Developing a Strong Authorial Voice

By Nicholas

So you've got a great novel in the works. It's got everything your audience could ask for - orcs and goblins, champions and villains, flashy adventures and passionate romance. Now the question is not what to write but how to write it; now comes the question of voice.

Voice, like personality, is a nebulous term, and it has as many facets. Your diction, your syntax, and the way you approach description and exposition affect your voice. You'll be hard pressed to find a more exact definition for voice than 'the way you write,' but rest assured it will play an integral part in the success or failure of every piece you write. Think of your voice as the foundation of a house - the stronger it is, the larger and more elaborate you can build. The weaker it is, the more your stories will wobble and threaten to crumble. Developing a solid narrative voice should be a key priority for any author who wishes to improve.

I would like to first dispel a few myths concerning voice, or, as it is sometimes referred to, style. Many new authors, particularly younger ones, seem convinced that voice is some abstract quality innate to each individual, that one is either born a good a writer or a bad one, and regardless that is that. This notion is ridiculous. Sure, style is inevitably reflective of the author, but it's a learned trait. I find it rather silly that writers expect each other to show genius from their first lines, whereas artists and musicians expect masters to have years of practice. Almost worse is the notion that voice is sacred, that it should be cultivated in secret, that it is too personal to be criticized or pursued with one's mentors and peers. I suspect that this idea stems from the insecure artist's mantra (i.e.; 'It's my style!'), but I digress. Voice is not sacred! Writing is like any other art: you practice, you get better. You focus on one thing, you get better faster.

So let's talk voice.

The universals of strong writing

Every artist wants to be unique. Unfortunately, too many of them start out by trying to be original. The truth is that in every art you'll find similarities between many if not all of its great artists, because they all deviate from and conform to the same basic rudiments of technique and style, and as beginning artists we'd all do well to learn and adopt those same rudiments. In writing, the universal elements provide a richness of prose - writers who have mastered them need very few words to say what they mean, because they know how to use them. These essential, universal aspects of writing are clarity, unity, and presence.

Clarity is above all the hallmark of good writing. Having clarity means that your readers can understand you effortlessly and that your audience can appreciate your story without the chore of parsing through your work. This does not mean that you can't be cryptic or obtuse - writers such as William Faulkner are renowned for having written stories that require close consideration - but it does mean that you should stay comprehensible. The difference here is in the question your reader asks himself; ideally he or she will ask what you meant, not what you were trying to say. To clarify, consider these two passages from 'On the Art of Writing,' by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.

I believe this difficulty, which verse, by nature and origin emotional, encounters in dealing with ordinary unemotional narrative, to lie as a technical reason at the bottom of Horace's advice to the writer of Epic to plunge in media res, thus avoiding flat preparative and catching at once a high wind which shall carry him hereafter across dull levels and intervals.

Granted, this quote is out of context (it refers to a lengthy work of poetry that precedes it), but nonetheless, it's nearly indecipherable. We can't consider what Quiller-Couch means here, or at least not without significant effort - first we'll have to figure out what he's saying. In contrast, this next passage, though it still requires careful consideration, is very easily understood.

But Homer does not escort us around a menagerie in which we can move expeditiously from one cage to another. He proposes at least, both in the Iliad and the Odyssey, to unfold a story; and he seems to unfold it so artlessly that we linger on the most pedestrian intervals while he tells us, for example, what the heroes ate and how they cooked it. A modern writer would serve us a far better dinner. Homer brings us to his with our appetite all the keener for having waited and watched the spitting and roasting.

The easiest way to lose clarity is to become overly florid and intricate in attempt for eloquence. Suspect your own eloquence. That's a message from my sophomore English teacher. Suspect your own eloquence, he said, because you're not Shakespeare, and if you start writing as though you are, more than likely you're over stepping your own literary know-how. If your syntax runs amok and suddenly you're averaging a punctuation mark every third word, reign it in. If your diction runs amok and suddenly you're using grandiloquent instead of erudite or high brow, reign it in. It's better to err on the side of caution in such matters. Obviously, we all have different thresholds for complexity in our prose, but in no case should it become so involved that the meaning becomes entangled in all of the verbiage and structure.

