Continuing to take a serious look after my tongue-in-cheek article, the Twelve Rules of Writing, we have reached number five, which is concerned with the writer’s voice.  Here’s the original rule to remind you: ~

5. Develop a writer’s voice

In order to be a successful writer you will need to develop a style which is distinctive and immediately identifiable.  To help develop your writer’s voice, try doing impressions of other writers.  YouTube is great for this as you can download clips of writers and imitate their speech patterns.  Once you have the hang of it, you can try developing your own voice.

We are told that so-and-so is the new voice of Science Fiction and that editors are always looking for new voices. We are also told that your voice should be unique, distinctive and original. It is not revealed, however, what your voice should be. That, after all, is up to you. It’s your voice. It’s a personal quest, which only you can undertake.

What do we mean, then, by voice? What is it that you’re looking for, that seems both elusive and obscure?

Here’s Mickey Spillane, talking about his name:

I got a kid named Mike…jeez, the names they gave ME. My father was Catholic, my mother was Protestant, and because of that I got Christened in both churches, so I’ve got all these names…but my Dad always called me Mick. My mother called me Babe, and Babe is not a nice name for a guy, unless you’re Babe Ruth.
~ from an interview with Michael Carlson for Crime Time.

Your voice is not one thing, but many. It’s the pace at which you tell stories – the timbre and tone you adopt. It’s where you place stress and emphasis and where you let things trail. It has both rhythm and timing, pace and punch, and forms a unique combination like a fingerprint. It’s about where you pause for breath, and what’s in that pause when it occurs.

A singular notion dawned upon me. I doubted not – never doubted –that if Mr Reed had been alive he would have treated me kindly; and now, as I sat looking at the white bed and overshadowed walls – occasionally also turning a fascinated eye towards the dimly gleaming mirror – I began to recall what I had heard of dead men, troubled in their graves by the violation of their last wishes, revisiting the earth to punish the perjured and avenge the oppressed; and I thought Mr Reed’s spirit, harassed by the wrongs of his sister’s child, might quit its abode – whether in the church vault or in the unknown world of the departed – and rise before me in this chamber.
~ from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

For some people, writer’s voice seems to come as easily as breathing. It’s as if they’re in the room as you read, literally a voice in your head. It helps if you’ve heard the writer read their work out loud, but for some, like the voices above, you don’t need to hear them – it’s there on the page. That didn’t happen by accident. I guarantee that the writer has worked to develop that voice. Maybe it’s a reflection of their natural voice, but even then it takes art to transfer it to the page so that it comes across in writing.

What can you do, then, to develop your own writer’s voice?

My advice to imitate writers voices from YouTube may have been flippant, but the idea of imitating other writers has some merit. Writing a short story or a piece of description in the style of another writer, whether it be as Charlotte Bronte, Mickey Spillane or another distinctive voice, gives you an idea of what makes that voice so distinctive. It makes you conscious of the elements brought into play, making it more explicit. You have to step back from the story and examine the words, the placing of punctuation, the delivery, to see what makes that voice.

Be sure to take more than one example and choose as many and varied as you can. Write as Tom Clancy, J R R Tolkein, P G Woodhouse, A A Milne – though with this last, you may find yourself channelling Alan Bennett by mistake. Then go back and look at what you’ve written and ask yourself – why is that sentence so long, or that comma placed there?

While your speaking voice is the product of your upbringing and your environment, and of the language(s) you speak, your writing voice is a cultured thing – something grown, developed and exercised. Having explored other voices, you need to find the voice in your own head, and heart, that expresses the truth that lies there.

In your imagination, create your own reader – they can be family, muse, friend, or lover – and bring your story to life for them. Make it personal, intimate and close – you’re not giving a lecture, you’re telling a story under the sheets by torchlight to someone with wide eyes and rapt attention. Watch their reactions as your story unfolds, pause while they hold their breath, race when the action is pumping, but tell it in your own way for that one person.

Finding your voice can take practice and time, but it is an essential part of what makes your stories unique, vivid and enjoyable for your readers. It is worth every moment invested and will make your stories stand out where others seem to lack something indefinable and essential.

