{"id":5998,"date":"2019-05-24T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-24T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/townhouse\/articles\/the-secret-of-style\/"},"modified":"2019-05-24T13:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-05-24T12:00:00","slug":"the-secret-of-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/the-secret-of-style\/","title":{"rendered":"The Secret of Style"},"content":{"rendered":"

Voice.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s the secret sauce of writing. The magical herb that transforms your stew. It\u2019s the leaf of gold in a martini. The lemony brightness.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also, no surprise, the single thing that agents most often look for in a debut work. A distinctive voice. The key to success.<\/p>\n

Although agents are most vocal in wanting this, I\u2019d say that the same issue matters almost as much to self-published debuts. After all, if you\u2019re writing just another romance, the reader can buy any old romance to meet their needs. They don\u2019t have to buy your #2 in the series. But if you write something so distinctive that there\u2019s just no adequate substitute out there, they have to buy your #2, and then your #3, and then \u2026 No prizes for guessing which kind of self-pub author makes more money.<\/p>\n

Right, so voice is good. But what is it? What actually are we talking about here?<\/p>\n

Well, the dictionary definition would be something like Voice = the author\u2019s stylistic fingerprint. A distinctive way of writing, unique to that specific author.<\/p>\n

Voice is most obviously applicable to questions of prose style. So Raymond Chandler\u2019s voice is immediately distinctive from the way he puts words on a page. This kind of thing:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Or this:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

But voice has to do with more than just prose.<\/p>\n

So if you think about (for example) I Am Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, there\u2019s nothing so very remarkable about the way she puts words on a page. For example, this:<\/p>\n

\u201cThen I understood I would never marry him. It’s funny how one thing can make you realize something like that. One can be ready to give up the children one always wanted, one can be ready to withstand remarks about one’s past, or one’s clothes, but then–a tiny remark and the soul deflates and says: Oh.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t have anything like the showiness of Raymond Chandler. Each sentence is perfectly simple. The finish is rather flat, as though the author is painting in acrylics, not oils.<\/p>\n

That sounds like a put-down. But the human \/ emotional insights are so precisely observed, so accurately and simply delivered, that their cumulative effect is overwhelming. The flatness of style is, in fact, closely married to the insight. The same kind of insight delivered in Chandler-ese would have deflected most of the attention to the writing, and removed the power of the actual observation.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not hard to find voice in any author of real quality. Take Lee Child. He hardly operates at the literary end of the spectrum. You could slap a chunk of his prose down on the page and not find anything so remarkable. For example:<\/p>\n

\u201cNever forgive, never forget. Do it once and do it right. You reap what you sow. Plans go to hell as soon as the first shot is fired. Protect and serve. Never off duty\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t look like authorial voice even a little bit. That looks like a chain of sentences lining up for the World Clich\u00e9 Parade.<\/p>\n

But \u2013 Jack Reacher. That\u2019s the secret of Lee Child\u2019s voice right there. The way Reacher thinks, acts, remembers, operates is a brilliant construct. Reacher certainly doesn\u2019t have any of Elizabeth\u2019s Strunk\u2019s quietly piercing observations, but Child gives us a complete, brilliant, detailed picture of the way a fighting machine like Reacher works. The (mostly) unremarkable prose is absolutely a part of that. Reacher doesn\u2019t do fancy, so the prose follows suit.<\/p>\n

And, OK, all this is interesting. But we haven\u2019t yet said anything useful.<\/p>\n

I mean, if voice is so important, then it would be kind of useful to know where to get it, how to build it. [Stuff I also discuss in this blog post<\/a>, incidentally.]<\/p>\n

And \u2013 I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

Not really.<\/p>\n

Or rather: I don\u2019t think there\u2019s a specific set of techniques you can use to go and get yourself a distinctive voice. In that sense, it\u2019s not like problems with prose, or problems with plot, where you can simply run a fairly standard set of diagnostic tools to identify the specific issues and find solutions.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, I can tell you what kind of person you have to be to have voice. What kind of writer.<\/p>\n

Above all, you have to be a confident one. Confident in yourself. I love quoting Gore Vidal on this. He says:<\/p>\n

“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The hardest bit there is the not giving a damn. It\u2019s finding the mode of expression that works best for you, then just going for it. Taking off that inner handbrake. Following the logic of your path to its end. Ensuring, relentlessly, that you are satisfied with every last word on the page. That those words, in that order, spoken by those characters are what you want to express.<\/p>\n

That means, in order to please an agent \u2013 you have to not give a damn about what an agent may think.<\/p>\n

In order to please your eventual reader \u2013 you have to not care, or not care directly, about their judgements.<\/p>\n

In effect, the finding-a-voice journey is an act of inner completion, that just happens to be executed via writing. Which is great. Which is uplifting. But which is also a real bummer, because what tools and techniques do you use to become a more complete human?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t really have a useful answer to that question. I\u2019d say my voice was kinda present in my first ever novel \u2013 it didn\u2019t read exactly like anybody else\u2019s debut novel. But before I had anything like a completely confident voice, I\u2019d written five (maybe six) novels and three or four works of non-fiction. And yes, I think there\u2019s something replicable about that technique. Write five or six published novels, and you\u2019ll find yourself writing in a Vidal-ish, not-giving-a-damn kind of way.<\/p>\n

But some of you might be a little more impatient than that. And yes, as a voice-acquisition technique, I\u2019d say my own process was hardly speedy.<\/p>\n

So instead let me recommend these two approaches:<\/p>\n

1. Learn writing technique<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the reasons why newbie writers end up sounding undistinctive is that they have so much else to grapple with. Is my plot working? Should I choose first person or third? Does this character feel vivid? Does this relationship have enough conflict? (etc, etc, etc).<\/p>\n

The result is that they never really get to grapple with those Gore Vidal-ish things at all. Their minds (my mind, during those first few books of mine) are too pre-occupied with issues of mere technique.<\/p>\n

So, lesson one, absorb writing technique until it\u2019s second nature. The more you absorb and internalise those tools, the more your mind is freed for other things. For self-expression and self-finding.<\/p>\n

2. Rewrite<\/strong><\/p>\n

You can\u2019t be satisfied because something is OK. You can only afford to be satisfied when this is OK and expresses exactly what you wanted to say in the way that you wanted to say it.<\/p>\n

And because you don\u2019t even know what you want to say until you start saying it, you\u2019ll find, almost inevitably, that you build your way towards something good by writing and unpicking, and then re-writing and re-unpicking, all the way until you\u2019re finally done.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s lesson two.<\/p>\n

3. Ignore anyone else\u2019s model<\/strong><\/p>\n

The next thriller writer to be as successful as Lee Child will not write like Lee Child.<\/p>\n

The next crime writer to make as much of a mark as Raymond Chandler will definitely not write like Raymond Chandler (because zillions of people have written in a Chandler-lite kind of way and absolutely none of them made any kind of mark.)<\/p>\n

So forget about those models, great as they are.<\/p>\n

Forget also about the endless peer-to-peer workshopping, practised by a lot of university creative writing programmes. That workshopping has plenty to be said for it, no doubt, but too much of it will turn your work into something that sounds like all those other creative writing MFA type products. And you don\u2019t want that. You want to sound like you.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

That\u2019s lesson three, and here endeth all the lessons.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s it from me.<\/p>\n

I am now going to take a hayfever pill and declare war on every blade of grass in Oxfordshire.<\/p>\n

Sneezily,<\/p>\n

Harry<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

PPS<\/strong>: The best place to learn writing technique? Duh. That would be on Jericho Writers, of course. Among your options:<\/p>\n