Voice

A rather resounding silence.

Hope you liked the story yesterday--I am just paranoid enough that the lack of any comments whatsoever makes me nervous. No, I am NOT fishing for compliments. I'm just sayin'.

Anyway, one of my writer friends was just asking about the elusive 'voice', and how to cultivate it. Sometimes us writers see the constant agent request for a "new, fresh voice" and we just panic. Is voice something that can even be created? Is it inherent to a writer, or learned? And how can we change voice when moving from one project to another, or one POV to another?

I was very pleased to see, when I re-read the story below yesterday, that the voice is completely different from that in TMT. The character is, at least to my read, completely male, and clearly Native American. His thoughts, his actions, his words and metaphors, all reflect that point of view. If I wrote that story with the same word choices as TMT, which are supposed to reflect the thoughts and actions of a young, medieval woman in England, we would have a serious voice disconnect. That would lose readers. (By the way, that story was a perfect example of the writing magic. I wrote it in 2 hours, with very, very few changes as I went along. Almost like dictation. I love it when that happens, but it is oh so rare.)

In my mind, then--and I may be wrong on this, so feel free to call me out--voice is largely a matter of being deep in the POV character. The words you use even to describe the actions of a POV character should be different from those for another character--and that culminates in voice.

However, sometimes there is a voice for the novel as a whole (or series of novels) rather than for one particular character, and I'm not sure I can define that as easily. That voice may be inherent to the writer: a certain type of chapter structure, perhaps, or a way of opening scenes. The method of handling tension and flow. These are beyond individual POV and beyond word choice.

Have you ever read a book by an author and started thinking like the book? D.H. Lawrence does this to me, and so, unfortunately, does James Joyce. (Which is why I avoid James Joyce...who wants to go around thinking like Ulysses?) That is an example of a strong book voice. It's so insistent that it pushes into your head.

Voice may well be a challenge for me with Book 2. Here we are with another young, medieval woman in almost the same time period as in TMT--yet the voice has to be different. The character is vastly different: Spanish-born, royal, warped by tragedy. Isabella is not naive as Katherine was; she didn't have a chance to be. My choice of words, of cadence, of everything will have to reflect that. Oh, and it has to be engaging, and "fresh and new" too. No problem, right? It all depends on whether I can 'hear' her or not, and whether I can capture that 'voice' on the page.

Medieval Word of the Day: pomely: Marked with rounded spots, dappled.