• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Voice? How and how much?

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
This turned into more of a rant than an actual question.
TL;DR - How do you balance voice and tight prose?


Lately (last few days) I've been pondering the idea of narrative voice a bit. It's an idea I like, that what I'm writing reads differently than to what someone else is writing, even if we're writing the same scene.

At first I figured this was something subconscious that happened automatically when you wrote, based on your personality, but now I'm not so sure. I believe it's something that you can have an impact on if you pay attention and set your mind to it.

My issue at the moment is that the more active and efficient your prose is, the less room there is for narrative voice. I'm not saying there's no room for it, but I think that with tighter writing there's less space for the little fluff that gives your language its character. You can probably still have a distinctive voice even with extremely tight writing, but I believe it's probably more difficult. That said, when it does work, it probably works really well.

---

What spawned this post is the thread about words to cut out of your writing. It eventually caused me to go through my own stories and check where I'd used those words. I'd used most of them, and in most of the cases where I found them I could probably have cut them out and achieved an effect of the same or similar kind.
In some cases I felt the bad words added to the voice of the sentence. They didn't add anything to the information conveyed, but they slightly changed the tone in which it was conveyed.
My thinking is that this change of tone, if maintained throughout the story, will have an impact on the readers overall experience of the book. It won't have any impact on plot or story or events, but it'll create some kind of feeling that they will associate with the book and the story and the characters.
I believe this is a good thing.

To my understanding the concept of voice is something quite intangible. Something that there aren't really any rules for and which develops over time as you get more experienced as a writer. I do think that once you get a grasp of it you can use it to great effect to alter the mood of both scenes and stories.

The difficulty at the moment lies in judging the balance between characteristic writing (voice) and efficient writing (lean, active prose). I feel I've got a decent grip on the voice I'm going for at the moment, but I'm easily carried away into a vague, indistinct purple haze that doesn't really bring the story forward.

Is anyone else having issues with this, or even thinking about it? What's your take on it?
 

BWFoster78

Myth Weaver
My issue at the moment is that the more active and efficient your prose is, the less room there is for narrative voice. I'm not saying there's no room for it, but I think that with tighter writing there's less space for the little fluff that gives your language its character. You can probably still have a distinctive voice even with extremely tight writing, but I believe it's probably more difficult. That said, when it does work, it probably works really well.

I'm probably not the best person to advise you on this because, while I believe that (character) voice has its place, I don't put it as highly as others.

That being said, three points:

1. It's my position that voice is about more than just wording. Voice is about what the character sees as much as about how he describes seeing it.

2. I think it's a lot like setting a scene. You don't describe everything in the tiniest of detail; you use a cardboard tree to stand in for a forest. Just as in scenery, a little bit of variation goes a lot way. If you pepper your narrative and dialogue with useless words, you're going to turn off the reader.

3. One way I create a unique character voice is to understand the character. The intellectual ones use bigger words than the dumber ones. One who is a merchant and focused on money tends to use words associated with business and his statements reflect his fascination with profit and loss.
 

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
1. It's my position that voice is about more than just wording. Voice is about what the character sees as much as about how he describes seeing it.

This is an aspect I hadn't considered and it got me thinking. When I'm writing a scene for a character, I should probably let the character's voice influence how the scene is written. I don't mean in just dialogue and thought, but in what is described as well. One character walking down a street will view it differently than another and it could be reflected in the description of the street (assuming a description is needed of course).


Your other points makes sense. I like a little more depth in my descriptions, but I think that's mainly a case of personal preference. I won't argue with the logic though. I guess you could say I like to glue some twigs on to my cardboard trees.
 

BWFoster78

Myth Weaver
When I'm writing a scene for a character, I should probably let the character's voice influence how the scene is written.

Absolutely!

I like a little more depth in my descriptions, but I think that's mainly a case of personal preference. I won't argue with the logic though. I guess you could say I like to glue some twigs on to my cardboard trees.

Definitely a personal preference thing to an extent. I add the qualification because description impacts pace. If you want an adventure novel, you probably don't want tons of description even if that is your taste. Epic fantasy, on the other hand, tends to lend itself more to accepting details.

