Voice

WHO IS TELLING YOUR STORY?

You are, of course. You choose what story to tell, which incidents matter, which scenes to show, which events to tell about. It is out of your mind that all the invention comes, all the characters, all the background details, all the ideas.

But when it comes time to speak the words of the story, whose voice will the reader hear?

It is never exactly your own voice. The very fact that you're writing down the words rather than speaking them will make the style more formal. The fact that you write more slowly than you speak, that you can see your words as you put them down, changes the way you produce and control your language. It's another voice.

Also, the fact that you can't see the audience's response requires you to be more precise and calculating in your written language—in speech, when you can look at your audience and judge whether or not they understand you, such precision isn't necessary. Even if you "write" by dictating into a tape recorder, it will not be your normal speech patterns, but rather your more regulated "dictation dialect." You've made this distinction many times—you instantly recognize the difference between natural extemporaneous speech, memorized speech, and speech that is being read.

It isn't just the difference between writing and speaking, though. You have many voices. You have one voice you use with your parents; another you use with your siblings. You might have a company voice. Most people have a separate telephone voice—professional secretaries and receptionists almost always do. If you have children, you doubtless have not one but two, probably three voices—the stern reproving voice, the affectionate approving voice, and the baby talk you used when they were little, which still drifts back when they're hurt and you're comforting them. You have a voice for service people and clerks, and another voice for public speaking.

Of course, your larynx produces the sound for all these oral voices. But the sound is only a small part of a "voice"—at least the kind of voice I'm talking about. Each of your voices has its own vocabulary. They over-lap, but less than you might suppose. Each has its own sentence structure, its own level of diction. One might be slangy, another formal, another relaxed; in one voice you might have some blue language available, while another voice never produces those words.

This came home to me when I was a teenager. One summer I worked as an actor in a summer theater, where the language among the company could have made sailors blush; I was as colorful as any of them. Yet I lived at home, where such language simply wasn't used. So clear was the difference in the two voices that I didn't even have to think about not using certain words where my parents could hear them. I never caught myself about to use the wrong words at home, because those words just weren't available in my "home" voice.

Does that sound like a split personality? Perhaps the function of our brain that lets us develop these different "voices" is the very function that drives multiple personalities—it seems likely enough. But the truth is that normal people all have at least a few different voices they can turn on at will. Most of the time you aren't aware of the difference—you use these voices by habit. When others change voices, you probably hear only the sound differences—a whining child, perhaps, or a friend trying to sweet-talk you, or a would-be date turning you down gently. At such times it's hard to be analytical—but if you don't already know what I mean by "voices," listen to other people move from relationship to relationship during the day, and notice how their vocabulary and syntax change for different tasks. They become slightly different in most cases, radically different in some.

You don't think about these differences when you use a different voice. You just change mindset—usually unconsciously—and slip into the pattern of speech habitual for that relationship.

I grew up out west, but now live in the South—in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, where the southern accent is fairly mild. Still, when I'm with southerners with good, solid accents, I catch myself talking the way they do—not just making my vowels like theirs, but also using their figures of speech, even making up southern-style metaphors and similes from time to time. "I'm as depressed as a chipmunk in a cat's mouth." "He went home so fast he slammed the door before he opened it." "It was raining so hard that if you looked up with a smile, you'd drown." I don't think about it—I get busy talking and my brain just kicks in with the right voice.

When it comes to telling a story, far more choices open up to you. You can use voices in writing that you never use in speech. I'm not just talking about regional dialects, either, though the cadences of Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, New Orleans, or the San Fernando Valley can bring color and life to the telling of a story. There's also attitude—cynical, flippant, wondering, cold, nostalgic. And level— crude, slangy, informal, formal, elevated, magisterial.

In fact, there are so many possibilities that I find that when I'm at the keyboard telling a story, it's almost as if I'm acting. I'm "in character," improvising the performance of my story using words and syntax that one of the characters in my tale might use.

This makes sense when I'm using a first-person narrator. The narrative voice has to sound like the first-person narrator; if it doesn't, it's a flaw in the author's technique.

But I find myself writing "in character" even when I'm using third person, even when the narrator isn't a specific person at all. I usually write in a voice similar to the voice of the viewpoint character, even though that character is not the narrator. In reading other writers' work, I find that, as often as not, they do the same thing.

The only clear exceptions are those authors who have a pronounced habitual style, so they use the same voice in all their stories. To a degree, of course, every author will have stylistic patterns that show up in every tale. The characters will always have some overtones of the author's own style of speech. We can't escape completely from our own underlying voices even when we try. But usually the narrative voice is not exactly identical to the author's natural speech—we always put on a voice of one sort or another when we tell a tale.

The underlying voice that repeats from one story to the next is your natural style. This book isn't about style. So I'm only going to deal with aspects of voice that change from character to character, from book to book.

When you actually set out to write down your story, you have a lot of choices to make—narrator, point-of-view character, tense, level of penetration, rhetorical stance. In the next few chapters I'll deal with the strengths and weaknesses of all these choices, so you can decide which one is best for each story you write, and how to carry out the choice you made.