softly and with style

the art of Voice

Well-met, fellow travellers in Sequel Country, let us refresh ourselves for the next leg of our journey in yonder wayside tavern, and perhaps listen to some of the voices there, as we rest ourselves many months into this journey.

Voices, and the way they come across in prose fiction, weren’t something I’d given much thought to in my writing before I was in my 40s. I was interested in characters and scenes and landscape and atmosphere, and found thinking about plot hard, and didn’t need the problem of authorial voice on top of all that. I tried to write as a neutral, omniscient sort of narrator, there only to mediate between the reader and the story while staying as much in the background as possible. I don’t write to exhibit my own personality, nor do I want to hit my readers over the head with my themes.

But then, perhaps as I got into reading Haruki Murakami after several trips to Japan, I became interested in writing in the first person. I wrote some short stories in the first person (the first time I’d tried this), and discovered that in this mode you have to think about how the character would express themself, what vocabulary and constructions they might use. It adds another dimension to a protagonist, one that you don’t get when reading a narrator who is not also a character.

The first story I wrote for my MA in Creative Writing was first-person, and also my first attempt at autofiction – fictionalising episodes from my own life – and also time ran backwards. The tutor had strongly encouraged us to be experimental! I hadn’t quite twigged that to get a good mark you had to not only to be experimental, but also had to pull it off well. When I got his feedback afterwards, which was the first professional feedback I’d ever had after 40 years of writing, one of the comments was “you have a voice”. I was thrilled. That definitely seems like something a writer should have. So, er, what does that mean?

In Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin suggests

Often voice is a kind of shorthand for authenticity (writing in your own voice, catching the true voice of a person, and so on).

I think this says it well. She refers to novels as “polyphony”, in that you get to hear all kinds of people speaking in a novel, in their dialogue. Each needs to be authentic: in good writing, you don’t simply hear the author’s voice in the mouth of every character. And if that applies to the dialogue, why not to the narrative as well - whether or not it’s told by a first person narrator?

In Monkeys With Typewriters, Scarlett Thomas points out:

The rules you set for your narrative style won’t just concern whose consciousness can be visited at what time, or who narrates in what order. When you decide on a particular tense, for example, you must stick to it and be consistent. […] The only way to really check whether you are consistent in this way is to read your work aloud to yourself.

When I first read that advice, I thought to myself that’s fine, that’s what I do already. I mentally read my work back to myself all the time.

But then, in the second year of my MA, I had a revelatory experience. Some of my classmates and I, those of us who were most interested in prose, used to book ourselves a room in the library and read out each other’s work in progress for critiquing. This was a brilliant experience. It turns out that when I read my own work out loud, as I had a few times at open mics and in class, I’m mostly concentrating on enunciating clearly, suppressing my possibly incomprehensible Yorkshire accent, and trying not to stumble amateurishly over my words. But when someone else reads it, you’re freed from all that, to actually listen to how it sounds! And you can tell when something’s clunky or a sentence is too long and when something lands just how you intended and the audience nods along and never even notices the “voice”.

Even so, when my personal tutor for my final submission (the award-winning writer Preti Taneja) gave me the same advice as Scarlett Thomas, I still didn’t follow it. My MA submission was the first ten chapters of what became my novel Parallel Lines, which is told from alternating points of view of the two main characters, a format I’d enjoyed using many times. More than once we discussed whether the two characters’ voices should be so distinctive that the reader can always tell who’s speaking and whose head we’re currently in. I experimented with having one of the characters grow up somewhere else, but ultimately decided against. One of the themes of the novel is class, and the way that the different class backgrounds of the two characters, who have grown up one village apart and went to the same school for 7 years, gives them radically different (and often conflicting) world views. So when Preti urged me to read my words out loud, I didn’t think I needed to, because the characters and the narration were all in the same voice. I had thrown some Yorkshire dialect words in (see part 7 for more on dialect), and some French words for the protagonist who speaks French, and I didn’t see why I needed anything else. Besides, I would have felt self-conscious reading my story out (over and over) with my partner and the dog within earshot.

But then, long after I’d completed the MA (I got a Distinction), I finished PL and read it, and was horrified how bad it was. Another of our tutors, the poet Jacob Polley, refers to the first draft as “the shit draft” and suddenly I saw why. Material I’d thought was great when writing it, was a bit shit. Clunky. Hard to read, even.

In desperation, I tried actually reading my work out loud, locked in a room on my own, and was amazed how well it works. I was recasting every second or third sentence of the first draft, at least in the first half of the novel, reading it aloud, changing it and reading it again, over and over until I got something that sounded right when read out loud. But then, later in the book, the edits got fewer, sometimes only one per paragraph. In the last quarter of the book, reading aloud wasn’t driving many sentence rephrasings at all. By the end, I realised what had happened: eventually, eighty thousand words in, I had stumbled upon the right voice for the story, the voice it should be told in. And in redrafting, what I had been doing was rewriting the rest of the piece into that voice. In later drafts, I made both characters’ dialogue more individual to them, both variations on the main narrative style, and polished it further by reading the whole novel out loud all over again (and making further changes here and there as a result) the following year.

I now think Virginia Woolf had it right:

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than any words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

It is all about rhythm, and finding the right one for the story. And there’s no substitute for reading your work aloud to check that fit; Preti and Scarlett were right. Read everything aloud, or if possible, get someone else to do it. Sean Bean would be great to narrate the audiobook of PL, I reckon, or maybe Matthew Lewis would be ideal.

My sequel is set on Tyneside, which will be more of a challenge that a book set in Yorkshire, given that I didn’t move to Newcastle until I was 21. But at the moment I’m struggling with what the story is, and it’s still much too early to start to pick up the “wave in the mind” that will inform how it should be told.

With that I must press on into Sequel Country, but feel free to linger in the wayside tavern for the next week or so. Just beware of hooded and cloaked characters looking for a hero to go on any kind of adventure…