To this end, I have a modest proposal for those of you who are serious about writing with a voice unimpeded by misunderstanding. Return to the most basic, most simplistic grammar and diction you remember. No, I'm not kidding. Jack and Jill went up the hill - that style of writing. Then move back up, experimenting with greater complexity and sophistication until you find a level where you are both comfortable with the clarity of your prose and the freedom of narration that its sophistication grants you. If you end up where you are now, fine. If you end up writing a years of sophistication below where you were, even better! Now your writing, by virtue of ease of understanding, will be more powerful than ever.

Of course, there are also less drastic measures that you can take to improve your writing in this regard. Read what you've written aloud - especially the dialogue. Does it make sense? Is it easily understood or are you often left wondering 'wait, which one did she kick, the dog or the ball?' Oftentimes we as authors will accept literary atrocities as we write them, but our ears are never so forgiving. Also, revise and rewrite from a reader's point of view - that means sitting on your works before editing them. Write something, wait two weeks, then pick it up and read it, marking every passage where you stumbled or faltered a moment. Those will be the spots to revise. Of course, you could let an editor do it for you, but hey, it's your mess - you clean it up!

Unity of thought and intent is also characteristic of strong writing. All good writing is focused, not just high school argumentative essays and college term papers. Fortunately, this is the easiest part of good writing to master; unity can be had through the close study of the structure of other works. When working on this aspect of one's voice, a good quality college handbook and the literary terms contained therein are indispensable. I suggest the Harbrace College Handbook, 13th edition - Half-Price Books usually has an entire stack of 'em, and one won't set you back more than ten dollars.

The first step in achieving a solid, cohesive style is to figure out what not to write. Put simply, anything that's extraneous, that doesn't serve the purpose of your sentence or paragraph but does distract the reader from it, should go (the three words most often useless, by the way, are 'really,' 'very,' and 'extremely'). Every scene, action, and word of your story should be defensible in its inclusion. 'It sets the mood' is a perfectly valid justification, of course; be certain, however, that such does in fact contribute to the final product. Yes, it's a very high standard to write to, and no, I doubt I could defend every single word I ever written, or every sentence, or even every scene. I wish I could. You should too; the words and paragraphs of chaff that we fail to separate from the wheat of our stories hang onto them like leeches, sapping the life out of them. This is why you can write fifty pages and then tear your hair out when you read ten pages of Tolkien and realize that he has more in those ten than you do in your fifty. Tolkien may have created an entire world's history and a dozen languages that he didn't need for his trilogy, but let it never be said that he watered his work down with unnecessary words.

The second step in cultivating unity with your voice is to master parallelism. Parallelism can be used to illustrate the connections between your ideas and aid in the flow of messy passages, and those connections are what you'll need to focus and clarify your work. Parallelism, by the way, is the mirroring of the relationships between the components of a sentence in said sentence's structure. We use parallelism, for instance, to reinforce the sense of opposites when we list dichotomies: good and bad, light and dark, live and dead, loud and soft. In practical terms, maintaining parallelism is just another form of writing in manner that is easily understood. Consider the following lines:

I don't like the cat, so I don't talk to it. I don't like the news, so I don't listen to it. I don't like my neighborhood's gas station, so I fill up in Charleston coming back from work instead.

I don't like the cat, so I don't talk to it. I don't like the news, so I don't listen to it. I don't like my neighborhood's gas station, so I don't go to it.

The first sequence is broken; the second one maintains the 'so I don't ___ to it' theme throughout, and as a result is more unified. Take this same approach to your writing. When you have two sentences with related ideas, unify them by creating similarities in their form. You will quickly find that your prose is suddenly livelier, more forceful, and more interesting to read. Yes, this is the same technique you learned in first-year composition - don't discount anything just because you learned it in classroom! Many of the old methods and strategies of writing you will find in those old English tomes will have direct application to the fiction writing you're doing now, because strong writing is strong writing is strong writing.

The last of the universals that we will address here is the sense of presence. By this we mean the consistency and forcefulness of your prose. Writing without presence is irresolute, apologetic, and easy to misinterpret - it leaves itself open to interpretation because it implies much but states very little. If this sounds reminiscent of unclear writing, as mentioned above, it should. Presence, Clarity, and Unity are very much tied together, and weakness in one breeds weakness in the others. It would be to your advantage, then, to work just as actively to establish presence as you do to maintain unity. Fortunately, there are two very specific steps that you can take to ensure that you keep a strong presence in you voice: using the active voice and using strong adjectives and verbs instead of adverbs to describe the people, places, and events of your story.

