna had really only dipped her toes into the water and been carried away by surprise, or if she had voluntarily swam out to sea in hopes of being carried away.
From Scott G.F. Bailey:
It was not far to the General Post Office on Sackville Street, but because he knew that Mr. O’Hagan would have left the office before his errand was done, Malone took his time walking through downtown. The weather had turned hot and humid and he had no desire to be soaked with sweat by the time he returned to work. In fact, Malone had no desire to return to work at all. Finnerty’s funeral had soured his thoughts for the day. He wandered at random through the crowded streets for some time, paused briefly to look up at the afternoon sun and then carried the package into a pub a block north of the post office.
Malone ordered a pint of stout, paying out of O’Hagan’s half-crown. The parcel lay on the table before him, addressed to Finnerty’s nephew in London. He remembered now that Finnerty had, before dying, written to this nephew but had not posted the letter and that the parcel contained something he’d left to the nephew in his will. He should have remembered the contents of both the letter and the parcel; he’d sat and listened as O’Hagan read Finnerty’s will aloud not a day earlier. But for the last several months Malone had been sleepwalking through his days, acting more out of habit than will. He frequently took breaks from copying or filing documents to scratch out short lists. In his coat pocket, in fact, was one such list he’d scribbled that very morning.
From Anne Gallagher:
As they drew closer to the old house, William hobbled the horses in a small clearing about twenty feet off the path. The two men moved stealthily through the remaining brush and came to rest in the back of the house.
"There’s someone in there, smoke from the chimney," Peter whispered. He pointed to a single stack.
Downstairs, the curtained windows hid any signs of life. William kept his eye on the second floor and was rewarded by a slight movement from the corner room.
"Up there," William whispered and pointed to the window. His heart almost broke when John appeared at the pane. How were they going to get his attention and where were the others?
"Now what, sir?" Peter looked to William for the answer.
"I don’t know. I'm going around front to see what that holds, then we'll come up with a plan. You stay here and if there’s any way you can get John's attention without being seen, do it." William crouched and made his way on his belly through the underbrush around to the front of the house.
Heavy curtains draped the front windows as well. An overgrown garden stood off to one side of the manison. A barely discernable drive led through another wilderness in the opposite direction. Two horses grazed in a field a short distance from the house. There was no barn, any outbuildings to use as cover, or people.
From Domey Malasarn:
The abductions started around the same time Trish met Scott. The first night it happened, Trish had been driving home on Interstate 7 after the couple’s second date. They had gone to a seafood restaurant, a place where Scott’s family celebrated all of their major milestones. She associated Scott with the aliens for a time, so blurry was her memory due to the lack of sleep. All of it had seemed extraterrestrial, not just the aliens, but the idea of being in love with Scott...the idea of being in love at all. On the night she lost her virginity to Scott, she knew that the aliens were watching.
There were two types of beings on the spaceship. (She hated that she now used words like "beings" and "spaceship".) One was a translucent humanoid form, the other like deshelled oysters: small, globular, mucoidal. The oysters slid around on the floor in glossy heaps, sometimes gathering in the corners as they conferred with one another. It was these oysters that seemed to be in charge of everything. The humanoids did all the work, but they were dumb. When they wanted Trish to raise her arms, they would raise their own arms. If she didn’t comply right away, more of them would raise their arms. In her most frightening moments—climbing onto the table, parting her legs for the probes—she felt as if she was surrounded by a tai chi class. She wasn’t even sure they were actually alive, these humanoids; they could have had motors inside them for all she knew. The oysters were the patient watchers. The oysters were the masterminds.
And now the Mystery Excerpts!
Number One:
I am homesick, Olivia thought. I miss Ali, his breath sweet with dates and almonds and his hair foolishly scented with English pomade like a cheap mobster. I miss the gap between your front teeth, she thought. What am I to do with you, Ali Ali Ali? Your name sounds like the wailing of Arab mothers at a funeral, and I hope you are being cautious. Algiers is a dangerous city, especially for men who take employment with the French oppressors.
A wind came up and Olivia made to snatch the wine glass from the window but she mistook the distance and knocked the glass off the ledge. It tumbled away out of sight to shatter on a paving stone below. Well, it had not been much of a glass.
Olivia stood and leaned out of the window, into the wind. The nights here were not as warm as she’d imagined they’d be. Her skin constricted in the cold air and she felt brittle, useless anger and the urge to scream out, to howl at the sliver of moon. She pushed her shoes from her feet and was about to pull off her dress and lean naked and foolish out into the frigid salt breeze when she heard the children laughing.
Number Two:
Richard stood on the fore deck of the triple-masted clipper, the spray of the water stinging his face. His heart filled with an immeasurable joy. There was nothing in the world like standing on an ocean-going vessel. The smell of the salt as it stung his nostrils, the heavy wetness encompassing him, almost womblike. The vastness of the water mesmerized him, what was on the other side, what treasure could be found there? He loved the ocean the same way he loved a woman.
As comforting as a mother’s hand with the gentle ebb and flow of the tides, the bob and sway as the vessel moved through the water, almost like sitting in a rocking chair suckling on a breast. The sea could also be as furious as a woman scorned, ranting and wild, a tempestuous fury. As beautiful as any woman he had ever seen, with her myriad of effervescent colors, shimmering or dull, the ever-changing hues of virulent blues and purples to chartreuse and moss to grey. And formed like a woman; the swell of a breast, the curve of a waist, the sway of her hips as she walked away. Yes his only true love was the ocean.
Number Three:
As the cookies baked, she slept and I studied her long, thin body lying limp on the couch. Her eyelashes, frail and skeletal, fluttered against her cheekbones. She was wedged between dream and sleep, unconscious of the fact that I was breathing her in. My heart beat wildly at the remembrance of her taking me into her arms years earlier. I was eleven, and she had whispered into my ear that there would be times I would feel sad, but those times would pass. She caressed my forehead, her hand smelling of lilacs. That was the year he died, my father, her husband. That was the year she began to tremble, the year she hid her red hair behind golden curls, the year she put up the fence. Change advanced gradually—in layers so slight I was only now beginning to see them, and for a brief moment I caught a glimpse of how thick these layers, these gradations of change had become, but another moment of reflection brought me back to the deliberate acceptance I learned years ago.
From the window behind her, bars of yellow light fell across my mother’s closed eyes. For a moment, she was so hushed with some thought wedged in her mind that I could hear the leaves fall outside. It was autumn, a season of change, but with my eyes focused on my mother, I felt as if there would only be one season, one age that would stretch further than I could ever imagine.
Number Four:
He woke to a strange sound. Orange light from a streetlamp below shone up through the blinds and streaked across his bare chest and legs. He panted, as if waking from a nightmare, though he had no memory of any dream. His skin was pricked with heat. The bed sheets were damp. The stench of skunk came in through the open window.
He looked at his room, inverted as it was from his position on the bed. He had knocked over the nightstand and the lamp lay disjointed beside an empty water glass. The bulb had popped when he swatted it to the floor—this he remembered. Bright light and shattered white glass and the coiled fuse dimming from orange to red to black. His alarm clock was still plugged in and he could see the first red digit unobscured by the lamp. It was after two in the morning. He heard again the sound that had woken him. It was a cry in the night, half man and half animal. It was the sound of pain. He groped for his clothes. He stood and stepped over the mess, careful not to cut his feet on the shattered glass.
Below, the rooms were bright in the moonlight and the streetlamp light. He could make out the clear path to the kitchen. He turned on the faucet and cupped his hands under the running water and drank. He reached into the cupboard, found a bottle of aspirin, and took some pills with another swallow from the tap.
And now you tell us who you think wrote what. Save discussion of stylistic indicators leading to your decision for tomorrow, if you will. Please make your decisions before reading the comments! You will be most helpful if you are an unbiased observer! Thanks awfully much!
Friday, March 25, 2011
Voice is Choice
I'm re-reading Albert Camus' novella The Stranger right now, for a variety of reasons. I don't speak French and so I only know the work through English translations. Specifically, I know it from the 1946 Stuart Gilbert translation, which I read way back in college. That's not the edition I have at home, however. The edition I'm currently reading is newer: the 1988 Knopf edition translated by Matthew Ward. From the very first page, I realized that Ward's translation was going to be quite different from the version I first read. I'll give you the opening passages from both editions.
