Voice In The Novel (Or Finding Yours)

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 ‘voice’ in writing, and how do you get one?

What Is Voice In Writing?

What Authorial Voice Is – And Why You Want One

Voice is to writing as personality is to humans.

‘Voice’ refers to the author’s writing style, or authorial voice. It is the stylistic imprint of the individual author – 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’s what will captivate your readers and hook an agent.

The idea is that authors with real “voice” are inimitable. That they sound like themselves and no one else.

So here’s Cormac McCarthy, for example:

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.

[The Road]

Here’s Raymond Chandler:

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.

[Farewell, My Lovely]

Here’s Gillian Flynn:

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s 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’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding.

[Gone Girl]

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

Why Do Literary Agents Care So Much About Voice?

Just imagine you were an agent looking through your slushpile – maybe 2,000 manuscripts through the course of a year.

Many of those manuscripts will be perfectly fine. Competent thrillers. Decent rom-coms. Accessible literary fiction with interesting themes.

But their ‘perfectly OK-ness’ is 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?

In many cases, the answer is ‘nothing much.’ And that’s where voice comes in. If you, as a debut author, can stride into the agent’s consciousness sounding like nothing else in his/her slushpile – sounding like yourself and no one else – you force the agent to pay you attention.

And in the course the editor.

And in due course the reader.

And that’s why voice matters. That’s why voice is golden.

Achieving Voice: Aspire To Authenticity

Voice is often left until later in writing courses. That’s emphatically not because the concept doesn’t 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.

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, handling points of view, and all those other things that go to make up a technically proficient novel. In short, if you’re uncertain whether you are yet entirely competent as a writer, you probably still need to worry at your technique as your priority.

(Oh, and I should be clear that I’m not using ‘competent’ 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’t make you a carpenter. Likewise, many first-time novelists may struggle with aspects of technique, which is fair enough if you haven’t done this before.)

Don’t Fake A Voice That’s Not Yours

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 work, yes, in principle – 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.

Character, Character, Character, And Story

To achieve authenticity, you need to not 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. Really, it has to work the other way round. You find the style that suits your character and work with that. I’ve 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’s not first person.

For a remarkable exercise in third-person character determining voice, try Brooklyn by the wonderful Colm Toibin. What you notice in that book is how little the author appears to do. How much is not said. But that’s 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 – only a little pretentiously – a system of silences. Character determining voice.

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’re most of the way to doing what you need.

Remember Imagery, Yes, But Also Everything Else

When it comes to ‘fine writing’, a lot of people have a strange idea that it’s 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:

• Rhythm
• Length of sentences and paras
• Vocabulary (broad or narrow, both can work)
• Vocabulary as a palette (for example, a book might cleave very tightly to agricultural and natural images, colours and allusions)
• Lyricism versus stony realism
• Humour
• Warmth
• Irony
• Does the book stick close to one or more characters, or does the narratorial voice sometimes protrude?
• Descriptive or terse?
• Minute dissection of moments, emotions, thoughts? Or very sweeping? Intimate or wide-angle?
• Does the writer tease the reader? Are mysteries left to linger unsolved?
• Present tense or past? And how are those tenses deployed?
• Preference for Anglo-Saxon vocabulary or Latinate, French?
• Smoothness or unexpectedness? Does the voice remain very consistent in tone, or does it move around to surprise the reader?

I daresay if you think a few moments, you’ll be able to extend that list a good way yourself. All these things can go to make up voice. You need to pick the bits that matter to you.

Remember It’s Not A Competition In Technique

And, also, you don’t get points for some show-off technique like, for example, writing a novel in the first-person plural. (The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides is a good example.) You get points for writing well. That can be by doing the basic things very well indeed. Don’t seek to flaunt some exotic piece of technique unless the book really demands it.

And for a last hint, I think that as you start to understand your own style, it can be worth doing the same thing, but just a little more. Taking your existing ingredients and cutting out anything that doesn’t quite mesh and emphasising your signature notes a little more.

It would be exceptionally easy to overdo this, of course, but it never hurts to nudge the reader, just a little, with what to look out for.

My Voice (Or The One I Share With Fiona Griffiths)

And there’s no use in talking about voice without showing it on the page. This is me, talking as my detective character Fiona Griffiths. Fiona is working undercover, is currently in prison, and is hoping to uncover some secrets from a fellow inmate, Anna Quintrell.

Quintrell is brought to the cell when the light is dying.

She looks rough. Not injured and knocked about, like me, but exhausted. Defeated. She’s still in her cutsie little summer dress, but someone has given her a grey fleece to wear over the top.

We stare at each other.

She sits on her bed. There are four blankets in the room and I’ve got them all.

‘What happened to you?’

‘Resisting arrest,’ I say. ‘Except some of it happened after arrest.’

She draws her legs up on the bed. ‘Can I have my blankets?’

I give her one.

‘And another?’

I tell her to fuck off. Say I’m cold.

‘So am I.’

I shrug. Not interested.

There’s a pause. A pause sealed off by steel doors and concrete walls.

‘They bugged my house. My phone. They’ve got everything.’

I shrug.

Light dies in the ceiling.

She tries to make herself comfortable. Twitches the fleece and blanket, trying to get warm. A losing game.

There’s a call button by the door which allows prisoners to ask for help from staff. She presses it, asks for more bedclothes. Someone laughs at her and tells her to go to sleep.

She stands by my bed and says plaintively. ‘You’ve got my blanket.’

I tell her again to fuck off. She’s bigger than me, but I’m scarier. She goes back to her bed.

The light fades some more. I try to sleep. The aspirin has worn off and my head hurts. Quintrell starts crying. Quiet sobs, that tumble into the blanket and are smothered. Down the corridor, we can hear more suspects being brought in and processed. Doors slam through the night: church bells calling the hour.

I sleep.

I won’t comment much on that, except to note that my style is unusual in its attempt at combining two things. First, its clipped quality (very short sentences and paras, lots of sentence fragments or verbs missing their subject), not uncommon in thrillers, but then I try for an almost lyrical quality, also (“A pause sealed off by steel doors”, “Light dies in the ceiling”), though this is unobtrusive, even sparse, because those interjections can’t detract from the action.

The combination of the two – plus that intense, up-close present tense – go to create a lot of what we experience as Fiona’s voice. She’s also an odd combination of highly intelligent (hinted at here only) and very, erm, blue-collar in her speech. It’s those dissonant ingredients that go to make our Fi.

If you’re struggling for that elusive ‘voice’ in your novel, and you’re writing in the first-person, why not set aside your story for a moment, and scribble a conversation with your protagonist or a page from their diary. What does it sound like?

Happy writing!