Building Your Writing Toolkit: Part 7.2 - Voice as Stain

When you hear your professor speaking does it remind you of your father? When you hear your friend speaking do you think of a cousin? When your boss talks to you does it sound like your mom? Probably not – each of the people you know has unique cadences to their speech and a distinct diction that makes them sound unlike most of the other people you know. You have a unique pattern of speech yourself, one which those listening to you can hear and identify you by.

Writers, however, must be able to command a number of different patterns of speech that they can use realistically for their writing. The rhythm of a poet’s poem is different from the rhythm that same poet would use writing an in-class essay; the diction an essayist uses when speaking to his brother is probably very different than the word choices he would make in his writing.

All of us have different voices for different occasions. You don’t speak to a child the same way you speak to a police officer, and you don’t speak to a bartender the same way you speak to your boyfriend. You also have different written voices. You may sound different when you’re writing a poem than you do when you’re writing an essay, and different when you’re writing an essay than when you’re writing a short story. But regardless of what you’re writing you should still sound like you.

Professors often notice (and complain) that students don’t have a voice of their own in their essays. The reason that students abandon their own voice is because they’re striving to sound academic in their writing – they think that there is a single proper tone that they can strike that will instantly make their papers more academic, just as many students believe a five-paragraph structure is required for academic writing – both suppositions are incorrect and both lead to bland, uniform student work.

Similarly many writers strive for a poetic tone in their poetry and fiction, imagining that if they are able to use properly poetic words and sultry enough phrasing that their work will instantly be more artistic – you frequently hear people describing this kind of language as “flowery” and in my mind that’s not a compliment: remember that flowers are a plant’s genitals – I don’t want a bunch of flora-dongs assaulting me either physically or mentally.

Good writing is, always has been, and always will be about good content. Content is the core of good writing and everything else is, to an extent, window-dressing. But it’s up to a writer to decide whether their content is dressed up tastefully or trashily, and much of what makes a piece “trashy” is what makes it trite or cliché. Writers who are afraid to insert their own voice into their writing frequently fall back on “safe” voices – the kinds of voices that have been used in the genre forever – in other words they use cliché and lessen the value of their writing by making it into something that a reader has heard a million times before and is sick of before getting past the first few lines.

Here’s an example from my own writing: I’m currently creating a character called Dr. Denkmann. She is a psychologist in her late thirties. Here are four genre examples of I one could introduce this character if I was aiming for a certain voice.

“The doctor stood before her dark window, watching the rain pound the pavement below. She had curves that wouldn’t quit, legs that went ’til Tuseday, and a look on her face that said trouble was heading my way.”

“A delicate, russet curl had escaped from Dr. Denkmann’s tight bun. It caught the soft light from the window as she looked up at me, gently adding a dusky hue to the blush rising on her cheeks and casting intricate shadows on her slowly heaving breast.”

“The doctor turned sharply away from the window and brought up a new screen on her desk. The smooth, rigid planes of her face relayed to me that bad news was on its way and the glint in her eyes, like cold, distant stars, only confirmed that my day was about to get a lot worse.”

“Alicia pressed her hand to the window and turned her face to me with a trembling lip. I had only just realized that I loved her and I waited, nervous, for her to confirm the worst – cancer, killing our love when it was young enough to be precious and old enough to have completely changed me from an asshole bad boy into a gentle, caring man.”

So were you able to pick up on the tried, true, tired voice in each of those? (I’ll give you the last one – it was the tone of a Nicholas Sparks novel, Sparks being the only living author to have pioneered a voice in his writing alone that is simultaneously addictive to women and repulsive to anyone who doesn’t like reading sappy books about mended men and women with horrible diseases.) Even if you didn’t manage to pin down the voice without more hints, you’ll be able to get it for sure when I ask which of these is romance? Or which of these is Noir? Or Science Fiction? Now it’s obvious. Painfully and depressingly obvious. Why is it obvious? All of these descriptions have the same core elements: the doctor, the window, and an indication that the doctor is upset. Now try to pin down the genre in the description that I actually wrote:

“Dr. Denkmann moved with a jarring, forest animal grace. Her wide hips and narrow shoulders were a startling contrast to her slender legs, capped with narrow black heels that clacked like a deer’s hooves when she walked. I caught her silhouetted against the window’s dim gray light, her absurd frame supported on a dancer’s legs, before she turned and sat, staring at me with a frown so slight that it was almost obscured by her glasses.”

Can you find a clear genre in that? What if I told you that Dr. Denkmann was a character in a horror story? Or a psychological thriller? Or a science fiction, noir, or romance novel? Would it fit with your common conception of any of those things? Probably not, and that is why most genre novels are derided by literature classes – they are genres that so infect the stories within them that most authors lose their voice to the genre. And fuck that bullshit – you can put any voice you want into any kind of writing you want. Dr. Denkmann is a side character in a psychological thriller, by the way, but I hate writing in tingly, questioning voices – nervousness isn’t conducive to character building – so I try to keep my writing MY writing and genre expectations can die in a fire for all I care.

So how do you assert your voice in your writing, whatever it may be? Well, first you have to know what your voice is. I like adding humor and vulgarity to almost everything I write. I know that because I’ve written a lot of shitty, flowery poetry. Flowery isn’t my thing. I had to practice a lot to know what kind of voice sounds right for me when I’m writing. I wrote a lot of stodgy, academic-sounding essays before I figured out that you can work a clever turn of phrase, a dash of hyperbole, and occasional obscenity into an academic paper and still have it turn out well. I’ve tried (you wouldn’t believe how I’ve tried) to write simpering, simmering romances just so I could have something to try to sell to a publisher but I always get twenty pages in and feel like my brain has turned into a milk shake. You assert your voice by writing, writing a lot, and messing up a lot before you figure out what works for you. And once you’ve found it you do your damndest to never write in someone else’s voice again.

Figure out metaphors that are amusing to you, adjectives that you like and aren’t tired of hearing. Here’s an exercise: in 100 words or fewer describe a bathroom. Describe it in every genre that you can think of. Then give yourself a thousand words and set a scene in that bathroom, and use those thousand words describing it the way you want to. Do it over and over and over until you are happy with the result. Then look at the result and really examine it – what makes you happy about it? What sounds like you? Hand your scene to a friend (or a professor – someone who can actually be critical of you but who knows you pretty well) and ask them if it sounds like you. Then the next day try the same exercise with an animal instead of a bathroom. The next day try a car. The next day try a person. When you’ve worked on it long enough (and it does actually take a lot of work) you’ll have found the elements in your writing that add up to your unique voice. Befriend these elements. Cultivate them. Cuddle them and bring them flowers. Then use them as much as possible to distinguish your writing from the writing around you.

Sorry if that’s massively unhelpful, and sorry if you thought there was going to be a quick fix. There’s never a quick fix when it comes to writing well – you should know that by now.

That’s all for now, Folks. I’ve allowed myself to ramble a little too much, but I’ll be back next week with advice on creating voices for your characters. After that I think we’re moving on to dialogue, or perhaps tone. Tell me which of the two you would prefer in the comments and that’s what our next subject will be.

Thanks for reading, and stay Tasteful,

Cheers,

     - Alli