From the 1946 translation by Stuart Gilbert:
Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.
The Home for Aged Persons is at Marengo, some fifty miles from Algiers. With the two o’clock bus I should get there well before nightfall. Then I can spend the night there, keeping the usual vigil beside the body, and be back here by tomorrow evening. I have fixed up with my employer for two days’ leave; obviously, under the circumstances, he couldn’t refuse. Still, I had an idea he looked annoyed, and I said, without thinking: "Sorry, sir, but it’s not my fault, you know."
From the 1988 translation by Matthew Ward:
Maman died today. Or yesterday, maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: "Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours." That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.
The old people's home is at Marengo, about eighty kilometers from Algiers, I'll take the two o'clock bus and get there in the afternoon. That way I can be there for the vigil and come back tomorrow night. I asked by boss for two days off and there was no way he was going to refuse me with an excuse like that. But he wasn't too happy about it. I even said, "It's not my fault."
Gilbert's language is more formal than Ward's; he uses longer phrases and is perceptibly less immediate (compare his "which leaves the matter doubtful" to Ward's "that doesn't mean anything.") Ward's translation seems to me to be a very American version of the narrative, with his clipped rhythms and less complex sentence structure.
Gilbert also translated the edition of The Plague that I read, and so my idea of Albert Camus is more-or-less based on Stuart Gilbert's idea of Albert Camus (I'll have to see who translated the edition of The Fall I read). Peter Newmark has written critically of Gilbert's "jigging up" of Camus' text and the problematic nature of translation in general, but today I'm not interested in the challenges of translation. What I'm thinking about lately is word choice and the enormous effect it has on writerly voice. Reading the recent Camus translation just sort of spurred me on to write this post today. (Apologies for not making this a Friday Filler, Davin.)
I've been noticing that, no matter if I'm writing from a first-person or a third-person point of view, or if I'm writing about people from the 16th century or the 21st century, I tend to use the same set of words in the same sort of ways in a great many cases. And while I try to expand my working vocabulary all the time (because I like to learn new words), I have noticed that one thing that creates boundaries around my vocabulary is a refusal to use certain words at all.
There are some words that I just don't like, and some words that I absolutely hate with a hatred usually reserved for use by totalitarian dictators considering their political enemies. My novels and stories are mostly free of current slang, for example. I just don't like it on the page. That's really more a stylistic choice, though.
No, the words you won't find in my writing are words that I just, for whatever reason, don't like the sound of. I'll use "vomit" but I'll never use "puke." I'll say "bellow" but never "holler" and rarely "yell." And "crappy" yes but "shitty" no. I have no idea why, except that I don't like the sound of "shitty." Possibly, in general, I tend to lean more toward Latinate words and away from Anglo Saxon words, but I'm just guessing. Surely "I should prefer not" and "I don't want to" mean the same thing, but they are spoken by two different voices and Melville's Bartleby would be less compelling and enigmatic had he said "I don't want to." (What? You haven't read Bartleby the Scrivener? Off you go to find it on Project Gutenberg or on the Melville House website. It's short so you've got no excuse.)
Anyway, I've been thinking about how writerly voice is partially defined by the words we won't (or should prefer not to) use. I know that the list of words I refuse to use is as long as my arm but--maybe because I don't use them--I can't think of many right now. Which is sort of irritating, you know? Here I am trying to make a point and I can't come up with any examples. Oh, "garbage." I don't like that word. I prefer "trash" or "rubbish." Go figure.
You? Words you can't stand/won't use? Thoughts on word choice as influence on voice? Too obvious? Why do I waste your time with posts like this? Hey, maybe this is Friday Filler after all!
From the 1946 translation by Stuart Gilbert:
Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.
The Home for Aged Persons is at Marengo, some fifty miles from Algiers. With the two o’clock bus I should get there well before nightfall. Then I can spend the night there, keeping the usual vigil beside the body, and be back here by tomorrow evening. I have fixed up with my employer for two days’ leave; obviously, under the circumstances, he couldn’t refuse. Still, I had an idea he looked annoyed, and I said, without thinking: "Sorry, sir, but it’s not my fault, you know."
From the 1988 translation by Matthew Ward:
Maman died today. Or yesterday, maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: "Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours." That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.
The old people's home is at Marengo, about eighty kilometers from Algiers, I'll take the two o'clock bus and get there in the afternoon. That way I can be there for the vigil and come back tomorrow night. I asked by boss for two days off and there was no way he was going to refuse me with an excuse like that. But he wasn't too happy about it. I even said, "It's not my fault."
Gilbert's language is more formal than Ward's; he uses longer phrases and is perceptibly less immediate (compare his "which leaves the matter doubtful" to Ward's "that doesn't mean anything.") Ward's translation seems to me to be a very American version of the narrative, with his clipped rhythms and less complex sentence structure.
Gilbert also translated the edition of The Plague that I read, and so my idea of Albert Camus is more-or-less based on Stuart Gilbert's idea of Albert Camus (I'll have to see who translated the edition of The Fall I read). Peter Newmark has written critically of Gilbert's "jigging up" of Camus' text and the problematic nature of translation in general, but today I'm not interested in the challenges of translation. What I'm thinking about lately is word choice and the enormous effect it has on writerly voice. Reading the recent Camus translation just sort of spurred me on to write this post today. (Apologies for not making this a Friday Filler, Davin.)
I've been noticing that, no matter if I'm writing from a first-person or a third-person point of view, or if I'm writing about people from the 16th century or the 21st century, I tend to use the same set of words in the same sort of ways in a great many cases. And while I try to expand my working vocabulary all the time (because I like to learn new words), I have noticed that one thing that creates boundaries around my vocabulary is a refusal to use certain words at all.
There are some words that I just don't like, and some words that I absolutely hate with a hatred usually reserved for use by totalitarian dictators considering their political enemies. My novels and stories are mostly free of current slang, for example. I just don't like it on the page. That's really more a stylistic choice, though.
No, the words you won't find in my writing are words that I just, for whatever reason, don't like the sound of. I'll use "vomit" but I'll never use "puke." I'll say "bellow" but never "holler" and rarely "yell." And "crappy" yes but "shitty" no. I have no idea why, except that I don't like the sound of "shitty." Possibly, in general, I tend to lean more toward Latinate words and away from Anglo Saxon words, but I'm just guessing. Surely "I should prefer not" and "I don't want to" mean the same thing, but they are spoken by two different voices and Melville's Bartleby would be less compelling and enigmatic had he said "I don't want to." (What? You haven't read Bartleby the Scrivener? Off you go to find it on Project Gutenberg or on the Melville House website. It's short so you've got no excuse.)
Anyway, I've been thinking about how writerly voice is partially defined by the words we won't (or should prefer not to) use. I know that the list of words I refuse to use is as long as my arm but--maybe because I don't use them--I can't think of many right now. Which is sort of irritating, you know? Here I am trying to make a point and I can't come up with any examples. Oh, "garbage." I don't like that word. I prefer "trash" or "rubbish." Go figure.
You? Words you can't stand/won't use? Thoughts on word choice as influence on voice? Too obvious? Why do I waste your time with posts like this? Hey, maybe this is Friday Filler after all!
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Ides of March Official Post
Today is the first day of the ancient Roman New Year, so happy new year, kids! That is all I have to say about that. Okay, don't turn your back on folks named Brutus, either. Which reminds me of this joke:
Brutus walks into a bar. He says to the bartender, "I'll have a martinum."
The bartender says, "Do you mean a martini?
Brutus says, "If I'd wanted a double, I'd have said so!"
Oh, that one just slays me every time. Latin jokes are hi-sterical. And now enough of this ides of March stuff.
Today, I think, I want to talk about voice. My last novel was written in a sort of mashup of the styles of Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, Herman Melleville and the King James Bible. Which was a lot of fun and, I think, appropriate for the story I was telling, but it was exhausting to maintain and a few steps removed from my sort of normal prose voice, which is similar to but not as chatty as the way I'm writing this very minute.
