Finding My Voice

The Lovers by Rene Magritte, 1928

Thinking about voice, more like. To be clear, I'm still actively working out this whole voice thing, so with that disclaimer out of the way, let's dive in.

There are two kinds of voice -- there's the voice you give your characters as you create them. They can be built from the outside in or the inside out depending on your writing process, but every character must have his or her own voice, which emerges from their individual histories, needs and goals. I call this "character voice." Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, is a tour de force of character voice.

What I'm talking about today is Authorial Voice. What is it? And, what is a writer's relationship to this mysterious idea of "voice"? Wikipedia has an interesting if quirky definition, which will serve. If you want more, I don't think there's a writing book out there that doesn't talk about voice. Now that I'm in the writing trenches, I have some thoughts of my own.

There's a lot of talk about developing your voice, but I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean. while a writer's voice does indeed develop, I think that stating it this way leads to an artificial separation. There is no way to "develop your voice" outside of the work. And by work, I mean writing. 


Your voice is not a caged bird, it is not your pet. It's not a thing that you can manipulate. To do good work you have to drill down through your conscious mind in search of the ore hidden in the dark and slippery subconscious. If you're lucky, work hard, and take risks, you might even touch the vast and inarticulate unconscious. Strange and shocking things will flow through your fingers onto the page. That's your voice. That feral half-understood thing. 

You don't develop your voice or even find it, so much as realize it. Your voice is YOU, and for your voice to develop you must put yourself on the page fearlessly. This is why critiques sting even when they're right. The thick skin you develop isn't about the rightness or wrongness of what's on the page, it's to protect your voice, so that you can keep going.

Your voice will change. You are a moving target after all (and always should be) evolving and developing as a writer and as a human being.Your voice accretes across time and over your entire body of work. This is why you keep writing. We find our voices by simply writing story after story, just like we find ourselves by walking out into the world day after day.

The authority in your voice is born of the risks you take on the page, how deep you dig, how far out on the limb you are willing to go. But, I don't believe you can achieve authority without acceptance. You must accept your voice as you accept yourself, as you accept your failures and your successes.

Every story I create is a frozen artifact of my voice at that moment, like a fleeting glimpse of myself in the mirror. I am in my pajamas, mouth frothing with toothpaste. I am putting on makeup for a date. One day I look smug, another, tired. Still, it's me every time.

Belated Grammar Love Day

Read up on semicolons here

Monday was National Grammar Day. I posted about it last year and have decided to make it an annual tradition. I continue to study grammar, and it turns out grammar is a lot more fascinating than I thought it would be back when I saw it as just some monster waiting to trip me up. It's also a moving target. Languages express our cultures and evolve with them. Check out this sampling of a few older grammar rules that have fallen out of use. Now you can indeed split that infinitive and feel free to boldly go!

A good book to wet your toes in the grammar pool is It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences: A Writer's Guide to Crafting Killer Sentences. It's practical and straightforward, and written by someone who's actually spent time editing in the real world. Because if this, she acknowledges that there can be more than one way to interpret a sentence grammatically, and many ways to fix it.

I have the Daily Writing Tips Grammar category on my RSS feed, and it's a great way to get a ten minute lesson in on a busy day.

This year, I'm also working my way through some more advanced books:

Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style

where Virginia Tufte "shows how standard sentence patterns and forms contribute to meaning and art in more than a thousand wonderful sentences from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. " 

The Art of Styling Sentences 

This workbook takes you through twenty sentence patterns, e.g. a series of balanced pairs, compound sentence with elliptical construction, object or complement before subject and verb. 

There are also chapters like: combining sentence patterns, myths about coordinators, and the twenty patterns in print (with examples drawn from published writing).

Heady stuff. 

I'm learning so much by intentionally writing sentences in a specific structure. I do this as an exercise - not while I'm working on stories. When I'm writing a story, all I can bring to bear are the lessons that I have internalized through practice. I want to have these elements DOWN, so that the story can flow unimpeded.

To some, my enthusiasm may look a little obsessive, and I'll own that. Certainly all that's required to convey a story is competency in grammar, but why shoot for competency when you can shoot for the stars? If the story is the message then the words and the GRAMMAR are the medium. The more I understand the nuances of grammar the more I can convey the story with subtlety and power. My ability to control and manipulate the elements of grammar is a big part of what makes up my writer's voice. It also gives me the ability to adapt my voice to the needs of individual stories. It's how I hone the emotions and themes of a story to a razor sharp edge.

I'll always be learning, always making mistakes. There's no such thing as a perfect story, but that's why art is all about the pursuit of perfection.