I think I'm going more for an adventure story that has epic elements, so I'm keeping my pace fast and tension level high.
 

Scribble

Archmage
Voice seems to be a pair of things. One is your natural story-telling "style", and the other is the collection of experiences that makes you unique. Voice is how that comes through in writing. My humor, my taste for the ludicrous, my views of society and psychology, the sort of details that interest me about people, the things that are important to me, what I hate and what I love, they infect everything I write.

We all know someone who can tell a really good story about a trip to the store to buy eggs, and we know someone who couldn't tell you about a road accident involving wild elephants with any listener engagement. It is the kind of details you mention, the tempo, the juxtaposition, the passion, the pathos, the humor, etc... all those elements are part of voice. I think everyone can learn to be a story-teller, it is just a matter of feeling free to do so, and learning how to do it in your own voice in a way that it is interesting for others.

I say natural, though you could possibly "affect" a voice and mask your self in a way. For example, you could tell a story in first person through the eyes of a character who is very different from your every day self. Still, whatever that character thinks and does is coming through your perception of the world.

I think you can hide your voice behind "tricks", we see it Hollywood a-la-Michael-Bay. Dazzle them with fast moving objects, generating tension and suspense, and nobody will notice there isn't much of a story being told. If you lack confidence in your own narrative voice, you can keep up action and tension before you find yourself in the uncomfortable position of expressing yourself.

One of my favorite books is The Grapes of Wrath, recently re-read. There are countless different elements that Steinbeck could have chosen to present to us, but the images he delivered were painted on the inside of his skull, and came out through the words. We saw that world through his vision, he highlighted certain details that spoke to us of the things that were of import to his mind. There were shifts when he goes off and shuffles a series of images past the reader, like a kind of slide show cross-section of what is happening to "the people" in the land, and you imagine the characters living through that, in fast forward. He then juxtaposes that with up-close action with the main characters. He is able to confidently shift between these modes of story telling, and there is a continuity in his voice. Other authors would find some other way to do that, not merely by selecting a different device for structural reasons, but by selecting a device that works for their voice.

I think you can write very self-consciously, and I am not sure if that is good or not. The best poetry I write is when I am drunk and just riffing off emotions and images, with the rational part of my brain turned mostly off. Of course, my sober editing is far superior to anything I might do under the influence. Unfortunately, for health and social reasons, I can't be drunk all the time, so I've had to learn how to let go and write while sober. If I think of audience first, what I write often stinks. I've got to try to write what makes me excited/angry/sad/triumphant, etc... and to hell with what people might think. I know that for me, when I write self-consciously, the end product is less interesting than when I just let go.

In the end, you have to find what works for you, and for what people seem to like in your writing.
 
Last edited:

Malik

Auror
When I'm writing a scene for a character, I should probably let the character's voice influence how the scene is written.

This. Voice can change with POV.

You need to practice consciously writing in specific voices, though, and practice both limiting and consciously switching POV's, so that you can get a feel for it. Do it enough, and your transitions will become natural and then you can stop thinking about it and let your editor worry.

Voice, especially in limited 3rd person, is dynamic. Similarly, POV is organic. You'll get to a point where you'll just know whose voice something should be in and whose POV you're looking through. Or maybe you won't; a scene just won't feel right and you'll go back and rewrite it from another POV or in another voice and it will click.

When I say that voice and POV should be natural, I say it with extreme caution because until you've got many solid years of hard writing behind you, you can really balls-up your POV and your voice if you just buffalo your way through without learning it. Just because it's organic doesn't mean it doesn't require work. It takes years of writing -- sometimes a lifetime -- to get to the point where your prose feels natural.

description impacts pace.

Fuel for another thread, but also this. So much, this.
 