The book I wrote before the last one had a sort of modernized Elizabethan English prose style, based as it was on Shakespeare's "Hamlet." Again, that voice was appropriate for the tale but it wasn't my voice. It was me doing a voice, doing an impression of Shakespeare, kind of.
The next book I write (and it could be any one of three novels at this point; I haven't truly decided) is going to be in a modern American prose voice, by which I really likely mean a mid-20th century prose voice similar to Hemingway or Chandler or O'Connor, or possibly what I really mean is the writing will be similar to mid-20th century translations of 19th-century Russian novels, because I think that's really where my sort of bedrock, basic writing style comes from. Or not. I'm not actually certain about that.
My point, however, is that the next time I seriously pick up a pen to write, I'm not going to be attempting to create any historical mood or sense of place with the prose style. I did that for two or three books and I'm tired of it. Now I just want to write in a clear, elegant manner. It's true that none of the three ideas for novels I'm considering is actually set in 2011 (one's in 1914, one's in 1923 and one's in 1790), but my current approach is to be a guy in 2011 writing about previous time periods, not to have the narrative seem to really "live in" those time periods. That may be a mistake, but we'll see. Since I don't consider myself to be a writer of historical fiction, I don't think that it matters. The tale and the telling are the things, not any sort of nod to ideas of history.
But right now I'm in that sort of fumbling about in the dark stage before I've actually committed to writing a specific novel. It's like being in heavy fog. Yesterday at lunch I sat and wrote out a rough outline of one possible book. It was not very good, frankly. I realized that I don't know enough about the ending in order to start writing. Though, truth to tell, I might not let that stop me this time. I might just throw all of my rules for rational writing to the wind and just grab a pen and see what happens. After all, I lean most strongly toward writing not a novel but a novella right now, and not even something that would be for publication. I'm possibly burned out from the last couple of years of writing Serious Literature and maybe, I think, I might want to just have some fun and write something frivolous and possibly not even very good. We'll see. Yesterday Domey mentioned that he's not really writing with an eye to publication right now and he's happier with his work than he's been in a long time. I am envious, so I might follow his example.
Brutus walks into a bar. He says to the bartender, "I'll have a martinum."
The bartender says, "Do you mean a martini?
Brutus says, "If I'd wanted a double, I'd have said so!"
Oh, that one just slays me every time. Latin jokes are hi-sterical. And now enough of this ides of March stuff.
Today, I think, I want to talk about voice. My last novel was written in a sort of mashup of the styles of Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, Herman Melleville and the King James Bible. Which was a lot of fun and, I think, appropriate for the story I was telling, but it was exhausting to maintain and a few steps removed from my sort of normal prose voice, which is similar to but not as chatty as the way I'm writing this very minute.
The book I wrote before the last one had a sort of modernized Elizabethan English prose style, based as it was on Shakespeare's "Hamlet." Again, that voice was appropriate for the tale but it wasn't my voice. It was me doing a voice, doing an impression of Shakespeare, kind of.
The next book I write (and it could be any one of three novels at this point; I haven't truly decided) is going to be in a modern American prose voice, by which I really likely mean a mid-20th century prose voice similar to Hemingway or Chandler or O'Connor, or possibly what I really mean is the writing will be similar to mid-20th century translations of 19th-century Russian novels, because I think that's really where my sort of bedrock, basic writing style comes from. Or not. I'm not actually certain about that.
My point, however, is that the next time I seriously pick up a pen to write, I'm not going to be attempting to create any historical mood or sense of place with the prose style. I did that for two or three books and I'm tired of it. Now I just want to write in a clear, elegant manner. It's true that none of the three ideas for novels I'm considering is actually set in 2011 (one's in 1914, one's in 1923 and one's in 1790), but my current approach is to be a guy in 2011 writing about previous time periods, not to have the narrative seem to really "live in" those time periods. That may be a mistake, but we'll see. Since I don't consider myself to be a writer of historical fiction, I don't think that it matters. The tale and the telling are the things, not any sort of nod to ideas of history.
But right now I'm in that sort of fumbling about in the dark stage before I've actually committed to writing a specific novel. It's like being in heavy fog. Yesterday at lunch I sat and wrote out a rough outline of one possible book. It was not very good, frankly. I realized that I don't know enough about the ending in order to start writing. Though, truth to tell, I might not let that stop me this time. I might just throw all of my rules for rational writing to the wind and just grab a pen and see what happens. After all, I lean most strongly toward writing not a novel but a novella right now, and not even something that would be for publication. I'm possibly burned out from the last couple of years of writing Serious Literature and maybe, I think, I might want to just have some fun and write something frivolous and possibly not even very good. We'll see. Yesterday Domey mentioned that he's not really writing with an eye to publication right now and he's happier with his work than he's been in a long time. I am envious, so I might follow his example.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Write Like a Sword-Wielding Martial Artist
Good morning! I've been super busy as we get the Notes from Underground anthology underway. The final release date is for March 1st. Let us hope and cross our fingers that this sticks. This is going to be one sweet book, you guys. You. Will. Want. To. Buy. It.
Today is a treat! One of our loyal readers and authors who will be in the Notes anthology is guest posting here today. Read this post! It's made of awesome. It talks about swords and what lies at the heart of what we should face as writers.
Welcome, C.N. Nevets!
________________________________
If you've been around the Literary Lab for very long, you've heard this message: write bravely. There are other variations, but it's a theme that comes up again and again. Over the past year or so, this has been one of the greatest challenges set before me in my own writing, and I'd like to cover some of what I have learned. I'll present these as confrontations, because I rather like the image of myself as a sword-wielding martial artist fighting against the evil hordes of my own worst bits of writing.
Confront Your Inadequacy. Try writing something you don't feel adequate to write. Challenge yourself. You can do it in baby steps, but the more times you accomplish what you previously felt you could not, the more stories you will be empowered to tell. I did this with a flash fiction piece I called, "Discipline." It's a story that's inspired by the story of my great uncle, an underage soldier in the Pacific theater of WWII. I didn't feel I could do it justice, and when I look at it I know it could have been better. But I've gotten a few precious bits of feedback that tell me that, at least for a few readers, the message got across. For me, that means it was well worth while.
Confront Your Darkness. Darkness comes in a lot of forms, but the kind that you need to confront is the internal darkness. I personally struggle a lot with writing the kind of things I do whenever I'm confronted with the reality of terrible evil. This past year, I've had more than one brush with this, including a teenage suicide and the disappearance of a good friend and his wife. The darkness you face may be less Hollywood. Perhaps you write YA romance and are suddenly uncomfortable with it because of the heartbreak your daughter goes through. Perhaps you write epic fantasy and face pressure that makes you feel guilty for dealing with fantasy rather than the real world. Some writers go a long time before facing this kind of darkness; few avoid it forever. If you face it, deal with it, and then write. It's okay to take a little time to sort through something, but there's no reason to let your writing be silenced.
Confront Your Detractors. Every writer has stories that get rejected. Often times, we develop nemeses who just plain don't like our writing and want to make a point of it. Sometimes it's just a bad comment on a single website, or an unfair review. Whether your detractors are critics or those annoying kids in your writing class, you cannot write in order to avoid their scorn.
Confront Your Supporters. Perhaps the hardest thing I've yet done in writing was to submit, "I Need This," to Domey, Michelle, and Scott.The writing itself was risky. The voice thick and easily misconstrued in a blind reading. The topic was dark, and portions were frankly vile. The Literary Lab had shown some confidence in my writing during the Genre Wars contest, and I didn't want to jeopardize my standing in their eyes. Writers spend so much time being rejected, it can be very hard to risk losing the support of those who have accepted our writing -- but you can't write for them any more than you can write to avoid your detractors.
Confront Your Self-Image.
A lot of this can be boiled down to this:
Confront Your Inside Voice. When it comes to writing, use your outside voice. I'm not saying there's no place for restraint in language, or for quiet prose, or for still moments. What there's no place for, though, is fighting against your self and holding yourself back.
