Over the last six or seven years, I've been trying to refine what my voice sounds like as a writer. Of course, there's the discrepancy between the fact that written language and spoken language are rather different fundamentally. It's one of the weird things about writing: Whoever it was who did it first chose, for whatever reason, to name this phenomenon as "voice". It's not aural, but visual. It resides in its own part of the brain where characters live. I've often said that writers are strange folk because they scriven what the voices in their heads say, then demand that someone else pay money to go through that same imagination. Basically, we pay to hear the voices in another's head.
I think that's where the voice concept comes in. The cadences and tones are imagined, and the best readers are the ones who differentiate between those separate voices naturally. Writers who sell well, broadly speaking, are those who can communicate that unique voice without obfuscating meaning and providing a pleasurable experience to the reader.
In my writing group, I currently have two novels being read. One is Writ in Blood, which I've spoken of countless* times. The other is Ash and Fire, and both run with my Shakespeare obsession. The first uses poetry as the magic system, as well as a complicated manner of speaking that I inaccurately call Form. (It uses what, to our English ears, sounds archaic, stuffy, and formal, even though, grammatically, it is using informal conjugations. The difference drives me crazy.) That derives directly from my (over)exposure to Shakespeare's words.
His life and times are also a passion of mine, so I have numerous books on the time of the Tudors and Shakespeare. The result? Ash and Fire (which has very little of either, to be honest) came about, a Jacobean fantasy quasi-London. I took a map of the original City of London and flipped it around until it suited me, and built Stann-over-Kenth from there. The speech is less flowery than what I did in Writ in Blood, but it's still keen on puns and wordplay, on relying on ambiguity and equivocation. In short, it's not an homage to Shakespeare, but it is to his times.
How does this pertain to voice? Well, it seems to me that, no matter what I do, I can't pull myself away from the orbit that Shakespeare exerts on me. Aside from the "Son of Memory" memoir that is available here, it's obvious that much of my voice is a faint echo of Shakespeare's. I don't really oppose this, but I realize that I'm in a very small pool when it comes to finding that sort of writing worthwhile. It might be a bit of a distortion to say that my inability to escape from Shakespeare could very well be part of what's preventing me from publishing anything. It's kinda like wanting to be a fashionista but having this guy's taste in clothes:
I'm not saying that liking Shakespeare is bad taste. I'm saying that there is only a select crowd for whom this type of writing is a good thing.
Okay, I feel like that picture is probably not helping my case. At all.
Look, the point is, I've come to learn that my voice is not necessarily what's exciting for others. I tend toward verbosity, my descriptions vary from overdone to hardly-there-at-all, and I tend to rely on one source of what I think is great to the exclusion of other excellent voices. A good singer is one who can solo.
A great one can sing alone and blend into a choral.
I want to be a great writer, but I just don't know if my voice is up to it.**
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* I've talked about stuff with my "story journal" 43 times, at this point. So I guess it isn't countless. But, were it not for my computer being able to count those tags, I wouldn't have found that number.
** I don't want the sports fan above to be the only image in this essay, so I put this footnote in to provide this picture. I hope you enjoy the kittens.
I think that's where the voice concept comes in. The cadences and tones are imagined, and the best readers are the ones who differentiate between those separate voices naturally. Writers who sell well, broadly speaking, are those who can communicate that unique voice without obfuscating meaning and providing a pleasurable experience to the reader.
In my writing group, I currently have two novels being read. One is Writ in Blood, which I've spoken of countless* times. The other is Ash and Fire, and both run with my Shakespeare obsession. The first uses poetry as the magic system, as well as a complicated manner of speaking that I inaccurately call Form. (It uses what, to our English ears, sounds archaic, stuffy, and formal, even though, grammatically, it is using informal conjugations. The difference drives me crazy.) That derives directly from my (over)exposure to Shakespeare's words.
His life and times are also a passion of mine, so I have numerous books on the time of the Tudors and Shakespeare. The result? Ash and Fire (which has very little of either, to be honest) came about, a Jacobean fantasy quasi-London. I took a map of the original City of London and flipped it around until it suited me, and built Stann-over-Kenth from there. The speech is less flowery than what I did in Writ in Blood, but it's still keen on puns and wordplay, on relying on ambiguity and equivocation. In short, it's not an homage to Shakespeare, but it is to his times.
How does this pertain to voice? Well, it seems to me that, no matter what I do, I can't pull myself away from the orbit that Shakespeare exerts on me. Aside from the "Son of Memory" memoir that is available here, it's obvious that much of my voice is a faint echo of Shakespeare's. I don't really oppose this, but I realize that I'm in a very small pool when it comes to finding that sort of writing worthwhile. It might be a bit of a distortion to say that my inability to escape from Shakespeare could very well be part of what's preventing me from publishing anything. It's kinda like wanting to be a fashionista but having this guy's taste in clothes:
 |
| Thanks, Pintrest, for this gem. |
Okay, I feel like that picture is probably not helping my case. At all.
Look, the point is, I've come to learn that my voice is not necessarily what's exciting for others. I tend toward verbosity, my descriptions vary from overdone to hardly-there-at-all, and I tend to rely on one source of what I think is great to the exclusion of other excellent voices. A good singer is one who can solo.
A great one can sing alone and blend into a choral.
I want to be a great writer, but I just don't know if my voice is up to it.**
---
* I've talked about stuff with my "story journal" 43 times, at this point. So I guess it isn't countless. But, were it not for my computer being able to count those tags, I wouldn't have found that number.
** I don't want the sports fan above to be the only image in this essay, so I put this footnote in to provide this picture. I hope you enjoy the kittens.