T.Allen.Smith

Staff
Moderator
My issue at the moment is that the more active and efficient your prose is, the less room there is for narrative voice. I'm not saying there's no room for it, but I think that with tighter writing there's less space for the little fluff that gives your language its character. You can probably still have a distinctive voice even with extremely tight writing, but I believe it's probably more difficult. That said, when it does work, it probably works really well.
I don't think tight writing eliminates voice at all. Unlike Brian, I think a strong sense of voice is very important. As a reader, a strong voice can certainly improve the experience.

I'll tell you this.... Brian and I have similar views on craft. We probably mirror each others beliefs the vast majority of the time, and I know we both incorporate a tight writing style. That being said, if you read one chapter from his WIP & followed immediately with one of mine, there would likely be drastic differences in your reader experience. We will have a different voice.

I agree with Brian that much of voice can be character directed. If you want a great example of this, pick up Abercrombie''s "Best Served Cold". The character Morveer reads very different from the others. He has a distinct condescension that permeates his thought and language. That is character voice.

Don't fret too much about voice. It will come. You just need to write, write, and write. In my opinion, most authors find their voice by emulating other writers, and then failing. Somewhere in that phase they branch off into the discovery of their own unique style. Just be you, the voice will grow as your understanding of writing grows and matures.
 
Hi,

Yeah voice is interesting. I think every writer has one, but every book has several. The voice of the writer as he writes the book, setting scene, character, plot, language, grammar, rhythm etc. Then there's the voices of the characters themselves as they survey their world etc and you as the reader get to peer into their heads and see through their eyes. And pace is the natural enemy of voice - and other parts of the novel like description.

Let's face it, if you want rapid pace to engender a feeling excitement, you're going to cut everything out except the plot. Best examples I can think of at the moment would be "The Man With Golden Torc" and the following books. When I first read these books I was surprised by Simon Green's change in writing style, and I wasn't sure I liked it as much as his earlier work. It was simply too bare. But as a reader I adapted and the story / world is good. He left just enough in.

But there's a catch. When writing becomes that bare it loses something, for me anyway. And to my mind the work of fantasy writers like Stephen Donaldson and Robert Holdstock with their longer prose, more drawn out description, far more detailed world building, are more engaging. Even Simon Green's earlier works like Blue Moon Rising are more enjoyable.

To me reading a novel should not be a breathless race. I don't read just for excitement. I read to enjoy, to bury myself in the world and the characters, to live through their tale. As a corollary to that I've read Blue Moon Rising several times, but I will never read the Eddie Drood books again.

Cheers, Greg.
 

Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
How are you defining "tight"?

If it's relevant for establishing the character's perspective and immersing the reader, then you include it.
 

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
How are you defining "tight"?
That's the billion dollar question though isn't it? ;)

I'll give it a go though.
To me, the way I understand it (and with only a few minutes to think about it)...
...the tightest writing is that in which anything but the absolute bare minimum needed to move the plot forward has been eliminated.

I doubt anyone will accept this without arguing and I'll probably change my mind about it in the next thirty minutes, but at least it's a statement - a starting point for further discussion.

If it's relevant for establishing the character's perspective and immersing the reader, then you include it.
That's good writing. That's difficult. :)
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
I agree that loose prose doesn't mean you lose voice. IMHO you lose voice if you overly tighten something. BUT you can lose voice if it's too loose because the voice gets drown out by the sea of unnecessary fluff.

When to loosen your prose and when to tighten it up is about feel, which IMHO you learn by practice-practice-practice. Each story is unique in what it needs and what you're trying to achieve. A lot of times you don't realize how much plumpness there is in a story until you deeply examine it, getting at the heart of exactly what you're trying to say.

Practice exercise, take one of your short stories and cut the word count by 25%, then do it again another 25%. This is about putting yourself in a position of making very tough decisions on your world count, where taking out one word can something significantly.

One time I had a word count limit of 4000 words and the story I wrote was 5000. I managed to cut it down to 3750 words without loosing anything key, and I used the extra 250 words to make the story more full.
 

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
Practice exercise, take one of your short stories and cut the word count by 25%, then do it again another 25%. This is about putting yourself in a position of making very tough decisions on your world count, where taking out one word can something significantly.