The benefits of writing bravely are many, from self-satisfaction to improved quality. Sometimes, the benefits are even practical. I'm currently finishing up a novel, Sublimation, that I will be querying for publication. I've had to write bravely several times in the course of this work. When I posted a synopsis and a quote from the book on my website, it got the attention of one of my writing heroes, who then reached out to me to express his appreciation and support. That has been a tremendous encouragement to me -- and it could not have happened if I had not taken the leap into writing bravely.
.Nevets.
(p.s., If you care to read, "I Need This," you can do so by going to to the http://www.nevets-qst.
Today is a treat! One of our loyal readers and authors who will be in the Notes anthology is guest posting here today. Read this post! It's made of awesome. It talks about swords and what lies at the heart of what we should face as writers.
Welcome, C.N. Nevets!
________________________________
Confront Your Inadequacy. Try writing something you don't feel adequate to write. Challenge yourself. You can do it in baby steps, but the more times you accomplish what you previously felt you could not, the more stories you will be empowered to tell. I did this with a flash fiction piece I called, "Discipline." It's a story that's inspired by the story of my great uncle, an underage soldier in the Pacific theater of WWII. I didn't feel I could do it justice, and when I look at it I know it could have been better. But I've gotten a few precious bits of feedback that tell me that, at least for a few readers, the message got across. For me, that means it was well worth while.
Confront Your Darkness. Darkness comes in a lot of forms, but the kind that you need to confront is the internal darkness. I personally struggle a lot with writing the kind of things I do whenever I'm confronted with the reality of terrible evil. This past year, I've had more than one brush with this, including a teenage suicide and the disappearance of a good friend and his wife. The darkness you face may be less Hollywood. Perhaps you write YA romance and are suddenly uncomfortable with it because of the heartbreak your daughter goes through. Perhaps you write epic fantasy and face pressure that makes you feel guilty for dealing with fantasy rather than the real world. Some writers go a long time before facing this kind of darkness; few avoid it forever. If you face it, deal with it, and then write. It's okay to take a little time to sort through something, but there's no reason to let your writing be silenced.
Confront Your Detractors. Every writer has stories that get rejected. Often times, we develop nemeses who just plain don't like our writing and want to make a point of it. Sometimes it's just a bad comment on a single website, or an unfair review. Whether your detractors are critics or those annoying kids in your writing class, you cannot write in order to avoid their scorn.
Confront Your Supporters. Perhaps the hardest thing I've yet done in writing was to submit, "I Need This," to Domey, Michelle, and Scott.The writing itself was risky. The voice thick and easily misconstrued in a blind reading. The topic was dark, and portions were frankly vile. The Literary Lab had shown some confidence in my writing during the Genre Wars contest, and I didn't want to jeopardize my standing in their eyes. Writers spend so much time being rejected, it can be very hard to risk losing the support of those who have accepted our writing -- but you can't write for them any more than you can write to avoid your detractors.
Confront Your Self-Image.
A lot of this can be boiled down to this:
Confront Your Inside Voice. When it comes to writing, use your outside voice. I'm not saying there's no place for restraint in language, or for quiet prose, or for still moments. What there's no place for, though, is fighting against your self and holding yourself back.
The benefits of writing bravely are many, from self-satisfaction to improved quality. Sometimes, the benefits are even practical. I'm currently finishing up a novel, Sublimation, that I will be querying for publication. I've had to write bravely several times in the course of this work. When I posted a synopsis and a quote from the book on my website, it got the attention of one of my writing heroes, who then reached out to me to express his appreciation and support. That has been a tremendous encouragement to me -- and it could not have happened if I had not taken the leap into writing bravely.
.Nevets.
(p.s., If you care to read, "I Need This," you can do so by going to to the http://www.nevets-qst.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Can Your Voice Be Found?
A few days ago, Scott wrote a post on voice, and (as sometimes tends to happen) he and I disagreed on something. Based on my own personal experience, I believe that a writer can discover some sort of natural or authentic voice. Scott believes that "we find ways to write that achieve our goals for what we're writing, and when we do it's nice and enjoyable and easier. It feels 'natural' and 'like us.'"
So, he asked me to expand on what I thought was this natural, authentic voice...probably so that he can disagree with me again. Yes, Mr. Bailey, I'm psychic.
An authentic voice
Without getting into too many details, in 2008-2009, I had the opportunity to spend much less time on my day job and much more time on my fiction writing. During that time, I tried a bunch of literary experiments and discarded a lot of ideas I had about what I wanted to write. I felt like I got all of my writerly promiscuity out of the way in just six short months.
When that happened, I found myself at a loss for words. Suddenly, all of the techniques, all of the poetics, all of the technical tools that I considered to be in my arsenal had been culled. I no longer relied on Faulkner's technique of splicing words together or McCarthy's stringing together of actions with the word "and." I stopped making my characters take quick steps like Anna Karenina, and I didn't let them blush to the hairline anymore. In other words, I stopped using other writers' inventions in a major way.
What I was left with was myself and my observations of the real world. If my character couldn't blush to the hairline (because, after all, Tolstoy came up with that), I had to observe real people in their real embarrassing situations and discover for myself how they responded. I needed to pay attention to myself and see how I responded when embarrassed. If I couldn't link together several actions with "and" I had to come up with my own sentence structures based on how I organized my own thoughts.
To me, this was finding my voice. I was writing based on what I was observing in life and how I was organizing those observations. That to me is authenticity.
Of course I couldn't completely be free. After all, I still had concepts like the metaphor to use. I didn't erase entirely my knowledge of the English language, and that in a sense will always be polluted by what I'v read before. But, I felt like I was working from a much simpler base.
In many ways, this made my life a whole lot harder. Writing progressed at a much slower pace. Everything I wrote required much more thinking for myself. But, my life also got a lot easier because I felt like I was making up my own answers and solving my own problems. When I was stealing techniques from Tolstoy, I was always comparing myself to him. He was an apple, and I was some sort of mutant, sub-apple. But, when I was inventing my techniques, I was suddenly an orange. And, even if I could imagine myself tasting better or glowing brighter to reach my own standards, I was comforted in knowing that I would have my own slot at the farmer's market.
I think that when we stop using other writers' voices, we start having to invent our own, and that comes out on the page. I believe that readers find these sorts of authentic voices more compelling simply because they are totally new ways of looking at the world. Now, more than ever, I feel like I am observing life, and I'm observing it because I want to write about it in my own voice.
Friday, March 26, 2010
How to establish my own unique voice in my writing?
The title of this post is from one of the google searches that have led people to the Literary Lab blog. It turns up frequently in our statistical visitor analysis. Yes, we have statistical visitor analyses; we're almost like a professional blog, you know. Anyway, I have been considering the idea of voice lately and even though Davin, Michelle and I have all written previously about voice, I'm going to prolix on about it a bit more today.
What do writers mean by voice? The Oxford English Dictionary gives this definition: "A mode of expression or point of view in writing; a particular literary tone or style."
Tone or style and point of view seem to be the most important and most easily discussed parts of this definition. Let's tackle point of view first, mostly just to dismiss it and thereby remove it from the discussion. No matter what the literary point of view from which the story is told (first person, third person omniscient, etc.) there is always an "I" even if that "I" is disguised. There is always a narrator, always a narrative presence from whom the words flow. This narrative presence has a tone or style that draws attention to itself or draws attention away from itself. Aside from recognizing that there is always a narrative presence, I don't think that distinguishing between first-, second- and third-person POV matters in what I'm discussing; let's just agree that there is some sustained voice (or some sustained voices if you have multiple narrators) that is telling the story to the reader. Whew, this paragraph is dense and dull but thank the gods we're done with it. Let's talk about tone and style instead, okay?
But no: the point I just failed to make is that some writers have a mistaken belief, that as soon as they create a first-person narrator for their story, they have created a unique voice (because, like a snowflake, every person is unique). Did I say "mistaken belief?" Hey, I did. I meant it, too. Too often, I hate to say and sound like an old crank, these unique first-person narrators are characters we've read elsewhere and they're not unique at all. Holden Caulfield has ten thousand clones, as does Bella Whatsername in Forks, as do uncountable hardboiled and cynical detectives and plucky young heroines. My real point is that a lot of you are trying too hard, and you're aiming your energies at the least important (though possibly most visible) aspect of voice. If you have a narrator who is actually a character in your story, work on that character's character rather than how they present themselves.
