Voice In Writing

"Something else I would love to know about novel writing: you know when you said a writer should find their own voice - what if that voice involves fancy language?"

- Rebecca Anne, Wolverhampton, UK

Finding your voice in writing is a tricky business, so let's start with the basics.

All good writers have a voice which is unmistakably theirs. Hemingway's voice is characterized by direct and unadorned prose, Melville's by a kind of poetic quality. I have my own voice and you will have yours.

What makes a writing voice? Lots of things...

• Word choice (or diction)
• Sentence length
• Sentence construction
• Punctuation
• And so on

Now, it is my firm belief that the best way to succeed in contemporary literature is to adopt a simple voice. In novel writing classes, far too many beginners kill their prose through overwriting. Instead of writing this:

John sat on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette.

They write:

John lowered himself onto the edge of the bed and felt himself sink into the soft mattress, like falling through fluffy clouds. He removed a cigarette from the packet sitting on the water-stained mahogany night table and raised it to his lips with trembling fingers. He lit it and closed his eyes as the smoke poured into his lungs like a delirious waterfall.

Writing like this is overblown and looks amateurish. Okay, so the first example is minimal in the extreme (you certainly wouldn't want every sentence in your novel to look so stark). But a compromise might be to write something like this:

John sat on the edge of the bed and shook the last Marlboro from the packet. He hated soft mattresses. And with no more nicotene until Nick's Diner opened at dawn, this was going to be one swell night.

Using a "fancy" voice in writing - in a conscious effort to make the prose sound more "literary" - usually makes it worse. If your natural tendency is to prefer ornate over stark prose, then fine. But never fall into the trap of believing that the way to improve a sentence is to change short words to long ones, ot to add adjectives and similes galore. If a simple sentence conveys the precise shade of meaning you are after, use a simple sentence.

One other thing...

Remember that, in a third person novel, there is more than one voice. In writing such a novel, you will use both the narrator's and the viewpoint character's voices. You use the neutral narrator's voice to set the scene, then let the prose take on the characteristics of the viewpoint character's voice as the action heats up.

If a particular viewpoint character, therefore, has a naturally "fancy" way of speaking, you must reflect this in the writing - by using an adverb or a simile too many, or by using a complicated Latin word when a simple Anglo Saxon one would be better.

But when using the neutral narrator's voice, or when standing in the shoes of a viewpoint character who does not have a fancy speaking voice, keep it simple.

I hope that answered your question. Get back to me if it didn't.

Harvey