Great suggestion. Thanks. :)




Edit: ... I totally missed it. :/
 
Last edited:

Ankari

Hero Breaker
Moderator
I'm trying to think of a fantasy novel I read that used tight prose and blew my mind away. I can't. I can make a list of the books written by authors who didn't adhere to artificial measures of progress.

But you'll ask "What do you mean by artificial measures of progress?"

Everyone on these boards wants to be a writer, and we only represent a fraction of a percentage of the population with the same aspirations. How do you tell ten million people how to better their writing without reading ten million samples of their works and combing over their technique to fine tune their skill? You create blanket rules that are dispensed as milestones of an amateur writer's skill. Something measurable that writers can assess at any given point. If you are using so many words, you failed. If you are using so many adverbs per total words, you failed. If you are using too many of the "no-no" words, you failed.

Then, when the writer has finally achieved the sacred formula of lean, active writing, all the established names will tell you the true learning begins.

I would advise people to stop worrying about anything formulaic, and work on substantive content. Work on using the right word, on creating identifiable characters, on taking an old idea and spit-polishing it so that it appears new, on creating an immersive world, on your comedic mind (everyone needs a laugh once in a while), on your dramatic heart, and, finally, creating a great story.

Listen. If you go to the compost pile, place it in a nice, perfectly square box, use the best wrapping paper money can buy, and silk ribbons freshly imported from a small village in China, what do you ultimately have in the box?

We are carvers. Take the raw material that permeates our everyday existence, carve it with sharp tools until it best represents the idea in your head, and gift it to the world.
 

Jabrosky

Banned
Does anyone else wonder if the nature of a story's setting might affect its ideal voice? For some reason I tend to imagine characters in modern and futuristic settings as generally speaking in a more informal, slangy manner than their historical and fantastical counterparts. On the other hand, really fancy language with lots of big words sounds better coming from aristocrats or scholars than peasantry, common soldiers, or tribal characters.
 

Scribble

Archmage
We are carvers. Take the raw material that permeates our everyday existence, carve it with sharp tools until it best represents the idea in your head, and gift it to the world.

Not just pretty words, Michelangelo said as much:

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

Every idea I have becomes clearer the next time I think about it, a poem gets trimmed down, the real story in the novel emerges. I actually wrote a poem about this very idea. It was about a fellow poet's style, a friend of mine, I was emulating his style in writing it, echoing Michelangelo as homage and lesson:

master

within
the marble
he knew

hammer
chisel

chip
away

until
only truth
is left

There is a lot of noise in our heads and in our hands when we go to make something. The thing that comes out of it is rarely the same we thought it would be. We have a plan, an outline, an idea, but in the making, the cutting, the carving, the sculpting, we find something of ourselves, of truths we hold, of questions we have, laid bare in the words we write. If we don't do that carving, we are merely setting up a stage full of fancy sets but not really telling anything. When you dig down, you find you put a lot of stuff there you thought was vital, but it just gets in the way.

I didn't mean to get so "what is the nature of art" here at 9:30 AM, but hey, when the spirit strikes you... :)
 
Last edited:

Scribble

Archmage
Does anyone else wonder if the nature of a story's setting might affect its ideal voice? For some reason I tend to imagine characters in modern and futuristic settings as generally speaking in a more informal, slangy manner than their historical and fantastical counterparts. On the other hand, really fancy language with lots of big words sounds better coming from aristocrats or scholars than peasantry, common soldiers, or tribal characters.

That's a good question. We are greatly affected by our pop culture. There are other modes of "being" but as western television and internet washes over and through us, we can find it disingenuous to speak using great words. We're too ironical.

Postmodernism is anathema to ancient magical thinking. People would speak in oaths and curses because they believed that words would have an effect on the universe. We do still believe that, but it is relegated to superstition. "Don't say it's going to rain on picnic day! You'll jinx us!" (Really? How?) People who speak with a certainty of the magic of their reality, or the certainty of their position in the universe are able to do so un-ironically.

