Not every writer needs a voice. Lots of ghost writers out there. As long as you can write clean and clearly and have a decent story in a selling genre you'll be published. I have boxes of gothic romances and horror novels to attest to this. Most of the writers sound the same but every once in a while one will stand out and have a unique voice or style. You won't recognize your own style until you have some pieces to really compare and really see what you're doing. Despite the different characters and there voices and storylines - you'll start noticing the choices you make are usually the same - sentence patterns, the addition of humor, wryness, cynicism or charm, favorite words, favorite phrases, outcomes, plot twists. That's all style is - making you're own pattern.
Oh I recognise that, sure. Comparing my two WIP's and how I wrote at the beginning and what comes out now .. there is a huge difference and I am completely happy with what I am producing now. I may not be fast (still needs some more words), but the choices are clear and it is exactly as you say: there are patterns emerging
My writes - mainly incoherent, lack visual sense, common sense, sense, linger web ways, free to read, OR upon the back pages of the anthology @ £9.99 for relatives, they shun me now I exposed the clan in my prose. Quite a thought, really. I hate granny.
@matwoolf, you definitely have a voice! Now all you need to do is find a language other people can understand.
Oh shush @Steerpike, I am feeling very sensitive today, umm, yes and I know @M, but a bad day for me, a writing hell :/...maybe go for pirate story? ...Terrible addiction to Wordpress going on, need to draw breath, submit properly [again] rather than play for laughs; waiting for little gold stars to appear on my screen is madness. Voice is voice, a confidence with age? Suppose though 'sincerity' works best. I am not philosopher. Today's output was dreadful: The not very good writer was very depressioned in the dumps. He lived in a dump, he worked at the dump, a dump-faced dump. Humpty Dumpty would not befriend Dump. Dump, no friends, not even at the dump. ...
I think this is one of these agent-speak things. In this case I have a shrewd idea 'a distinctive voice' means 'written compellingly'. A unique voice doesn't help a book be good; being similar in voice to many other works isn't a bad thing as long as those other things are good. What they probably care about most is a writing voice that is enjoyable to read. Obviously that depends on the book and the agent but what you really should worry about is if your book is good to read and why. There's an interplay between the tone of the book, the style of your writing and the voice of your narrator. In a light contemporary romantic comedy you need a light style. It might be unique to approach that genre with the overwrought melodramatic prose from a gothic horror but that's essentially a gimmick, not really an appropriate way to write a huge series of books. You need a voice that reflects the mood and tone of the book and that is versatile enough to reflect the complete emotional range of said work. A style that is too light doesn't set up the stakes involved, a style too heavy will stifle the comedy or less intense moments. It's good to be unique if you can get it but if you can't then settle for a good voice that quietly informs the readers expectations about the book and the tone and puts them in the right emotional place for what they are going to see. A really hyperbolic voice is one that can't clearly communicate when things are actually important. What's my writing voice? It's laconic, bordering on beige, discussing happy and sad things with the same weight. I write horribly depressing, tear jerking stories so I need to have a voice that sounds natural to describe someone's thought process as they get raped without being so heavy as to make everything sound like someone's being raped. So I have this voice that, in good times, is reserved and a bit sarcastic that implies a bit of a know-it-all smirk to the reader, and in bad times there's unflinching, unadorned description of these horrible things that says 'this is how it is, i'm not going to let you look away'. Is that unique? No, not really. William Gibson is the master of that kind of writing and I am but a pale shade of his depressing worlds. Fortunately I write for teenage girls so I probably sound a bit more unique (for good or ill) in that marketplace.
Oxford Dictionaries has this to say: 1.3 The distinctive tone or style of a literary work or author: 'she had strained and falsified her literary voice' [sounds painful] — which I'm sure clears up the debate nothing for all of us. I suppose it depends on what you're trying to write. Maybe we could put JK Rowling at one end (call her commercial) and @matwoolf at the other (call him experimental). The Rowling is distinctive cos she's sold a mountain of books; the wolfman is distinctive cos he plays with language. Maybe we shouldn't worry too much — like @LostThePlot says, it may just be agentese — and write what makes us happy. Surely that's where we find our voice. Or we could line up ducks between JK and MW, watch them roll along, take a shot — win a teddy. Roll up, roll up, find your voice at the wordwright's fair, ladies and gentlemen...
