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Elizabeth Zelvin
In my alternate persona as a therapist, I was trained to ask, when a client claimed he (or she) kept hearing voices, “Do the voices come from inside or outside your head?” If the voices came from outside, chances were the client had a thought disorder, such as schizophrenia. (Obviously, I got my training well before the cell phone era began.) So I wasn’t too terribly freaked out when, having developed my series protagonist, recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler, I began to hear his voice at odd moments on the inside of my head. The more I wrote about Bruce (four novels and four short stories so far, though not all are published yet), the more distinctive his voice became.
I’ve just opened at random the notebook I keep on my night table, along with a self-illuminating pen, to write down those middle-of-the-night thoughts. Here’s the first entry that caught my eye.
Bruce: X’s supercilious expression would have looked good on a camel.
I don’t know who X is. I’ve never transcribed the line to a computer file or used it in a manuscript. But it sure is something I know that Bruce would say.
Now, here’s a passage that never made it into Death Will Help You Leave Him, the book that will come out in the fall. I forgot about it once I’d written it down in the middle of the night. Bruce and his ex-wife Laura are breaking into her boyfriend’s apartment. Bruce has been complaining that Laura has no sense of irony.
I hoped we weren’t going to end up in jail over this little expedition.
“What’s the sense of giving up jumping turnstiles if you have me breaking into apartments?”
“You pay the fare now? Oh, Bruce, that’s funny.” Laura’s deep laugh rang out.
Okay, so she did have a sense of irony.
Are you beginning to get the hang of Bruce? He sure doesn’t sound like me—and to me, that’s the miracle of “voice” in fiction. Here are some lines from that scene that did make it into the book. They’re climbing up the fire escape to get into the apartment.
I needed a smoke. A guy’s gotta do something with the anxiety. Prayers to my Higher Power for guidance in breaking and entering didn’t seem quite appropriate.
A little later on, he says, “I don’t recommend breaking and entering sober.”
Fellow author Susan Froetschel described the process very well in an interview on Poe's Deadly Daughters a while back. She said: “The conversation comes naturally, just spills out, and I often must use a heavy hand to cut the dialogue. And as the story unfolds, the characters can surprise even me with what they say and do. Once I get to know them, their reactions just pop into my head.”
That’s it precisely. Recently I revised a manuscript that I hope will become the third book in the series. Bruce and his friends Barbara and Jimmy are at an elegant party in the Hamptons. Barbara can get a little too earnest about recovery, and as a world-class codependent, she can always think of a way to fix or improve someone else. Jimmy has been in AA a long time and takes its principles and slogans very seriously. Bruce, on the other hand, tends to maintain a certain level of skepticism.
It had been a while since I’d read over the first draft of this manuscript. I couldn’t quite remember how the scene went, but, pen in hand, I read this passage at the bottom of a page.
“He couldn’t shake hands,” Barbara said, “because he had a bottle of Veuve Cliquot in one hand and a flute in the other. And now he’s moved on to whiskey. I don’t suppose you or Jimmy could twelve-step him?”
“The program is for those who want it, not for those who need it,” Jimmy said as he came up behind us. “Attraction, not promotion.”
I read those AA catch phrases (completely in character for Jimmy at that moment), and I thought, I know exactly what Bruce would say: “Yeah, yeah.”
I turned the page, and there was the next line, in Bruce’s narrative voice:
Yeah, yeah.
As Susan Froetschel puts it, his reaction popped into my head, as it had when I wrote the first draft. In this case, it wasn’t clever or complicated, but I’m absolutely sure it’s what Bruce would have said in the circumstances. And in revision, what she says about cutting the dialogue, heavily if necessary, is true for me too. In the first draft, I need to pour it all out without censoring myself. Not every writer works this way, but many do. In revision, I have to “kill my darlings.” It’s taken me a long time to learn not to cling to every well-turned phrase. But it’s become a lot easier since I learned to recognize Bruce’s voice. No matter how much I loved a line when I wrote it, if it’s Not Bruce, I cut it.
Showing posts with label voice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label voice. Show all posts
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Thursday, November 15, 2007
The Indefinable Quality of Voice
Elizabeth Zelvin
If you ask agents and editors what single quality draws them to a manuscript by a new author, the majority of them, at least in my experience, will say “voice.” A strong writer’s literary voice is hard to describe. It may or may not be hard to imitate—but a work that does imitate an established writer’s voice immediately gets branded as derivative or mere pastiche or parody.