Don't confuse the voice in 'active voice' with the voice we have been using as a synonym for 'style' - this is something new. If you are not already familiar with the active voice and the passive voice, don't worry; they're simple concepts. An active voice sentence names the instigator of an action first, whereas a passive voice sentence does not. The passive voice names the cause of an event indirectly or not all. Here are some examples:

Passive Voice: The mirror was shattered.

Also Passive Voice: The mirror was shattered by the ball that Jimmy threw.

Active Voice: Jimmy threw the ball and shattered the mirror.

In the last sentence, we immediately know what happened. In the middle sentence we can assume that Jimmy shattered the mirror, but there are no guarantees - the ball could've been one that Jimmy had thrown last week, or in a 1973 Yankees game. In the first sentence, we're totally clueless about what just happened. Did someone shatter the mirror? Did it fall off of a plane and break against the rocks of a New England jetty? Our instincts tell us that the mirror was shattered by an external force, but even that isn't certain given the way this sentence has been phrased - it could have suicided, distraught over its installation into a convention center men's room. So which one of those sentences would you rather use? The last, of course, as it is the one that is least meek, that causes the least confusion. Now, before you say that you might want your readers confused during a certain passage, let me warn you: that sort of confusion is the confusion of a passage that lacks clarity. That sort of confusion leads to frustration, which eventually leads your audience to find a better author. If you bewilder your readers, you are doing so at your own peril. It's much, much more desirable to bewilder them with a surprising, well-thought story line.

I will not go so far as to call adverbs totally useless, because that would be hypocritical, but I do suggest that you use them sparingly. Filling your story with adverbs is like eating clumps of sawdust. They'll fill up space well enough, but they don't contribute much to the final product. Stephen King says in his book 'On Writing' that adverbs are life-sucking leeches, but that may be overstated. Adverbs are the sweets of your diction's food pyramid - you might like them, but they aren't very good for your story. They're a last resort, a crutch for those times when our own ineptitude keeps us from thinking of a strong adjective or a powerful metaphor. Make an effort to use fewer adverbs and you will find your style cleaner, healthier, and livelier.

Finally, if you intend to use a voice that differs from your own - if you are a sane individual who wants to write from the perspective of someone who is insane, or a young person who wants to write from the perspective of an adult - use that voice consistently. Slipping out of that voice without a clear intent to do so only shows the audience that you're not up to the task of developing and maintaining your characters. If you decide to write a medieval knight with type syntax and diction, and halfway through your novel he inexplicably goes from 'methinks foul play is afoot' to 'I smell a rat,' you've destroyed the presence of your voice. Why? Because you've betrayed the reader, who has been convinced by the last hundred pages that your character is a knight only to find that he's actually a cliched sixties detective wearing chainmail and swinging a sword. You might be able to get away with having the inhabitants of your ancient Elven township all speak twenty-first century mall rat English, though I wish you wouldn't, but you can't have them spouting old English one minute and modern English the next. Your own voice ought to be the preferred one, as it should be relatively constant, but if you're going to use a manufactured one, keep it consistent. No one will take you seriously if you do otherwise.

Establishing a personal voice

If you understand the basics of style and have the developed the proper foundation, congratulations. You are now one of the hundreds of thousands of people who have done so. This illustrious congregation, which includes virtually every English major alive today, is only marginally represented by the people out there who can actually write well. The problem is that the foundations, while enough for textbooks and term papers, don't always suffice in a work of fiction. Great authors are great not only because of the quality of their ideas but because of the quality of their personal styles, and they are so few because there are no hard and fast rules for developing an interesting and worthy individual voice. There are, however, several methods of practice that seem to produce consistent results; I have outlined them below. They include study by example and counterexample, study by comparison to music, and study by comparison to the spoken word.

By far the most valuable method of practice to you will be study by example and counterexample. Examining the works of others - examining, not just reading, although that's important as well - is vital in developing an understanding of one's own writing. Find your favorite books, your least favorite books, stack them all into a pile, and go through them one by one to find what it is about each that enraptures or repulses you. Look at the sentence structure of passages that stand out - do they help the mood? What combination of structures are more appropriate for scenes that need to rush? That need to linger? That need to be confusing or straightforward, tense or at ease? Look at the author's choice of words? Does it reflect the culture of the setting and the characters? Which words bring out the emotion of the passage? Does the author use the same words over and over? Which ones, and what are the effects? Rewrite poor sections of the work you're analyzing and see if you can improve them. If not, figure out what's wrong. Reading is easiest way to improve your writing.