As part of my continuing series following on my tongue-in-cheek Twelve Rules of Writing post, today we are discussing characters. First, though, let me remind you of Rule  4:

4. Characters must be three dimensional

Creating characters is difficult enough, but you must also make them three dimensional by describing them in excruciating detail. In order for your readers to be able to picture your character in 3D, they must know what underwear they have chosen and whether they floss their teeth.  It may help if you can get your readers to wear those cardboard spectacles with red and green filters.

This is one of the most cryptic pieces of advice to new writers – Make your characters three dimensional – make them stand out! It made my comment about the red and green glasses all the more poignant until my son reminded me that it was all done with polarized light these days. Writing advice like this is not very helpful unless you already know what three-dimensional characters are supposed to be, in which case you probably don’t need the advice. So what do we mean?

The reference to three dimensions really comes from the third dimension – remember in school we had (1) length, (2) height and (3) depth, and depth is what we’re looking for here. It helps to look at synonyms and antonyms:

~ Synonyms – complex, intense, profound
~ Antonyms – shallow, facile, superficial

Be aware that we are not talking about deep or shallow people as characters – it’s perfectly possible to have a shallow, superficially person as a character, represented in a way that would give them depth – someone profoundly shallow. It’s the way they are portrayed that is key to the depth of a character.

What can you do, then, to give your characters depth? Here are some suggestions:

• Find out what drives your characters. When you are writing a character, a key question is to know what they want, and what they will do to get it. Make sure they want something, even if it’s to be left alone. If they don’t want anything, why are they in the story?
• Give them an outlook on life. Are they a pessimist or an optimist? Are they confrontational or withdrawn? Do they have an attitude problem or are they a shrinking violet? Crucially, how do they deal with conflict? We all know people who deal with opposition in very different ways, and conflict is crucial to stories.
• Once you have outlook and motivation, think about what made them that way. What happened to them in their life that colours their decisions and guides their actions? What’s their story, and how does that colour their responses.

The temptation will be to include this material in your story, after all, you spent time and energy coming up with it, so why not use it? The danger here is that you get side-tracked into back story and lose the thread of the narrative exploring character background. The back-story can be revealed, but only when it is relevant and timely to the story.

Notice that I haven’t mentioned what the character looks like. My comment about describing characters in excruciating detail in Rule 4 refers to appearance, not substance. When we talk about shallow, superficial characters, we’re talking about appearances, and as we all know these are misleading. In fact they’re a great opportunity for an author to play with pre-conceptions, setting expectations only to twist them later to reveal something new and interesting.

Now that you know the character as a person, it’s time to introduce another dimension – time. The one thing that will define a character more than anything else is the decisions they make over time. Ultimately it’s not what we say that matters, but what we do, and by presenting characters with a dilemma and forcing them to make a choice, we see what kind of person they really are. When those decisions are profound, we gain insight into the depth of that character.

That allow us to explore their reaction in three critical ways:

• How do they react physically: Do they start shaking, screaming, fighting, hiding, running..?
• How do they react emotionally: Are they happy, sad, afraid, bewildered, resentful, amused..?
• How do they react spiritually: Are they changed? Have their values shifted? Is this a crisis of belief? Is it a moral choice..?

The other aspect of this is that when the dilemma is decided it must ring true for that character in that circumstance at that time. If the reaction is out of character then the reader will not accept it and the character will appear random or unpredictable – revealing little but the surface. So the development of the character over time through the story must support the dilemma that the character must eventually face and lead the reader to understand that the decision is neither straight-forward or simple, making the decision valid and understandable, even if it’s the ‘wrong’ decision.

A character faced with a true dilemma making a genuine choice reveals depth – whether we agree with the decision or not, we know them better as a person and that’s what it takes to bring a character into 3D.

Rule 3 in my Twelve Rules of Writing went like this: ~

3. Words are interchangeable, it’s what you mean that’s important.

The English language was created to mislead you.  Take the words ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.  Clearly, the word ‘right’ is misspelled, since ‘write’ goes with ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ should be paired with ‘left’.