Why? To paraphrase John Gardner, "The best narrative voices, from Tolstoy to Lahiri to King, are invisible and similar; they don't draw attention to themselves." Let me give some better examples. Of the last ten Pulitzer Prize winners in fiction, only two of the books had narrative voices that stood out purely as voices: Junot Diaz' "The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" and Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." McCarthy leans heavily on Hemingway and Faulkner, but even so, once you get past the first 25 or so pages, his prose creeps into the background and no longer self-consciously draws attention to itself. He makes himself invisible and you see the story in your mind's eye, not the words on the page, not the narrator. Diaz, on the other hand, is entirely self-conscious and intrusive and personified and a great deal of the hoohah surrounding that book is entirely about the voice. I'm going to opine that McCarthy's book is better, because its strengths are in characaterization and storytelling and revelation of humanity and Diaz' book is a lecture on the Dominican Republic and immigrant experience disguised as a story. But that's just me and hey, who the hell am I? I digress.
Tone and style, though. Let's talk about those. First off, there is an idea floating around that a writer will "find her voice" at some point and will have a way of writing that sort of ties together all her work once she's "matured." For some writers, this is maybe more-or-less true and a page from one book can--stylistically--be slipped into any of their other books and none could say but that it was from the same author. Antonia Byatt and Gunter Grass and J.K. Rowling and John Cheever and many good writers fit into this idea. Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner and James Joyce and Cormac McCarthy and Peter Carey, for examples, do not.
So let's think about tone and style applied to story and not really think about narrative voice. Here are two excerpts:
She had lost all sense of the direction she’d been traveling and so she picked a path that looked easy to follow through the brush. A loose vine swung down and hit her on the shoulder and Hope screamed until she saw that it was not a snake and then she laughed and then she bit her lower lip and began to cry. John would be along any minute, she thought. John would be along and then they’d go back to the cabin and then they’d eat that boiled chicken and corn and have a pipe and a swallow of whiskey and it would be fine. She pushed on through the swamp and slipped again, twisting her right knee awkwardly and then going down forward into the mud, barely keeping her face out of it. Hope sat up and her knee hurt and she sucked in a sharp breath and knew she couldn’t go on. She would sit there in the downpour, in the mud and filth, and wait for the storm to end, wait for John to come and find her.
--and--
I stood there in the frozen air and let my eyes be drawn down to the patterns formed by the blood on the ice. It is a star chart, I thought. The king stands in Orion while Fortinbras drags his wounded foot through Cassiopeia and spits a mouthful of bloody sputum onto the Pleiades. I wondered if Fortinbras had any regrets. If he did, he did not have long to live with them. He swung wildly at the king, missed and fell to one knee as his lame foot slipped on the ice. He knelt in Perseus. There was frost and blood on the face of his helmet. King Hamlet stood in Taurus and brought his sword down in a mighty blow, cutting Fortinbras’ left arm apart at the elbow. Fortinbras bellowed like a wounded bear and dropped his sword and then the king rained death down upon him, hacking him to pieces. Bright blood spread onto the ice, flooding over my imagined constellations. King Hamlet, still ruler of Denmark, stood over his dead cousin. He pushed up the beaver of his helmet to lick some of Fortinbras’ blood from his blade. One barbarian had killed another, and the rebellion was over.
I may be no judge, but to me, the narrative voices in these excerpts seem different even though they're from the same writer. The difference between third-person and first-person is not, I don't think, the primary difference in the tone and style of these narrations. The first is more casual, with longer sentences that tumble along imprecisely, chaining ideas together to accumulate power. The second example is very high-flown and formal, with shorter sentences that are more precise in their meaning. The narrative styles, I claim, use different tones because the stories themselves have different tones. Which means (to finally arrive at something like a point) that it is the story that should determine the narrative voice, and not some ideas we writers have about uniqueness because we're told that we need to find "our own voices."
My claim is that by writing out the story, we will naturally fall into the proper voice for that story if we pay attention to the needs of the story and ignore everything else. Disingenuously I have used examples from my own writing above, and I arrived at those particular voices not deliberately, but by just writing the stories and thinking about (in the first case) the mood I wanted to set and the vocabulary I wanted to use, and (in the second case) the idea I had of the what the first-person narrator would think about when relating this story and the metaphysical/scientific language he'd use to talk about it.
What do writers mean by voice? The Oxford English Dictionary gives this definition: "A mode of expression or point of view in writing; a particular literary tone or style."
Tone or style and point of view seem to be the most important and most easily discussed parts of this definition. Let's tackle point of view first, mostly just to dismiss it and thereby remove it from the discussion. No matter what the literary point of view from which the story is told (first person, third person omniscient, etc.) there is always an "I" even if that "I" is disguised. There is always a narrator, always a narrative presence from whom the words flow. This narrative presence has a tone or style that draws attention to itself or draws attention away from itself. Aside from recognizing that there is always a narrative presence, I don't think that distinguishing between first-, second- and third-person POV matters in what I'm discussing; let's just agree that there is some sustained voice (or some sustained voices if you have multiple narrators) that is telling the story to the reader. Whew, this paragraph is dense and dull but thank the gods we're done with it. Let's talk about tone and style instead, okay?
But no: the point I just failed to make is that some writers have a mistaken belief, that as soon as they create a first-person narrator for their story, they have created a unique voice (because, like a snowflake, every person is unique). Did I say "mistaken belief?" Hey, I did. I meant it, too. Too often, I hate to say and sound like an old crank, these unique first-person narrators are characters we've read elsewhere and they're not unique at all. Holden Caulfield has ten thousand clones, as does Bella Whatsername in Forks, as do uncountable hardboiled and cynical detectives and plucky young heroines. My real point is that a lot of you are trying too hard, and you're aiming your energies at the least important (though possibly most visible) aspect of voice. If you have a narrator who is actually a character in your story, work on that character's character rather than how they present themselves.
Why? To paraphrase John Gardner, "The best narrative voices, from Tolstoy to Lahiri to King, are invisible and similar; they don't draw attention to themselves." Let me give some better examples. Of the last ten Pulitzer Prize winners in fiction, only two of the books had narrative voices that stood out purely as voices: Junot Diaz' "The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" and Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." McCarthy leans heavily on Hemingway and Faulkner, but even so, once you get past the first 25 or so pages, his prose creeps into the background and no longer self-consciously draws attention to itself. He makes himself invisible and you see the story in your mind's eye, not the words on the page, not the narrator. Diaz, on the other hand, is entirely self-conscious and intrusive and personified and a great deal of the hoohah surrounding that book is entirely about the voice. I'm going to opine that McCarthy's book is better, because its strengths are in characaterization and storytelling and revelation of humanity and Diaz' book is a lecture on the Dominican Republic and immigrant experience disguised as a story. But that's just me and hey, who the hell am I? I digress.
Tone and style, though. Let's talk about those. First off, there is an idea floating around that a writer will "find her voice" at some point and will have a way of writing that sort of ties together all her work once she's "matured." For some writers, this is maybe more-or-less true and a page from one book can--stylistically--be slipped into any of their other books and none could say but that it was from the same author. Antonia Byatt and Gunter Grass and J.K. Rowling and John Cheever and many good writers fit into this idea. Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner and James Joyce and Cormac McCarthy and Peter Carey, for examples, do not.
So let's think about tone and style applied to story and not really think about narrative voice. Here are two excerpts:
She had lost all sense of the direction she’d been traveling and so she picked a path that looked easy to follow through the brush. A loose vine swung down and hit her on the shoulder and Hope screamed until she saw that it was not a snake and then she laughed and then she bit her lower lip and began to cry. John would be along any minute, she thought. John would be along and then they’d go back to the cabin and then they’d eat that boiled chicken and corn and have a pipe and a swallow of whiskey and it would be fine. She pushed on through the swamp and slipped again, twisting her right knee awkwardly and then going down forward into the mud, barely keeping her face out of it. Hope sat up and her knee hurt and she sucked in a sharp breath and knew she couldn’t go on. She would sit there in the downpour, in the mud and filth, and wait for the storm to end, wait for John to come and find her.
