LOOK WHO'S TALKING, AND HOW
by Deb Vanasse
Voice. Style. Mood.During my twenty years of teaching literature, I hated trying to explain these to students. Vital concepts, but slippery ones. Textbooks kept explanations of these devices to a minimum, so I figure textbook authors have trouble with these intuitive concepts, too. When I taught writing, I’d encourage students to find their voices. What was voice, they’d wonder. One of those things you’d know when you found it, I assured them. Kind of like love.Voice and its counterpart style are our signatures. They’re uniquely our own. Others can try to forge them, but their efforts will feel forced. Like a signature, voice comes naturally, but it can change over time. It can change with the venue. I sign my books more purposefully than I sign my checks. But when you look at both signatures, you can tell they’re mine.Mood happens when voice collides with setting and atmosphere. We talk about creating mood in a piece, but we don’t talk about creating voice. Voice just happens. I love poetry and lyrical language. No surprise, then, that I’ve had all sorts of picture book manuscripts rejected because they’re “too quiet.” It’s a matter of voice. Since it’s my voice, am I stuck with it?
Not at all. Voice can be enhanced, refined, and molded to the story and its purpose. You can have a lot of fun with voice. Subtle and not-so-subtle changes will energize a manuscript.One great exercise is to choose a writer whose voice is noticeably different from yours. If you tend toward the lyrical, pick someone who’s blunt and bold. If your voice is whimsical, choose someone serious and weighty. Then try rewriting a few paragraphs of yours so it sounds like theirs. Or try writing a few paragraphs of a next chapter or an alternate ending for their book in their voice. The goal here is to stretch, to see what you could sound like if you wanted to. You’re not trying to drastically alter your voice with this exercise. You’re only trying to increase your range.Another voice-building exercise I’ve enjoyed is to read a poem by one of my favorite poets and then, without thinking much about it, to do a quick draft of my own on some unrelated topic. Bits of the poet’s voice, cadence, and structure imprint and carry over into the draft. The voice is mostly my own, but it’s enhanced by the professional voice of the poet that lingers in my head. My favorite is Wislawa Szymborska, an amazing Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1996. Not only does her voice resonate in every poem, but she had the guts to hang up during an NPR phone interview when she thought the discussion was getting too personal. For fiction writers, changing the narrative point of view works wonders with voice. After editors kept saying they liked one of my manuscripts but they couldn’t connect quite enough with the characters, I realized the story would be much more powerful if told in the first person. Look at this paragraph before the rewrite. In third person, it sounds formal and overwrought.“She lets go of him. He looks past her pudgy cheeks and made-up eyes, seeing the old woman she’ll become. If the table between them were to dissolve, if she were to wrap her arms around him and hug him in her ample embrace, he would fall apart. Her love is that real and powerful, touching the raw nerve of his pain. He looks away again.”When the narrator gets to speak for himself, the voice becomes more immediate and the emotion more real:“She lets go of me. I look past her pudgy cheeks and made-up eyes, seeing the old woman she’ll become. If the table between us were to dissolve, if she were to wrap her arms around me and hug me in her ample embrace, what would happen then? Her love is too real. Too powerful. I look away.”Voice is tough to explain, but it’s vital to our craft. If a manuscript’s not working, take a look at the voice. Little changes can go a long way toward a more engaging story.