However you define "voice," I suppose it is safe to say you don't need it. There is a lot of generic fiction out there that sounds the same and could be just as easily written by author A as author B. I prefer a more distinctive voice, though.
I definitely agree that a bland voice is a problem but I do think it's important to separate a distinctive voice from good one. If a bland voice is a problem then you could make it better by making it more distinctive but a voice with too much personality is a problem by itself because it takes you out of the narrative. It's a golden mean thing. You can have a voice that is subtly distinctive without it over-powering the event your describing.
Kind of a branch off this topic: I was talking to a teacher the other day about standardized testing in the US, and she brought up such a good point that since we're teaching kids to pass an essay portion on the test, we aren't teaching them to find their voice. Instead, they're being taught to be evaluated on how well they understand a prompt. This hinders their ability to ever find their voice and really understand how to write well.
Going to take a stab in the dark at this. Voice should establish the tone of your writing. Should we be happy, sad, pissed, etc. in a given scene? It should tie in with the characters own persona, not their speaking voice. For example if you are writing about a an eccentric pirate on the high seas in the Caribbean, the tone should be modeled around those elements. Captain Rusty Boots sat in his quarters, half drowned in a bottle of rum. Pegleg, his parrot rested atop the stolen Spanish chair the soused captain sat in peering out the dingy window at the sunset. Pegleg fluttered his wings irritably as his peg legs held tight in the crude holes that were bored into the head of the chair. Squawking at his master, still upset that he lost his real legs to his master's appetite. The ocean sloshed gently against the hull of the ship, and the rum sloshed with in old Rusty Boots. Infernal bird, he thought looking at the creature with blurry bloodshot eyes. Perhaps tomorrow he will enjoy the wings of the peg legged parrot. And if his fowl mouthed feathered first mate did not keep his tongue, he would be fired from the main cannon at the next encounter with the Spanish armada. I think that is what it means to have a voice anyway. Just thought I would take a stab it.
I don't off the top of my head; I don't really read. But a reasonable example here would be a book like Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy where the narrator is a character unto itself. HHGTTG is a comedy and so the narrators flight's of fancy and random divergences in the middle of scenes isn't a big problem as long as they are funny and thematic but equally it's heavily distracting from the actual action. If that style of narrator were transplanted into a serious book, disgorging random bits of serious backstory around the edges of serious scenes it'd be overbearing to the point of making your eyes bleed because it's telling not showing and it's breaking the flow and screwing with the mood and doing everything that a narrator shouldn't do. In a comedy we don't care. It's subverting the form; both of radio where the story was originally made for and of books by being so funny and so well written that we just don't care. But anywhere else that'd be an author who almost doesn't know how to write. Voice of god dumping exposition on us out of nowhere? No thank you.
I think you're right. The voice of the story is going to constantly be there with the reader and is going to be a huge contributor to how the reader feels at any given time. You need to walk that tightrope between giving away too much in narration and not giving the reader enough to feel the right things when there isn't speech happening and that's very hard. It takes a light touch and less is definitely more. Your voice should hint at things, should set the mood like lighting or background music might in other media. A big part of my work is leaving it up to the reader to decide if they are ok with what they are seeing or not. What that really taught me was that you need a voice that's focused on creating the appropriate amount of tension. It's up to the characters and the readers to have feelings about things; to have the emotional reaction to events; but it's up to the voice to inform the reader (and the characters) about how intense the scene is. When things are intense I tighten the focus, stretch time out, include telling little details. This tells the reader how to feel without telling them what to feel. That voice tells them 'this is important and meaningful (and usually horrible)' without saying 'and you should be sad/outraged/traumatized'. It's a subtle difference but an important one. It makes a voice that isn't dictating to the reader, it's just putting their attention where I want it and (hopefully) letting the events speak for themselves instead of letting the book speak for them. That's why I think that a 'distinctive' voice isn't the same as a good one. Your voice is a strand that ties together everything else; that strand is not the focus of the book. Your narration is certainly not a chance to show off how funny or clever or descriptive you are. Your characters and story and dialogue can do that, sure, but not your voice. Your voice is just there to let those other factors shine; to be the scaffolding you hang a story from. Gold plated scaffolding just draws attention away from the building you are constructing.