If you're practicing your voice in earnest, write naturally. Don't assume the guise of a character's personality or stilted manner of speech, don't adopt the mannerisms or idiosyncrasies of anyone, but write with the words and the structure that comes to you. This may seem to fly in the face of the paragraph above, in which I urged you to study those you admire, but it doesn't really. By reading and studying others you hone your instincts and shape your understanding of what makes good storytelling; by writing and studying yourself you use those instincts and discover the areas on which you need to focus. It's very important to have your natural, relaxed voice be as strong and interesting as possible, because you'll always tend toward it, and no matter how concerted an effort you make you will not be able to get rid of it. Strive to write naturally and you'll learn very quickly what to practice.

Finally, listen. Listen to what people say, how they say it, and what they mean. Mark Twain spent months with a young teenager from a small rural town before he wrote Huckleberry Fin; though he was striving for authentic dialogue and not the improvement of his own style, he nonetheless understood the value of listening. This is a still a germane activity, by the way, for those of you who are writing high elves and ancient demons and who don't have a single character speaking modern English, because the value of listening comes not only in gaining an understanding of when we use various words, but in gaining an understanding of the rhythms with which we use them. Of course, when considering the language you hear around you, it's important to omit the stuttering, swearing, and other such lapses of thought. You'd probably surprised to know how often you or one of friends says 'uh,' but that doesn't mean that such a revelation should cause you to rush to your word processor and begin to fervently weave that particular mental flatulence in your characters' dialogue. Pay attention when you begin to lines that don't stutter - when the people around know exactly what they want to say and are choosing their words carefully. That's worthy of imitation, because it the genuine quality that every writer attempts to recreate. If you can't maintain such a believable rhythm within your prose you'll sound contrived. Your characters won't seem real. Things will go downhill quickly. In contrast, if you develop an ear for language you'll find yourself able to effectively set a mood and immerse your audience in your story with little effort. That's the power of the rhythm of speech, and that's why study it.

So there you are. Sadly, there are no instant fixes here. I think that maybe we too often read our tutorials, handbooks, and guides with the expectation that the great secrets and discoveries of our crafts will be revealed to us. The truth is that in most crafts, writing among them, there are few if any secrets; there is nothing to learn, nothing to discover. There are only things to practice. If I have done well with this article, you'll move on having learned how to practice more effectively, nothing more. You won't leave a better writer - that only comes with work. Of course, there are many other guides out there that have many other guidelines and methods, many of which are useless and some of which are not. Use them - they'll let you progress much faster - but don't forget that they'll never be enough. Practice. Write. If you find another path to the goal of developing your voice, or any other goal in this or any other craft, write an article about it and save your fellow students some time. But keep writing. I wish you luck.

Recommended Reading

The following books are useful sources with much to offer. Much of what I've discussed here has been drawn in some part from one of these publications. I suggest you try to find them second-hand if you have a Half-Price Books, university co-op, or local book shop close by. Not only are they cheaper that way, but oftentimes you'll find that the previous owner has already highlighted or bracketed important sections, or has scrawled his notes and thoughts in the margins, all of which may prove useful and insightful.

		The Elements of Style by William Strunk & EB White The definitive language manual. Unlike the Harbrace handbook, which is a hefty tome, Strunk's Style is flimsy, thin: a short read. Strunk took pride in the smallness of his book - in writing he was a master of clarity and presence, and this book is especially strong in its discussion of those areas. [More info!]
		On Writing by Stephen King The collected thoughts of a very successful author. While some of his suggestions are only loosely related with the craft itself, his book remains a rich resource nonetheless. This book contains a much more thorough discussion of tone, voice, diction, and rhythm than has been provided here. [More info!]
		On Writing Well by William Zinsser Zinsser's book is not only another excellent guide for composition but a discussion of the development and adoption of modern language. Anyone interested in historically accurate voicings would do well to read this book. [More info!]
		Voice and Style by Johnny Payne Another resource for study-prone authors. The entire book is on the subject of voice, and it should be able to answer just about any question that arises. [More info!]
		Harbrace College Handbook, revised 13th edition, John C. Hodges editor This is a typical college composition text. It's an excellent tableside reference for any question you might have concerning the language's structure, certainly [More info!]

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