Also, ‘their’, ‘they’re’ and ‘there’ should be synonymous and interchangeable.  Feel free to impose your own logic on the language as many people have before you.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the English language was indeed created to mislead.  The language is complex, inconsistent and, at times, preverse. Take the words bough, through, thought, cough and rough. In five similar words, the letters ‘ough’ are sounded out as five different vowel sounds.  Even for native English speakers, this makes spelling a matter of learning and familiarity, not of systematic understanding. This can make it seem daunting.

My comment about imposing logic is not without grounds, either. In some ways English isn’t one language, but many.  In a survey done by computer in 1973, it was estimated that English was in origin: 28% old Norman, 28% Latin, 25% Old Germanic and 5% Greek with the rest being made up of fragments from elsewhere or even made-up words – the word television, for instance, is a composite of the Greek TELE, meaning far and the Latin VISIO, to see in person.

To put this in perspective, Basic English includes about 850 words, and the General Service List (compiled of words from which most English can be understood) includes about 2,000 words.  If you have excellent facility with English then your vocabulary might be as high as 60,000 to even 100,000 words – still a fraction of language as a whole which may be over 600,000 words.

That brings us to meaning: ~

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” ~ Through the Looking Glass: Lewis Carroll.

This may be true for Humpty Dumpty, but writing is about conveying meaning and building a shared understanding between writer and reader. When your writing is published, you send it out into the world without the chance to clarify its meaning. People will either understand it or they won’t. It’s rare, particularly with fiction, for the reader to keep a dictionary handy in case they encounter a word they don’t understand, and if they take a moment to look up a word then they’ve broken out of the story, de-pacing the plot and breaking the suspension of disbelief.

You might think, therefore, that it is best to use only the simplest of language, to choose words perhaps from the basic list of 850 and therefore keep your reader’s attention. That has its own risks, though, as readers tire of the same words being used repetitively, the prose lacking depth and colour, the character voices all the same.

Too little and you risk boredom and disconnection – too much and your prose will become purple and elaborate beyond the needs of your story

This is the dilemma that writers face. They must choose a word, a phrase, an epithet, which illustrates the meaning while maintaining the rhythm and tone of the story. Each choice is crucial and characterises the writer’s skill in communicating the plot while depicting the characters in the context of the scene. It doesn’t always have to be a word the reader would know – context is all and, with skill, the writer can build a framework around an esoteric word to support a reader who doesn’t have the word in their vocabulary. This in turn expands their lexicon, building in richness and variety.

Developing these skills means reading, not as a reader – immersed in the story and blind to the words – but as a writer, examining the author’s word selection and deciding whether you would have chosen a better word, something more apposite. Give yourself a moment to appreciate a new or unexpected word-choice and become conscious of timbre, rhythm, tone, pace and harmonic form.

Develop an interest in etymology, the origins of words, for they have surprises in store for you. Look up, for instance, the evolution of the word ‘nice’. Its usage today is in contrast to its history, and that gives it a new context and a depth of meaning when you use it. A nice shot, a nice day, a nice cake, playing nice, niceness.

To write well, you need to learn to love words. it’s one of the subtler pleasures of writing to find the right word for the moment and use it sparingly and precisely, delivering exactly the nuance you require. It has the satisfaction of an accurate shot or a dive that leaves only ripples, something done perfectly and apparently without effort. Like many things it comes easier with practice and repetition, but it takes concentration and effort, just like that perfect dive.

A few weeks ago I posted a rather tongue-in-cheek article entitle The Twelve Rules of Writing, which some of you may have read and which it was nice to see a number of people commenting upon.  For me, one of the surprising comments was that people didn’t realise it was humorously intended until they got some way through it, perhaps because there are any number of articles out there where people say this sort of thing in all seriousness.

I’m also conscious that we are in the middle of NaNoWriMo and there are lots of people focused on upping their word-count with the intention of delivering a first draft by end of month.  It seemed a good time to offer some advice and encouragement, and I thought I might try and follow the themes in the original article but address them in a more serious manner.

