Voice [1]: What Voice Is
Ten thoughts about voice in fiction
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[Note: Put cursor over footnote for pop-up.]This is the first of three linked posts about voice:
Part One: What we mean by “voice” and why it matters. Part Two: Ways novels can be voicey, along with a raft of examples. Part Three: A list of voice-driven works not included in Part Two. 1.
We’re fascinated by human speech
We’re wired for listening to each other, we have an enormous capacity to recognize voices, to pick up shades of mood, to trust them (or not), to be quickened or soothed or brought to tears. We understand that a voice is a one-of-a-kind occurrence in nature.
Think of your father’s voice, your mother’s.
Likewise, a story’s voice is recognizable and unique. It doesn’t just impart new information, it is new information.
2.
Love at first sight?
You can be seduced on the first page. Is “seduced” the right word? Seduction’s got a bad vibe in our day. But this isn’t a kidnapping, it’s a locking of eyes across a crowded room, a voluntary letting down of defenses, risk-taking in the name of excitement.
Some openers are snappy/jazzy or angsty or rueful/sorrowful or full of yearning, some sly or sternly authoritative or spooky or hesitant, some charming/irresistible. From the look of the words on the page, their cadence, their skein of meanings, a presence takes shape; you begin to think, Yes, I want to be here, my time won’t be wasted . . .
The wise, rhythmic paragraph opening Mark Helprin’s story, “A Vermont Tale” has long been a favorite of mine:
Many years ago, when I was so young that each snowfall threatened to bar the door mountain lions came down from the north to howl below my window, my sister and I were sent for an entire frozen January to the house of our grandparents in Vermont. Our mother and father had been instructed by the court in the matter of their difficult and unbecoming love . . . [in Ellis Island and Other Stories (1981)]
3.
Who’s Talking?
Whether reader or a writer, we enter a story hopeful but ignorant.
As reader: We let the voice speak to us, but from the start we’re vetting it as we do all new information. We can’t open ourselves to it fully until we know where it’s coming from. Consider the source. Who’s talking? What’s the angle?
As writer: Our stories have to start somewhere—with known events, often, which we use like the armature inside a sculpture. But just as often we begin with almost nothing, just a glimmer, as writer Pam Houston puts it. Getting from glimmer to words on a page takes concentration, patience, a good ear. We write a little, stop, dawdle, start over, then over again, until we eventually say something that sounds interesting, an image or a little burst of attitude, and we think, Yes, like that!! We follow that sound like the pinging of a tracking device.
However long it takes to lock in, we come to trust that specific cadence, to know that it’s the story’s true voice. If it seemed disembodied at first, now a character emerges from the fog, accumulating identity as it comes, until you have somebody—Nick Stavros or Laurel Mahugh or Marly Wilcox.
Sometimes the voice of the story turns out to be Nick’s or Laurel’s or Marly’s voice, in which case you’re writing a first-person story.
Or the voice may come from outside. In school, we called this outside voice, “the author”—Wharton or Twain or Irving. But this seems wrong to me. This exterior voice isn’t you—it’s as much an invention as the speaking voices of your characters.1 Though it’s bodiless, nameless, it has a presence, a way of thinking, of organizing and laying out the story. It can know everything, having the authority to give us characters’ backgrounds, historical fact, what’s going on in the privacy of anyone’s mind, what will happen years in the future, and so on. Or it can curtail this power—that is, limit its omniscience to whatever degree serves the story. Often this means sticking to one character’s consciousness (or one at a time).2
4.
But, Uh Oh—
One day you realize something’s off about the work-in-progress. Your work ethic’s been goosing you forward, but, wow, it’s gotten too damn hard—you can barely bring yourself to sit down with it. Your inner scold starts in on you: Jesus H. Christ, another failed project! If you were a real writer, this wouldn’t be—
And so on. You sigh, put the thing away and that’s that.
