V is for Voice

A lot of new writers worry about their 'voice'.  Understandable, given that debut novels are often heralded with comments like 'a stunning new voice' and agents write rejection letters with feedback such as 'didn't like the voice' or 'didn't believe the voice'.  I think I was lucky in that I didn't register the term until after I was published, because I'd have been fretting about my voice (or lack of it) and would have become very self-conscious.  

Voice is simply the way you write.  It's about your choice of vocabulary, your word order, your writing style, your subject matter.  It's as individual as your speaking voice and comes as naturally.  You can tweak it, in the same way you can tweak an accent, and you can develop it through reading and writing, but essentially it is what it is.  Your voice is you, and there's not a great deal you can do about it.  

But sometimes your voice doesn't match your chosen form.  When I started I wrote literary short stories.  I had some success with them, but the natural home for my voice is contemporary women's fiction and when I started writing in that style - by accident! - it just clicked.  That's one of the good things about writing exercises; they force writers to go outside their usual genres. Sometimes that suits the author's voice better.  

Writers with very distinctive voices have to be doubly persistent.  They can struggle to find a form that both shows off their style AND fits into a publishing category.  I'm afraid that publishing is a cautious business and they like work that can be neatly slotted into marketing boxes.  Work that sits outside the usual categories struggles to find a home.  Kate Atkinson and Terry Pratchett have such distinctive voices that they have developed genres all of their own, and there are many other similar examples. 

Sometimes authors find their work being published in areas they didn't expect - last year I met a Costa winning author who hadn't expected to be marketed as YA, she just wrote a book.  I've heard other authors who thought they'd written one thing, but were marketed as another eg Louise Welsh and The Cutting Room.  Jill Mansell once told me that she'd tried writing for Mills and Boon, and kept on being turned down because she had too much humour.  She finally changed to chick lit and rom-coms and became one of the top selling UK authors.  

So, don't worry about your voice - it's there regardless - but search for the form that suits it best.  It may not be what you think it is.  

Does Reading Other Writers Influence Your Voice?

The poet I mentioned in my last post did justify her non-reading position. She was worried, she said, about another poet influencing her voice.

It's a common fear, but one that is ungrounded. If you go to any writing class or circle and hear people reading their work, it's utterly clear that their 'voice' is there, fair and square. Our writing styles are set in our own personality. They're in the way we speak, the vocabulary we use, the things we choose to write about. We can no more lose them than getting a Rachel hair cut would suddenly make me look like Jennifer Anniston.

Try looking at it from the opposite angle. Rory Bremner, Roni Ancona, Jon Culshaw et al are paid vast sums of money to imitate celebrities. And how often do they manage it? We recognise who they're trying to be, but you don't for a minute actually believe that the impressionist is that person. They are always, noticeably, themselves first, the celebrity second.

Ditto parodists. We laugh because the imitation is good, but it's rare that we think we're actually reading Dickens or Austen or whoever. So if the very very best can't lose their voice in another writer's style when they're trying exceptionally hard to do so, why do you think your voice will get lost?

I remember going to a workshop, long before I was published, and being asked to write a piece in the style of Carol Shields. I dutifully did this - rather well, I thought, if I'm honest. But the teacher shook her head at all our efforts, including mine. None of us could 'do' Carol Shields, we were all too busy being ourselves even when we were trying our hardest to be someone else.

I must admit I don't read my genre when I'm writing, but that's because I'll get envious/depressed that they write well or have a good story idea, or furious/depressed because it's badly written and yet it still got published. Either way, it's not good for my writing to be sitting in front of the laptop in a state of envy/depression/fury. And I do have a residual fear I might inadvertently nick a good phrase and pop it into my own work.

But losing my voice? No, never. It simply won't happen. Read on.

NEW!!! I've finally got round to organising some course dates....

How to WRITE a Novel: London 3rd May/Birmingham 7th May/

Oxford 8th May/Exeter 21st May/Bath 12th June

How to SELL a Novel: London 24th May/Exeter 4th June/

Bath 3rd July Details are on my website

The Bus Stop Test

Recently I've been doing a bit of travelling by public transport. It's been great - a chance to settle down with a book. However, there is always the niggling residual fear that I'll be so sucked into the fictional world that I miss the stop in the real one. It hasn't yet happened, partly because my book at the moment has been the magisterial Last Night in Twisted River by John Irvine.

Weighing at nearly 700 pages it was always going to be a long read, but I'm a reasonably fast reader - a book a week is standard, so I didn't expect Last Night in Twisted River to go beyond a couple of weeks. It's been over a month, and I've only just finished. Phew.

There are two main reasons why it has taken so long. Firstly, I kept dropping off to sleep. Secondly, even when reading I was easily distracted by what was going on around me. I was trying to pin-point why, exactly, I was making such heavy work of reading the book - it's undoubtedly well written, the sentences flow, the images are arresting, the characters distinct people, yes, there's flashback and I was often confused as to when exactly we were which meant going over some pages a second time but that wouldn't entirely explain my distraction - and then it struck me: it was the omniscient authorial voice.

At the end of the book John Irvine talks about the writing process (the novel is about a writer who uses autobiography for his writing) and says that the omniscient authorial voice is out of fashion, but he likes the style and is going to carry on using it. Fair enough.

But to me, that voice distanced me from the characters. I never truly engaged with them and could have put the book down without reading to the end almost every moment. There were only about 20 pages when I was in danger of missing the bus stop and, in a book of nearly 700 pages, that seems a poor ratio. I persisted with reading because I usually do read to the end regardless, because a friend had rated the novel and because John Irvine is a great author.

It may be that intimacy with characters is fashionable and fashions can, and do, change. You can choose to write in whatever style you wish, and if that's with the magisterial voice common in the C19th then fine. There are readers who love that style. But, you should also be aware that it's a distancing voice and the current fashion is for something more intimate. That way, hopefully, you'll pass my bus stop test.

NEW!!! I've finally got round to organising some course dates....

How to WRITE a Novel: London 3rd May/Birmingham 7th May/

Oxford 8th May/Exeter 21st May/Bath 12th June

How to SELL a Novel: London 24th May/Exeter 4th June/

Bath 3rd July Details are on my website