Fancy language without conviction would sound foppish and annoying at worst, or crazy at best. We don't (in general) believe in the divine right of kings, and if we hear someone shouting about that sort of thing today, we'd think them nuts. So, in order to pull off the "ancient mode" of speaking, the character has to believe it, and everything in the story has to hold that up because we need to make the leap from our modern day mentality to that old way.

It certainly isn't dead in the world, there are other societies where you can speak un-ironically in old forms of address, but they are being eroded by western culture. If you take wise-cracking suburban teenagers and toss them in with ancient gods, you have at best a comedy. If you put characters who believe and fear them, with a sense of destiny and reverence, as though they are cut from the same cloth - they belong there, and are believable.

How to pull off that sort of "ancient mode" or "high address"? Your character has got to believe in it, and you've got to make the reader believe that they believe in it. The characters can transform from "modern" to "fantastical", by becoming immersed and believing in the world. Narnia and Harry Potter do this.
 

BWFoster78

Myth Weaver
You create blanket rules that are dispensed as milestones of an amateur writer's skill. Something measurable that writers can assess at any given point. If you are using so many words, you failed. If you are using so many adverbs per total words, you failed. If you are using too many of the "no-no" words, you failed.

I like how you present this. It's exactly how I feel about the rules - a way to give beginners a path to improvement. Granted, the best way to help someone is to painstakingly comb through their work and say, "This didn't work. This is why I feel it didn't work." Unfortunately, there is no time to do that for even one person. How can you possibly do that for everyone?

In the absence of detailed feedback and personal instruction, telling them to learn the rules - both the what and the why - is the best place that I can think of to start.

Then, when the writer has finally achieved the sacred formula of lean, active writing, all the established names will tell you the true learning begins.

Yes. Exactly this. The rules are a starting point.

I would advise people to stop worrying about anything formulaic, and work on substantive content. Work on using the right word, on creating identifiable characters, on taking an old idea and spit-polishing it so that it appears new, on creating an immersive world, on your comedic mind (everyone needs a laugh once in a while), on your dramatic heart, and, finally, creating a great story.

I divide knowledge of writing into two categories: technique (how to convey information) and storytelling (what information to convey). There's overlap between the two, so the line isn't perfectly distinct. I find the differentiation helpful, however.

I think that, in order to be successful, an author is going to have to become proficient in both aspects. Granted, some authors may be so good at storytelling that weak technique is overlooked (the reverse is seldom true). My path was to focus on technique first because, though not easy to learn by any stretch, it, imo, is the easier of the two.

Bottom line of what I'm trying to say is that, while storytelling is the more important of the two, at some point you're going to have to be at least competent with technique. Thus, I don't think that studying technique is any kind of waste of time.

That is not to say that you shouldn't be learning storytelling (which is how I define the aspects Ankari mentioned). Again, storytelling is, in the long run, more important to your success than technique.

My advice: learn everything you can. Now. From every source that you can find. Pick out what you like and what can help you. Discard the rest.

You never know what little piece of information is going to cause you to transport your writing to a higher level of skill.
 

GeekDavid

Auror
I would advise people to stop worrying about anything formulaic, and work on substantive content. Work on using the right word, on creating identifiable characters, on taking an old idea and spit-polishing it so that it appears new, on creating an immersive world, on your comedic mind (everyone needs a laugh once in a while), on your dramatic heart, and, finally, creating a great story.

A-friggin-men!

Some people get so worked up about following every rule from every online writer (most of whom have never had a bestseller in their career) to the letter that they might as well be robots. "BEEP. Rule# 1042 says I must insert plot device A into slot B."

Writing is not computer programming. If you get a line a little bit "wrong" according to the endless tomes of "rules," the book won't crash. In fact, it might even be better, because it's more creative and less staid and predictable.

I've used this example before, but imagine if Dali had followed the endless "rules" of painting. We'd never have seen The Persistence of Memory, the famous painting with the melting clocks.

If you wanna talk books, the Harry Potter books have a lot of adverbs, which is supposed to be verboten. Hunger Games includes a lot of "telling," thus breaking the "show, don't tell" rule. If breaking the rules is supposed to be bad for your book, how is it that these stories are so popular?
 
Top