Time passes—days/weeks/months. The story tugs at you anew—it’s like a promise unkept, a message unsent, a check not cashed. You mull, you think, Well, it’s good material, isn’t it? What if I came at it from another angle? Your default’s always been third-person, let’s say, but maybe this one should be flipped? So you “translate” a page, then another. You see signs of life, you get that certain prickle, and after a while you settle into the groove of this other voice.3
This happens—not always, not even most of the time, but often enough to teach you the value of remaining flexible, on the balls of your feet like a shortstop.
Before moving on, a related question: Are the first-person version and the third-person version simply different iterations of the same story? Or are they funda-mentally different things?
Is this nitpicking?
Here’s the thing: years ago, I ran into a line in William Gass’s Fiction and the Figures of Life (1978), that permanently altered how I understand this question. In fiction, Gass said, there is no such thing as description, there is only construction.
I started to think about production design in film, and how nothing you see just happens to be there. No, it was all put there on purpose. What a revelation! I started telling students: You’re the production designer of your story. If it’s muggy, about-to-storm in your story, then that’s what it is—it cannot be otherwise. If the sun’s out and a soft breeze is blowing, you’re in a different story. This idea permeates my thinking now. Are the colors saturated or wan? Is there lots of sky, panoramas, or close-ups without much surrounding context? Does the camera look through windows a lot, or look up from the floor, or down from angel-height? Is the shot-rhythm staccato/twitchy/unsettling or unhurried/peaceful/sinuous? Ditto the pace of the dialog—do people interrupt each other constantly ala Robert Altman, or talk in a mannered confrontational way as in David Mamet, or laconically as in, for instance, The Last Picture Show? It all matters.
5.
Diction
When I was a lit-pup this word threw me—it was one of those terms that made me feel like an outsider looking in. If you’re that way, I’ll see if I can demystify it for you.
“Diction” refers to two facets of story language, without which the meaning and the import of a story will be lost or misconstrued:4
a) Where the language lives on several sliding scales—between crude and re- fined, simple and technical, high-brow and low-brow, archaic and up-to-the- minute, slangy and formal, unadorned and fancy, bureaucratic/abstract and specific/physical, etc. b) Whether we’re meant to take statements at face value or “interpret” them— i.e. hear their irony, their falsehood (full or partial), their exaggeration for effect and/or humor, their understatedness, their mimicry of other voices, or the fact that these spoken words are standing in for words that cannot be spoken. Last week I told you about enduring a long, dull speech while seated next to Ann Beattie, and how she finally whispered to me, “I am going to kill myself.” The anecdote makes no sense if taken literally. You have to hear what she means: that her saying suicide is the only way to escape this tedium (droll hyperbole, quintessential Beattie) will strike me as funny (it did). And my response (“A moment I treasure.”), which I hoped you’d find funny. Curiously, this line is, at once, both sarcastic/ironic and perfectly true.
And so, reading a novel, our ears constantly help us parse what’s being said—by the narrative voice (in a third-person story), by the narrator (in first-person), by each of the characters. In film, we see how a face looks delivering a line; in fiction all we have is the sensitivity of our ears.
6.
About first-person voices
Next week’s post will be a kind of Field Guide to Voices, a breakdown of approaches/ angles of narration, with a slew of examples. But for now, let’s imagine one more sliding scale: sounds like talking at one end, sounds like writing at the other.
Sounds like talking
Some narrators sound as if they’re talking aloud, in real time. Their speech hasn’t been polished, curry-combed, made elegant. There’s some awkwardness, some hemming and hawing, some clichéd expressions. And, typically, there’s an agenda, often fueled by passion. Thus, it’s a confession we’re hearing, or a last chance to set the record straight, or a plea for justice, or a revelation of long-obscured truth, or a tale of wonder . . .
This talking can be addressed to you (the reader, the audience) or to another character within the story, as in John Hawkes’, Travesty (1976)5 or to a figure outside it, as in Aravind Adiga’s Booker-winning novel, The White Tiger (2008), letters to the Premier of China on the occasion of his visit to India.