--and--
I stood there in the frozen air and let my eyes be drawn down to the patterns formed by the blood on the ice. It is a star chart, I thought. The king stands in Orion while Fortinbras drags his wounded foot through Cassiopeia and spits a mouthful of bloody sputum onto the Pleiades. I wondered if Fortinbras had any regrets. If he did, he did not have long to live with them. He swung wildly at the king, missed and fell to one knee as his lame foot slipped on the ice. He knelt in Perseus. There was frost and blood on the face of his helmet. King Hamlet stood in Taurus and brought his sword down in a mighty blow, cutting Fortinbras’ left arm apart at the elbow. Fortinbras bellowed like a wounded bear and dropped his sword and then the king rained death down upon him, hacking him to pieces. Bright blood spread onto the ice, flooding over my imagined constellations. King Hamlet, still ruler of Denmark, stood over his dead cousin. He pushed up the beaver of his helmet to lick some of Fortinbras’ blood from his blade. One barbarian had killed another, and the rebellion was over.
I may be no judge, but to me, the narrative voices in these excerpts seem different even though they're from the same writer. The difference between third-person and first-person is not, I don't think, the primary difference in the tone and style of these narrations. The first is more casual, with longer sentences that tumble along imprecisely, chaining ideas together to accumulate power. The second example is very high-flown and formal, with shorter sentences that are more precise in their meaning. The narrative styles, I claim, use different tones because the stories themselves have different tones. Which means (to finally arrive at something like a point) that it is the story that should determine the narrative voice, and not some ideas we writers have about uniqueness because we're told that we need to find "our own voices."
My claim is that by writing out the story, we will naturally fall into the proper voice for that story if we pay attention to the needs of the story and ignore everything else. Disingenuously I have used examples from my own writing above, and I arrived at those particular voices not deliberately, but by just writing the stories and thinking about (in the first case) the mood I wanted to set and the vocabulary I wanted to use, and (in the second case) the idea I had of the what the first-person narrator would think about when relating this story and the metaphysical/scientific language he'd use to talk about it.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
The Same Notes Over and Over
Playful graphic interpretations of vocalizations in
“Messa di Voce” by Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman
with Jaap Blonk and Joan La Barbara.
First, I was driving in my car the other day. I don't often drive, let alone by myself, so this was one of the times I actually had some time to turn up the radio and listen to whatever I felt like listening to. A song came on that got me practically dancing in my seat - a mix of rap and metal and pop. It was fantastic!
Then, I was playing Guitar Hero with my husband, and a question occurred to me as I pressed the same four keys over and over again: what makes it possible for only a few notes to be turned into something amazing?
The song in the car was very repetitious - the same phrase played to the same rhythm, completely predictable, yet so catchy I wanted to listen to it a hundred times over. Guitar Hero lets you play the bass or guitar lines to a variety of songs using only four or five keys. Writing is the same way. We have only 26 letters to work with, and if you ask me, only so many stories to tell over and over. I've always believed that there's only a set amount of plots, and they've all been told before no matter how you structure or tell a story - at its roots is the same ideas retold time and time again.
Yet, somehow, in the hands of a good writer, the same story can be turned into something incredibly unique, something that gets me dancing in my seat.
I'm currently working on a novella that feels to me, cliched and overdone, but I'm telling myself that this story has never had my voice to it, and because of that, it can be something lovely and different. I'm using some notes that people are familiar with, and readers may expect certain things from what I'm doing, but I'm having a lot of fun twisting it all up.
So, I guess my point here today is that we should never shy away from a story idea that feels like everyone else has already done it. I used to think we should. Reinventing the wheel seemed like the only option for a long time.
What stories have you read lately that use the same "notes", but manage to hide it so well the story seems like something new that's never been done before?
Also, don't miss my post over on Innocent Flower today for Master the Shorts week. Davin is guest posting for me, and it's something you don't want to miss!
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Don't Try To Be The Fattest Giraffe
We all have our strengths and weaknesses. Someone might be great at dialog and not so great at description. Or, someone might be great at description and not so great at structure. The obvious approach as we try to become better writers is to strengthen our weaknesses. I, for example, didn't like how I was handling structure, so I've been researching standard structures, mainly from reading screenwriting books. But, then, I started thinking about voice and what makes voice unique. What if part of what made my voice unique was the fact that my story structures were odd?
A giraffe is a cool animal, not because it is skinnier than an elephant. A giraffe is cool because it's got a super-long neck and an amazing heart that allows it to pump blood up that neck. If I were to be impressed by a giraffe, it would be because it was really tall, not really fat. In fact, I'd probably be less impressed by a fat giraffe. An elephant, on the other hand, is cool partly because it is so fat. That's why we're impressed when it can stand up on its hind legs, or balance on a ball. In other words, each of these animals is cool because of its unique characteristics, and if all animals developed features that made them equally good at everything, they would end up being less interesting as a whole, some featureless brown blob like a cardboard box with fangs.
Though I'm NOT saying that we should wallow in our weaknesses, I think a valid approach to creating unique work is to exploit our strengths to compensate for our weaknesses. Someone who is bad at dialog could write a brilliant book that contains no dialog. Someone who is bad at description could write "Hills Like White Elephants." (Yes, that's a joke.)
With this mindset, a good book can be represented by a pie chart. Some good books will have very even pie slices, where each slice represents a component of writing such as description, character, dialog, pacing, transitions, emotion, intensity etc. Other good books might have only three really big slices--character, emotion, and intensity. That doesn't necessarily mean that it is a less impressive book. It just means it has the potential to be unique.
Is this crazy? Am I wrong? Do you have weaknesses that might actually allow you to write a more unique book?
AND, we wanted to mention that writer Roz Morris is giving away FREE copies of the pdf of her book, Nail Your Novel. We checked it out and think it's a solid resource for beginning writers. Check it out!
DOUBLE AND, Tess Hilmo sold her novel, With A Name Like Love!!!!!!!
Friday, October 9, 2009
Influence and Voice
Yesterday, Lady Glamis posted about voice, which got me thinking. About voice. In my last novel, which is set in 16th-century Europe and plunders Shakespeare's "Hamlet," my narrator and all the characters speak in a sort of modernized Elizabethan speech. It's very distinctive but nothing at all like the way I write or speak in real life. My current work-in-progress is set in 18th-century Colonial America, and while I'm not totally sure how my characters should talk yet (still doing research on that), the narrative voice is more modern than in my last book, but still has a sort of formal, old-fashioned tone. Again, it's not how I talk or write in real life.
As I said in my comment yesterday to Lady Glamis' post, I think that beneath the narrative voices lies my own authorial voice somewhere, which presents in the way the rhythms of the prose work, in word choice, in sentence and paragraph construction. Even though the Hamlet-based book was heavily influenced by the language of Shakespeare, and my current book is heavily influenced by the language of Hemingway and Melville and possibly people like Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens, I think that not only does each book have its own unique voice, they both also have my own unique voice.
Which gets me thinking about influence upon authorial voice. Davin Malasarn, as anyone who's read his posts for any length of time should know, is a big fan of Count Leo Tolstoy. Yet Davin's writing doesn't sound like Tolstoy, it sounds like Davin. Which is good, because I am a big fan of Mr. Malasarn's writing. His book ROOSTER is written in a clear, shining voice that gives space for the characters to act and the reader to see. My own prose, despite my love of Hemingway, is dense and can become overcrowded with multiple meanings if I don't watch myself. So how much actual influence is there on us from the writers we admire most? What is it that we take from reading their works? What, exactly, is the influence Tolstoy is having on Davin and what is the influence Hemingway is having on me?
I think there might be a large gap between our favorite authors and the stamp those writers make on our writing. Which is curious and strange but I think it's true. I think that when we really admire to the point, maybe, of worshipping some writer, they may have less actual impact on us than writers we don't love as much.
When I wrote my very first novel about 15 years ago, I was trying very hard to write in the style of Flannery O'Connor, a sort of bizarre religion-centered Southern Gothic darkness. That novel is really awful, so bad that I gave up writing for about a decade in fact, but in a lot of ways I got the O'Connor voice on the page. But I'll never try that hard again to imitate another writer, at least not consciously. I have since then learned that I write better when I'm not trying to copy someone else.