This is the first of those articles, which I have split into two parts, the first part covering factual accuracy and the second to cover authenticity of experience, but to remind you of the original post – here it is: ~

1. Write what you know

In order for readers to engage in what you are writing and be drawn into the story, your writing must be authentic and genuine. You must therefore write about what you already know. There’s no point in researching stuff that you don’t know about, since that will immediately appear false to your readers. Stick to safe ground and it will save you a lot of effort.
As a side-effect of this, obviously science fiction and fantasy are not proper writing as you cannot possibly know about things you only imagined in the first place.

The reason I chose this as the first rule is that it seemed to me to be one of the most common pieces of advice, frequently offered without any explanation of how to follow it.  It’s trite, but it’s also true.  The key to this particular gem is authenticity.  It’s about getting inside the experience and making it immediate and personal, but it’s also about the suspension of disbelief.

Take the following example: ~

Sherlock Holmes went to the window of 221b Baker Street and glanced at the distant face of Big Ben.  It was almost midnight.  The game was afoot! (with apologies to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle).

There’s nothing wrong with this as a piece of writing.  It is spelled and punctuated correctly and, though it is brief, it encapsulates a moment.  However, twenty seconds with Google Maps will show you that from any window in a flat on Baker Street it is not possible to see the face of Big Ben – it’s in the wrong direction.  Using the iconic landmark gives us a sense of place, but it’s the wrong place, and it jars the reader out of the flow of the story.

This is an obvious example, but small things can be just as damaging. I am reminded of the character living in England who opened a tin of beetroot (which is almost always sold in jars in Britain) or Robin Hood arriving at Hastings and then riding to Nottingham in a day (not possible at the time, given the roads and the available modes of transport).  These are failures of fact and highlight the importance of research. If you are going to set a story in a location then you need to know not just the geographical layout, but also the culture, the smell, the clothing, the road-markings – everything that would bring that place alive for someone who actually lived there.

The danger then is that you include this in your story. Having done your research in painful detail, you then walk your reader through it, item by item. We’ve all done it.  At the beginning of Sixty-One Nails, I describe Niall mentally mapping his tube journey in detail after a line closure. It’s a small thing, and I needed to know he could make the journey for the story to be realistic, but it was a mistake to include it. It is enough for the reader to know that it could be done. Now I know better.

A little later in Sixty-One Nails, there is a scene where the police take Niall back to his flat where he believes there is something waiting to get him.  The scene has been described as “creepy” and “chilling” and is one of my favourite scenes from the book. In the initial draft the police broke into the flat, trying to catch the intruder.  They worked quietly and moved quickly to surprise the suspect.

Later, though, I talked to serving police officers and walked them through the scene (thank you Steve and Rachel) and discovered that this is far from what would happen in reality. The police do not want to surprise intruders or catch them unawares. Surprised people are unpredictable and irrational, they can be violent to others or hurt themselves. When entering a premises where an intruder is suspected to be, the officers shout, “Police! We’re coming in!” to warn the intruder and let them prepare themselves psychologically for arrest. Of course, they also have someone at the back to prevent escape, but they do not surprise intruders if they can avoid it.

This changed the entire scene for me and resulted in a complete re-write of that section of the book.  The result is grittier, more realistic (despite the other-worldly aspects) and rings true for the reader. It also changed my impressions of the police and the work they do, the way they are trained and the professionalism with which they approach their job. That added to the richness of the narrative and the portrayal of their role in the story.

In general, the people I talk to when researching a book are pleased to be consulted and interested in the writing process. Often they seem gratified that someone in interested enough in what they do to get the detail right. My experience is that this is true of most professionals, so all you really need to do is ask. Generally people want to help.

So when you reach the end of your NaNo novel, don’t be afraid to go back and revisit the material with a critical eye.  Think who might have a perspective on what you’ve written.  Talk it through with people you know – you might be surprised by the response and enlightened as to the experiences of your friends and acquaintances. Be prepared to rewrite where you find inaccuracy, but treat the factual content with a light touch. Like salt, research makes a fine seasoning, but a poor main course.

In the next article I’m going to discuss the other aspect of Write What You Know – emotional authenticity and realistic experience – and how you write about something you’ve never seen, not done and haven’t known.