Sounds like writing
Most often, though, first-person narration sounds like talk written-down—it has the flavor of the central character’s voice, but instead of being raw (live, in the moment) it’s cooked (developed, edited).
Compare these two short passages. First, sounds like talking:
[Rule of the Bone, Russell Banks (2011)]6
Then, sounds like writing:
M Y N A M E I S Luke Ripley, and here is what I call my life: I own a stable of thirty horses, and I have young people who teach riding, and we board some horses too. This is in northeastern Massachusetts. I have a barn with an indoor ring, and outside I’ve got two fenced-in rings and a pasture that ends at a woods with trails. I call it my life because it looks like it is, and people I know call it that, but it’s a life I can get away from when I hunt and fish, and some nights after dinner when I sit in the dark in the front room and listen to opera. The room faces the lawn and the road, a two-lane country road. When cars come around the curve northwest of the house, they light up the lawn for an instant, the leaves of the maple out by the road and the hemlock closer to the window. Then I’m alone again, or I’d appear to be if someone crept up to the house and looked through a window: a big-gutted grey-haired guy, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, staring out at the dark woods across the road, listening to a grieving soprano.
["A Father's Story," Selected Stories, Andre Dubus (1988)] 7.
About Third-Person Voices
Earlier, I asked you not to confuse a novel’s third-person narrative voice with the writer’s personal voice. I was trying to make a point, to reinforce the idea that a story is a constructed artifact. If you felt like responding, Wait, is that really true? Isn’t there some continuity between the voices in all of John Irving’s novels, or Ann Patchett’s or Toni Morrison’s? And doesn’t it come from who they are, how they were raised, and so on? I won’t argue with you. But isn’t this really an extra-literary concern?
Anyway, writing in the third-person has its rewards—it gives you a huge range of possibility, flexibility. First-person is concentrated, having the purity/intensity of one angle. Readers need to make their own judgments about the speaker. In third-person, the voice of the narration can talk to you about the nature of the character, can argue in favor of trusting this figure (or not). And third-person lets you move in and out easily. Joyce Carol Oates is incredibly adept at this—going along in outside-narrator-voice, then dipping inside the character without any “she thought” signpost.7
Whole primers/handbooks/websites are devoted to POV, the virtues and drawbacks of the different modes. Follow up if this fascinates you.
8.
Other Angles
Now and then, we find a novel in the second-person voice [“you”] or the third-person plural [“we”]—these are much rarer, but either can be the perfect answer for a particular story. I’ll give a bunch of examples in next week’s post.
9.
A Cool Hybrid
I always think John Updike’s quartet of Rabbit novels are first-person. They’re not. The only time we hear Rabbit directly is when he talks in a scene. The POV gets mislabeled in memory because the third-person narration sounds like first-person. It’s as if Rabbit’s inner voice has bled over into the narration.
Here’s the opening of Rabbit Is Rich (1981):
But my all-time favorite example is the start of George Saunders’s short story “The Falls”:
Morse found it nerve-racking to cross the St. Jude grounds just as the school was being dismissed, because he felt that if he smiled at the uniformed Catholic children they might think he was a wacko or pervert and if he didn’t smile they might think he was an old grouch made bitter by the world, which surely, he felt, by certain yardsticks, he was. Sometimes he wasn’t entirely sure that he wasn’t even a wacko of sorts, although certainly he wasn’t a pervert. Of that he was certain. Or relatively certain. Being overly certain, he was relatively sure, was what eventually made one a wacko. So humility was the thing, he thought, arranging his face into what he thought would pass for the expression of a man thinking fondly of his own youth, a face devoid of wackiness of perversion, humility was the thing.