Also, I think that when we really admire a writer, as we come into our own as writers and start to find our own authorial voices, we avoid anything that sounds like our writing heroes, even if we don't know we're doing it. I want to write like Hemingway, but I don't want to have written something that's a rip-off of Hemingway or anyone else. I think Davin won't write like Tolstoy because Davin is trying to write like Davin. Possibly, what each of us wants is to have the command of craft that our favorites have, to command the same affect upon readers these guys pulled off. But not so much to sound like them. Maybe.
I know that reading a lot of Shakespeare has given me a new appreciation of the way words sound together, and of the games you can play with double-meanings in dialogue. I know that Hemingway has given me an appreciation of clarity and simply saying what you mean. Flannery O'Connor had a great economical way of describing action that I admire and try to emulate. Melville enjoyed the sound of his own voice and really understood the concept of telling details. Dostoyevski and Gunter Grass and A.S. Byatt know how to show people at their best and their worst, to create deep characters that remain with readers. I've tried to learn from all of these people, but I don't think I sound like any of them. If there was one thing I would like to still learn, it would be maybe Ivan Turgenov's way of relaxing into the prose and making the reader see the broad sweep of the landscape surrounding the action, all with a couple of sentences.
So we come to the questions du jour: Who are your favorite writers? Do you try to write like them or not? What's the one thing you'd like to learn from another writer?
As I said in my comment yesterday to Lady Glamis' post, I think that beneath the narrative voices lies my own authorial voice somewhere, which presents in the way the rhythms of the prose work, in word choice, in sentence and paragraph construction. Even though the Hamlet-based book was heavily influenced by the language of Shakespeare, and my current book is heavily influenced by the language of Hemingway and Melville and possibly people like Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens, I think that not only does each book have its own unique voice, they both also have my own unique voice.
Which gets me thinking about influence upon authorial voice. Davin Malasarn, as anyone who's read his posts for any length of time should know, is a big fan of Count Leo Tolstoy. Yet Davin's writing doesn't sound like Tolstoy, it sounds like Davin. Which is good, because I am a big fan of Mr. Malasarn's writing. His book ROOSTER is written in a clear, shining voice that gives space for the characters to act and the reader to see. My own prose, despite my love of Hemingway, is dense and can become overcrowded with multiple meanings if I don't watch myself. So how much actual influence is there on us from the writers we admire most? What is it that we take from reading their works? What, exactly, is the influence Tolstoy is having on Davin and what is the influence Hemingway is having on me?
I think there might be a large gap between our favorite authors and the stamp those writers make on our writing. Which is curious and strange but I think it's true. I think that when we really admire to the point, maybe, of worshipping some writer, they may have less actual impact on us than writers we don't love as much.
When I wrote my very first novel about 15 years ago, I was trying very hard to write in the style of Flannery O'Connor, a sort of bizarre religion-centered Southern Gothic darkness. That novel is really awful, so bad that I gave up writing for about a decade in fact, but in a lot of ways I got the O'Connor voice on the page. But I'll never try that hard again to imitate another writer, at least not consciously. I have since then learned that I write better when I'm not trying to copy someone else.
Also, I think that when we really admire a writer, as we come into our own as writers and start to find our own authorial voices, we avoid anything that sounds like our writing heroes, even if we don't know we're doing it. I want to write like Hemingway, but I don't want to have written something that's a rip-off of Hemingway or anyone else. I think Davin won't write like Tolstoy because Davin is trying to write like Davin. Possibly, what each of us wants is to have the command of craft that our favorites have, to command the same affect upon readers these guys pulled off. But not so much to sound like them. Maybe.
I know that reading a lot of Shakespeare has given me a new appreciation of the way words sound together, and of the games you can play with double-meanings in dialogue. I know that Hemingway has given me an appreciation of clarity and simply saying what you mean. Flannery O'Connor had a great economical way of describing action that I admire and try to emulate. Melville enjoyed the sound of his own voice and really understood the concept of telling details. Dostoyevski and Gunter Grass and A.S. Byatt know how to show people at their best and their worst, to create deep characters that remain with readers. I've tried to learn from all of these people, but I don't think I sound like any of them. If there was one thing I would like to still learn, it would be maybe Ivan Turgenov's way of relaxing into the prose and making the reader see the broad sweep of the landscape surrounding the action, all with a couple of sentences.
So we come to the questions du jour: Who are your favorite writers? Do you try to write like them or not? What's the one thing you'd like to learn from another writer?
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Two Voices...and Penguins
MG Higgins recently did a post that sparked my thoughts about voice. I normally hate the term voice. It annoys me because it's such a slippery term; it can mean so many different things depending on how you look at it and who's defining it.
I propose this today that there are at least two voices in every work. Did you know that the emperor penguin, like most birds, has a two-part organ that produces its "voice?" In most birds, these two parts of the organ are used separately from each other, but in several species of penguins, they're used together. Especially with the emperor penguin. Because there's no possible way for the penguins that mate together to find each other's nests in order to switch off "egg warming" duty, they must use their distinct voice pattern to recognize each other for the rounds.
Hmm, two voices creating a distinct voice that matches no other. Because there're a lot of penguins waddling around on that ice.
Which Two?
First, I've noticed in every novel I've written, there are two voices. The first one?
My voice.
I think this is something extremely hard to lose or avoid unless, like I've done before, you're being dishonest with yourself and trying to write something that's not who you are. Every writer has a voice. It just sort of happens. And it's not something I feel you can consciously alter. Our experiences make it what it is. It shows through in every word choice, every sentence construction. In my opinion, referring to MG Higgins's post, this voice does not change.
The other one?
Your narrator's voice.
This is often the Main Character, but think of it in terms of the essential viewpoint character, the one you cannot tell the story without. They have a voice, just like you do. In my novel, Monarch, I have three POV characters, but only one is the essential viewpoint of the story, and he flavors everything, even the other viewpoints. In my opinion, this voice should change.
Like MG says:
In my novel, my main character makes an important life decision and becomes more self-aware. So she shouldn't sound exactly the same on the last page as she does on the first. She's still spunky (since that's a personality trait), but not as sarcastic. And she's more relaxed because her decision has been made.
Remember the Penguin
So like the penguins, try to remember that you've got dual voices going on, and that they should work together to create a feel for that novel, and that novel alone. This is how we can write completely different novels that feel distinct, but the same. Our voice usually doesn't change (unless over a long period of time as we change) but each essential viewpoint will change for a different book (outside of a series, I suppose).
MG said she has a hard time separating personality traits that don't change from a situational-based personality trait that's more pliable. Those pliable traits, like MG's character's sarcasm, are what make a story arc exciting. When a character actually changes their worldview because of the action, choices they make, etc., that's when the story gets exciting. They change. They grow. Their voice should change to reflect that!
Question For the Day: Do you feel like you have two voices going on in your work? How does it help you, if you do?
~MDA (aka Glam)
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Defensive Writing And Your Unique Voice
From the age of fifteen to about twenty-eight, I was obsessed with the idea of originality, which to me translated as style (when I was painting) or voice (when I was writing). Now that I feel more confident as a writer, I worry less about being original--I just try to write what I want to write. The cool part is that, I think the less we try to be original, the more original we become.
Yesterday I talked about not trying, the idea that if you just relax and approach writing naturally, you will end up using your own voice. Today, I'm discussing something similar, but it is a distinct strategy in my mind. This is the idea of writing defensively, which is not as bad as it sounds.
It's hard to write a perfect paragraph, never mind using the perfect voice. Your first drafts might have too much telling, or not enough telling. It might have too much description, or not enough description, etc. As you revise, you try to balance these things out. You try to use language that doesn't sound too vague or too formal. You try to make the dialog sound more natural, or more funny, or more whatever. The idea is that you try to fix all these things that are broken with your earlier draft. You don't have time to worry about using any sort of voice; you're really just trying not to sound like a stupid loser. (My language seems to have become more crude. I blame it on writer Scott G. F. Bailey, who made me start my Tuesday morning with the word bitchcakes.)