The singer’s voice makes a good analogy to writer’s voice. To start by saying what it’s not, I’m not talking about the easily discerned difference between Renee Fleming singing opera and Mariah Carey belting out a pop song. Opera and pop are different musical forms, just as a poem and a novel are different literary forms, and the singers or writers present each in an appropriate artistic style. Voice is more like this: you’re sitting in a greasy spoon in Wichita drinking coffee, and the radio is set to an oldies station. A phrase of vocal music floats past your ears, and you think, “Judy Garland!” or “Louis Armstrong!” Garland and Armstrong are both decades dead, but millions of people still recognize each of these great singers’ unique voice whenever they hear it.
When it’s in the first person, the reader may think of it as the character’s voice rather than the author’s. One of the great challenges to the writer is to shift voice when writing different characters. Some writers do it better than others. To use examples from mystery fiction, Charlaine Harris does it masterfully with the protagonists of her three series, Sookie Stackhouse, Lily Bard, and Harper Connolly. Ruth Rendell, after writing the Inspector Wexford books for years, took the pseudonym of Barbara Vine, in my opinion, less to write in a different subgenre than to write in a different voice. Robert Parker’s voice, on the other hand, is strong and unmistakable, but he doesn’t change it well, so that the Sunny Randall books sound—to my ear, at least—exactly like the Spenser books. Stuart Woods is similarly monolithic: the Holly Barker books sound exactly like the Stone Barrington books, a problem the author solved by getting his two protagonists together and into bed.
Voice at its best is both powerful and memorable. The three examples below came to mind immediately, although I haven’t reread any of these books in years. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appeared in 1885. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published more than 70 years earlier, in 1813. Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle came out in 1948. Like Judy Garland and Louis Armstrong, Huck Finn and Elizabeth Bennett and Cassandra Mortmain are unforgettable once you’ve heard them speak.
Twain:
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly -- Tom's Aunt Polly, she is -- and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.
Austen:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
"My dear Mr. Bennet," said his lady to him one day, "have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?"
Smith:
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy. I can’t say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring—I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn’t a very good poem. I have decided that my poetry is so bad that I mustn’t write any more of it.
If you ask agents and editors what single quality draws them to a manuscript by a new author, the majority of them, at least in my experience, will say “voice.” A strong writer’s literary voice is hard to describe. It may or may not be hard to imitate—but a work that does imitate an established writer’s voice immediately gets branded as derivative or mere pastiche or parody.
The singer’s voice makes a good analogy to writer’s voice. To start by saying what it’s not, I’m not talking about the easily discerned difference between Renee Fleming singing opera and Mariah Carey belting out a pop song. Opera and pop are different musical forms, just as a poem and a novel are different literary forms, and the singers or writers present each in an appropriate artistic style. Voice is more like this: you’re sitting in a greasy spoon in Wichita drinking coffee, and the radio is set to an oldies station. A phrase of vocal music floats past your ears, and you think, “Judy Garland!” or “Louis Armstrong!” Garland and Armstrong are both decades dead, but millions of people still recognize each of these great singers’ unique voice whenever they hear it.
When it’s in the first person, the reader may think of it as the character’s voice rather than the author’s. One of the great challenges to the writer is to shift voice when writing different characters. Some writers do it better than others. To use examples from mystery fiction, Charlaine Harris does it masterfully with the protagonists of her three series, Sookie Stackhouse, Lily Bard, and Harper Connolly. Ruth Rendell, after writing the Inspector Wexford books for years, took the pseudonym of Barbara Vine, in my opinion, less to write in a different subgenre than to write in a different voice. Robert Parker’s voice, on the other hand, is strong and unmistakable, but he doesn’t change it well, so that the Sunny Randall books sound—to my ear, at least—exactly like the Spenser books. Stuart Woods is similarly monolithic: the Holly Barker books sound exactly like the Stone Barrington books, a problem the author solved by getting his two protagonists together and into bed.
Voice at its best is both powerful and memorable. The three examples below came to mind immediately, although I haven’t reread any of these books in years. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appeared in 1885. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published more than 70 years earlier, in 1813. Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle came out in 1948. Like Judy Garland and Louis Armstrong, Huck Finn and Elizabeth Bennett and Cassandra Mortmain are unforgettable once you’ve heard them speak.
Twain:
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly -- Tom's Aunt Polly, she is -- and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.
Austen:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
"My dear Mr. Bennet," said his lady to him one day, "have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?"
Smith:
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy. I can’t say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring—I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn’t a very good poem. I have decided that my poetry is so bad that I mustn’t write any more of it.
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