{"id":220,"date":"2020-11-16T13:14:16","date_gmt":"2020-11-16T13:14:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/?p=220"},"modified":"2023-05-31T12:02:29","modified_gmt":"2023-05-31T11:02:29","slug":"voice-in-the-novel-or-finding-yours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/voice-in-the-novel-or-finding-yours\/","title":{"rendered":"Voice In The Novel (Or Finding Yours)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Countless agents will talk about voice, or something similar, above all other assets that an author might bring. One agent we know of, for example, offered representation for a book having read just one sentence of it. So what is a \u2018voice\u2019 in writing, and how do you get one?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Is Voice In Writing?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

What Authorial Voice Is \u2013 And Why You Want One<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Voice is to writing as personality is to humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Voice\u2019 refers to the author\u2019s writing style, or authorial voice. It is the stylistic imprint of the individual author \u2013 their unique, signature style, if you like. An authorial voice should have an instantly recognisable quality, or personality, and it should remain present throughout the novel. It\u2019s what will captivate your readers and hook an agent<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea is that authors with real \u201cvoice\u201d are inimitable. That they sound like themselves and no one else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So here\u2019s Cormac McCarthy<\/strong>, for example:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe.<\/p>\n

[The Road]<\/p><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s Raymond Chandler<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.<\/p>\n[Farewell, My Lovely]<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s Gillian Flynn<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Men always say that as the defining compliment, don\u2019t they? She\u2019s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she\u2019s hosting the world\u2019s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding.<\/p>\n

[Gone Girl]<\/p><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In each of these cases, those authors have an instantly recognisable quality. One that just drips with personality and mature stylistic confidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why Do Literary Agents Care So Much About Voice?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Just imagine you were an agent looking through your slushpile<\/a> \u2013 maybe 2,000 manuscripts<\/a> through the course of a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of those manuscripts will be perfectly fine. Competent thrillers. Decent rom-coms. Accessible literary fiction with interesting themes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But their \u2018perfectly OK-ness\u2019 is<\/em> the problem. Why would an agent prefer Competent Thriller A to Competent Thriller B? What would force an editor to buy one over the other?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In many cases, the answer is \u2018nothing much.\u2019 And that\u2019s where voice<\/a> comes in. If you, as a debut author<\/a>, can stride into the agent\u2019s consciousness sounding like nothing else in his\/her slushpile \u2013 sounding like yourself and no one else \u2013 you force the agent to pay you attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And in the course the editor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And in due course the reader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that\u2019s why voice matters. That\u2019s why voice is golden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Achieving Voice: Aspire To Authenticity<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Voice is often left until later in writing courses. That\u2019s emphatically not because the concept doesn\u2019t matter, but because you only get to deal with matters of finding your voice once the basics have all been properly dealt with. That certainly means that your prose style will read competently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it goes beyond that. It would be exceptionally rare for a writer to have a wonderful voice without also having a certain minimum level of competence at matters such as plotting<\/a>, handling points of view<\/a>, and all those other things that go to make up a technically proficient novel. In short, if you\u2019re uncertain whether you are yet entirely competent as a writer, you probably still need to worry at your technique as your priority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Oh, and I should be clear that I\u2019m not using \u2018competent\u2019 here in a dismissive sense. Rather the opposite. A professionally competent carpenter is a wonderful and skilful thing. Being able to lift a hammer or a cut a piece of wood doesn\u2019t make you a carpenter. Likewise, many first-time novelists may struggle with aspects of technique, which is fair enough if you haven\u2019t done this before.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t Fake A Voice That\u2019s Not Yours<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A lot of thriller writers, for example, knowing that Raymond Chandler is famous for his prose style and flashy images will seek to do likewise, and jam their prose full of over-the-top imagery and wild similes. This could<\/em> work, yes, in principle \u2013 but by golly it seldom does. And the trouble is partly a misreading of Chandler (who was carefully selective about when to pick an over-the-top image out of his toolkit), but mostly a lack of authenticity. The typical sign is a prose style that judders from the bland to the excessive and back again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Character, Character, Character, And Story<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

To achieve authenticity, you need to not<\/em> start off by worrying about voice. If you do that, you will end up imposing some excessively designed voice over the head of your character<\/a>. Really, it has to work the other way round. You find the style that suits your character and work with that. I\u2019ve put a chunk of my own first-person prose down below (so you can look at it and laugh at me), but character can influence voice even when it\u2019s not first person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a remarkable exercise in third-person character determining voice, try Brooklyn<\/em> by the wonderful Colm Toibin. What you notice in that book is how little<\/em> the author appears to do. How much is not<\/em> said. But that\u2019s because the protagonist is herself from a limited background without much range of personal expression. The intensity of the novel arises from what Toibin called \u2013 only a little pretentiously \u2013 a system of silences. Character determining voice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And if character is mostly paramount, then story matters, too. The voice that Toibin used for Brooklyn would not work well at all for (say) my own Fiona Griffiths detective stories, and vice versa. If you start with character and story, then write as well as you can, you\u2019re most of the way to doing what you need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Remember Imagery, Yes, But Also Everything Else<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When it comes to \u2018fine writing\u2019, a lot of people have a strange idea that it\u2019s all to do with imagery or sentence structure. And sure, if you have those in your armoury, then why not? But other elements of voice abound. For example:<\/p>\n\n\n\n