Oh good, I did a good. @LostThePlot I agree with you. I have done a fair amount of mood writing, and even manage to squeeze in a little dark humor into it to lighten the mood a bit. Though I do not pull any punches when it comes down to the grittier elements. The viscera flows freely and can make the floor a tad slippery. But it sure livens up the rather dull metal walls with a splash of color. All in all it is a wash of differing tones of all the rainbow. Figured I got it right when I broke into tears when one MC indirectly executed an old girlfriend. Or when he stayed with another character that dies, letting his humanity shine through his rough asinine persona.
I think you're right. I've read a number of Stephen King novels and even though I can tell they're all written by him, they each have their own voice or perhaps I could go so far as to say: voice-within-a-voice.
I love when my writing makes me cry. It actually annoys me a bit that I can't do that intense, complex, pained, tearful stuff all day every day. But it only works when you spend weeks on end building the world and characters and really feeling for them and finally letting the slow motion train wreck happen that you can give it that straight to that pure perfect visceral response to it. Something that can reach out to a jaded, cynical asshole (which really is a fair characterization of me) and make him cry. Obviously this is a multi-faceted thing; some is just to do with subject matter. I'm good at finding core stuff in characters that lets me tune into something deeply painful. But it's incredibly important to me to keep the focus on characters above all else and just watch them crumple under stress, then get back up and carry on. It's a risk, in a way, because if you don't sympathize with the characters and don't fall in love with them then they won't care when the crunch comes. But if you do then you'll get one hell of a ride.
Heck, I sometimes laugh and cry at the same time Watch out when that happens, that is something to behold. In writing I can be these people, can live their lifes at the same time as I live mine. I love all my characters, all their little, or not so little painful or under stress violent tendencies. All of them have good reason to be the people they are and I value them deeply. To watch them fighting for what they belief or hope, with all of their heart, to make the reader understand and love them also would be the greatest validation of every tear I've shed, every shell-shocked moment I've had and which might yet come. And I think this thread is going off on a tangent
I have on various occasions described my work as 'for people who like to cry while they are jacking off'. And while that's rather snarkily put it's closer to truth than anything else. I make no comment on my creative process. If only I was as snappy coming up with two sentence descriptions that are flattering. Alas my talents don't extend quite that far. Roiling maelstroms of pain? No problem. Good characters being compelled to do bad things and falling apart under the strain? That's my bread and butter. Making my work sound like something other people would want to read? That is unfortunately beyond me. It's easy for me to extol, nay, evangelize how painful and horrible and soul crushing my work is; I luxuriate in the pain I can put my characters through. But it turns out other people don't have their eyes light up when they hear tell of soul wrenching pain. Alas. I'm literally working on this kind of thing right now actually; an agent who asks to send them two or three sentences describing what the book is about. Somehow I suspect that starting that pitch with 'a teenage boy accidentally raping his mother' is not going to end in dollar signs. Much like when sleeping with a parent; it's important to ease into this (EDIT - No, I didn't go through all that just to make that pun; I am actually trying to sell a coming of age story that turns into a semi-consentual mother/son romance) Alas again. Nothing wrong with tangents. That's how we find out how far we can go.
@LostThePlot I have on various occasions described my work as 'for people who like to cry while they are jacking off'. This statement is rather odd, and slightly disturbing. Not sure what it is you're writing, but it should not be a depressing knob polishing.