Anyway, as you are just trying your best to cobble together that most primitive of competent stories, your unique voice naturally emerges as a consequence of trying not to do anything wrong. Everyone has their own idea of what is ideal. I have a concept of how much description I like in a story that may be different, even if just by 0.0002675% from the next writer. Given all the different elements that make up voice, the likelihood of any two people having the same combination of preferences for all of these elements is tiny, probably 0. (Ever notice how no two people give you the same critique?) Just fix what's broken and, voila, you have a voice!
So, I guess I see today's idea working with yesterday's idea this way: First, you start a story by trying to free yourself of all those other influences you admire. You don't try to copy anyone or build off of anyone. You just be yourself. Then, as you revise, you strive to fix all those things that you find wrong with your writing. As a result, you end up with that rare combination of technical elements that only you think is perfect. Thus, without trying to have a unique voice, you end up having a unique voice.
More and more I read about how important voice is to agents and publishers. I'm not sure if what I'm advocating is in line with them. For me, as someone who usually writes in third person, the voice I'm seeking is the narrator's voice, which more often than not is what I consider MY voice. I think a lot of times agents are looking for character voices, either from narrator characters or from the characters in the story, such as when something is told in first person. I think this sort of voice has an extra step in that the writer must be able to step into that character before speaking. But, once you are there, then I would guess that it's again a matter of relaxing and trying to write as naturally as possible from that different point of view. I've only done this a few times, but that has been my experience.
Yesterday I talked about not trying, the idea that if you just relax and approach writing naturally, you will end up using your own voice. Today, I'm discussing something similar, but it is a distinct strategy in my mind. This is the idea of writing defensively, which is not as bad as it sounds.
It's hard to write a perfect paragraph, never mind using the perfect voice. Your first drafts might have too much telling, or not enough telling. It might have too much description, or not enough description, etc. As you revise, you try to balance these things out. You try to use language that doesn't sound too vague or too formal. You try to make the dialog sound more natural, or more funny, or more whatever. The idea is that you try to fix all these things that are broken with your earlier draft. You don't have time to worry about using any sort of voice; you're really just trying not to sound like a stupid loser. (My language seems to have become more crude. I blame it on writer Scott G. F. Bailey, who made me start my Tuesday morning with the word bitchcakes.)
Anyway, as you are just trying your best to cobble together that most primitive of competent stories, your unique voice naturally emerges as a consequence of trying not to do anything wrong. Everyone has their own idea of what is ideal. I have a concept of how much description I like in a story that may be different, even if just by 0.0002675% from the next writer. Given all the different elements that make up voice, the likelihood of any two people having the same combination of preferences for all of these elements is tiny, probably 0. (Ever notice how no two people give you the same critique?) Just fix what's broken and, voila, you have a voice!
So, I guess I see today's idea working with yesterday's idea this way: First, you start a story by trying to free yourself of all those other influences you admire. You don't try to copy anyone or build off of anyone. You just be yourself. Then, as you revise, you strive to fix all those things that you find wrong with your writing. As a result, you end up with that rare combination of technical elements that only you think is perfect. Thus, without trying to have a unique voice, you end up having a unique voice.
More and more I read about how important voice is to agents and publishers. I'm not sure if what I'm advocating is in line with them. For me, as someone who usually writes in third person, the voice I'm seeking is the narrator's voice, which more often than not is what I consider MY voice. I think a lot of times agents are looking for character voices, either from narrator characters or from the characters in the story, such as when something is told in first person. I think this sort of voice has an extra step in that the writer must be able to step into that character before speaking. But, once you are there, then I would guess that it's again a matter of relaxing and trying to write as naturally as possible from that different point of view. I've only done this a few times, but that has been my experience.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Finding A Unique Voice: The Path Of Least Resistance
I constantly struggle with developing my unique voice. Ever since I was young, this was something I personally found to be important. Loving Yasunari Kawabata and Leo Tolstoy, I couldn't decide which voice was my favorite. So, I wanted my voice to be a combination of all the great writers I encountered, and usually I accomplished nothing because I didn't even know where to start.
Only recently did I come to understand that these writers were not opposites of each other. Great writers cannot be placed on two ends of the same spectrum. Sure, if you focus on a particular element, they may appear to be that way. But, each writer is unique, like a point on a star, or a branch on a phylogenetic tree. They may originate from a common source, but they evolve and move in their own direction. It was this realization that helped me to recognize my own voice.
Voice, for me, is a combination of every technical component of writing. Voice includes vocabulary, sentence construction, rhythm, metaphor usage, punctuation, pacing, length, perspective, point of view, and many other components. For every page we write, we make hundreds of small decisions that affect our voice. With all of these decisions, it's impossible to create anything that is a successful compromise of previously written work.
Now, while I think it's important to study the writing of others, whenever I try to consciously use a technique I've learned from someone else, I feel myself being pulled away from my own sincere thoughts. If I study a writer to find out how they transition from scene to scene, then I learn how they transition from scene to scene, not how life transitions. If I study how someone creates dialog, then I learn how they create dialog, not how dialog really sounds. Every attempt to use someone else's technique suddenly makes me use a different part of my brain and less of my heart. It feels like study rather than play. It feels like resistance.
For me, finding my own voice is a matter of following the path of least resistance. Whenever someone else's book changes my style, I become a follower of that book and its writer. A book that tries to be the next Anna Karenina may always be inferior to the original. It may be limited. Its glory, if it finds any, may have a lifespan. The components of that writing that will be unique will probably only exist between those followed elements in the story--maybe even only in the places where the writer has failed to follow accurately.* On the other hand, a book that tries to be itself will be harder to compare to anything before it, and, thus, harder to make inferior.
I'm sure that I will always flip through the pages of great books as I'm writing, but I find myself trying harder and harder to invent my own technique and let my writing flow out of me as resistance-free as possible. The better I get at writing, the more I realize the importance of not forcing myself to sound like anything at all. When I can no longer hear my voice because it is so perfectly tailored to me, that's probably when I'll have created something truly unique for the first time.
*This week I'm planning at least three posts about voice. And, as the opinions I'm expressing are not all my own, they will contradict each other. The failure that I mention here will come up in a more positive light later.
Only recently did I come to understand that these writers were not opposites of each other. Great writers cannot be placed on two ends of the same spectrum. Sure, if you focus on a particular element, they may appear to be that way. But, each writer is unique, like a point on a star, or a branch on a phylogenetic tree. They may originate from a common source, but they evolve and move in their own direction. It was this realization that helped me to recognize my own voice.
Voice, for me, is a combination of every technical component of writing. Voice includes vocabulary, sentence construction, rhythm, metaphor usage, punctuation, pacing, length, perspective, point of view, and many other components. For every page we write, we make hundreds of small decisions that affect our voice. With all of these decisions, it's impossible to create anything that is a successful compromise of previously written work.
Now, while I think it's important to study the writing of others, whenever I try to consciously use a technique I've learned from someone else, I feel myself being pulled away from my own sincere thoughts. If I study a writer to find out how they transition from scene to scene, then I learn how they transition from scene to scene, not how life transitions. If I study how someone creates dialog, then I learn how they create dialog, not how dialog really sounds. Every attempt to use someone else's technique suddenly makes me use a different part of my brain and less of my heart. It feels like study rather than play. It feels like resistance.
For me, finding my own voice is a matter of following the path of least resistance. Whenever someone else's book changes my style, I become a follower of that book and its writer. A book that tries to be the next Anna Karenina may always be inferior to the original. It may be limited. Its glory, if it finds any, may have a lifespan. The components of that writing that will be unique will probably only exist between those followed elements in the story--maybe even only in the places where the writer has failed to follow accurately.* On the other hand, a book that tries to be itself will be harder to compare to anything before it, and, thus, harder to make inferior.
I'm sure that I will always flip through the pages of great books as I'm writing, but I find myself trying harder and harder to invent my own technique and let my writing flow out of me as resistance-free as possible. The better I get at writing, the more I realize the importance of not forcing myself to sound like anything at all. When I can no longer hear my voice because it is so perfectly tailored to me, that's probably when I'll have created something truly unique for the first time.
*This week I'm planning at least three posts about voice. And, as the opinions I'm expressing are not all my own, they will contradict each other. The failure that I mention here will come up in a more positive light later.
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