[in Pastoralia (2000)]And though I may be trying your patience, one more—the narrative voice of How Late It Was, How Late (1994), James Kelman’s ruckus-inciting Booker winner:
Fuck it but he was tired, he was just bloody tired; knackered and drained, knackered and drained; nay energy; nay fuck all; he just wanted to sleep, to sleep and then wake up; refreshed and fucking enerfuckinggetic, enerfuckinggenetised. Mind you that was something about this being blind; how ye were so knackered all the time, it was cause ye were using so much fucking muscle power in every other direction, the compensation process, all this groping about ye were doing and fucking knocking fuck out of yerself off cupboards and doors and fucking lampposts man ye were fuckt, nay wonder ye needed to sleep all the time.
10.
Voiceless Grist
Those of you who’ve been on the bus a while may remember this quote from an earlier post [Fifteen Nuggets of Writerly Wisdom]:
Do you want to wake up thirty years later facing a shelf of voiceless grist with your name on the covers? [First Paragraphs, Donald Newlove (1992)]
(Leaving aside the question of how astonished and/or insanely grateful we’d be to see our name on the cover of any book.)8
Let’s end with this: We pick up someone’s novel, begin reading. Why do we keep reading it?
IMHO, it’s because we want a break from our own (beleaguered? claustrophobic? utterly familiar?) POV. We want to spend time with another consciousness. All we ask is that this other mind doesn’t waste our time, doesn’t trot out the same old, same old—boilerplate, corporate-speak, AI-speak. We want to be surprised, to hear from someone with something to say, someone smart, experienced in the business of living (or else not smart, not experienced in the business of living . . . but captivatingly so). We want that angle. If we start to slip away it’s because we’re getting bored, and we get bored when the voice goes bland, lazy, anonymous.9
Who’s talking? Even when you write nonfiction, you have to decide how it should sound. Chummy/informal/personal/anecdotal? Scientific/analytical/non-personal? Even fact-based writing requires you to pick a voice among the many legitimate ways you can sound.
Limiting omniscience: Moving from short stories to novels, I found this issue challenging/confusing at first. I never did figure out the big view, was always most comfortable using the POV of one character in each unit—usually a chapter.
Groove: Having once played in a band, I know how “the groove” feels—aka (old jazz lingo) “being in the pocket.” It’s palpable, hypnotic, an exceedingly fine out-of-yourself state.
But I have another (much humbler—coming as it does from an old dogfood commercial) way of putting this: The writing starts to make its own gravy.
Got a little buzz typing that last phrase . . . then I remembered:
She said, “It’s really not my habit to intrude
Furthermore, I hope my meaning
Won’t be lost or misconstrued
But I’ll repeat myself
At the risk of being crude
There must be fifty ways
To leave your lover
Fifty ways to leave your lover” . . .
[“50 Ways To Leave Your Lover,” Paul Simon]
Here, it feels like we’re transgressing, eavesdropping on words not meant for us.
Readers closer to my age (older than dirt) would be familiar with the classic mid-century example, The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger (1951), which opens with Holden Caulfield’s whiny monolog:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
Oates/in and out: From one of my favorites, Because It Is Bitter, And Because It Is My Heart (1990):
Says Virgil Starling, arm slung around Persia Courtney’s rib cage as he walks her, staggering- steady, hips banging, into the kitchen. “Know what you need, baby? Some good solid food in you.”
Persia protests. “Oh, honey—I don’t think I could manage.”
Leaning on him, hiding her face in his neck.
She’d almost said keep it down. Don’t think I could keep it down. Thank God she hadn’t.
Persia Courtney’s sweet caramel-skinned lover, beautiful Virgil Starling, like no man she’s known. Just the look of that man . . the look from him . . . Persia melts like honey.
Would you believe it, after all she’s been through?
She wouldn’t.
Voiceless grist: In my case, it’s actually been forty-one years since my first book of stories. I regret that my shelf has only seven books on it, yet I’m proud of the work, I stand by it . . . despite the suggestion by my agent that I should write under a new name since “my brand” had been tainted by abysmal sales figures.
But I digress.
Which is why I once titled a craft talk: Hey, Gimme Some Fucking Attitude!
“Seduced” is the right word.