Let Your Writer’s Voice Fly Free
Remove all guardrails and see what happens
Discussions around a writer’s “voice” usually focus on deliberate stylistic choices that infuse a book (especially fiction) with a particular narrative tone that is complemented by the characters’ own voices.
The variety of voice-choices is wonderfully varied, ranging from the impressionistic and elegiac (Tommy Orange’s There There) to the fiercely satirical (Several People are Typing by Calvin Kasulke) and so much more in between.
I’m here to explore the writer’s “voice” in a different context—one focused on the writer as a person trying to summon a voice for a book when a lot of mental noise and uncertainty makes that hard to do.
A seasoned, successful writer like Tina Fey (as I explored here recently in Part 1 of this two-parter) can get out of her own head well enough and long enough to craft a narrative voice (albeit with co-writers) for a long piece of fiction that’s handled consistently and not hard to identify. (Oh, yes, humorous satire: I see you, Fey.)
Many of us struggle to infuse a long work with a voice that consistently makes sense in the context of the story we’re telling and the characters we deploy to tell that story.
One symptom of this struggle, which I’ve seen in many early novel drafts, is that most of the characters sound alike and the narrative voice itself is rather colorless. Things happen, but there’s not a lot of personality or distinct voicing behind the scenes to propel them forward.
You might blame a weak point-of-view (POV) for this, but let’s stick with calling it a voice problem.
Writing is an incredibly bold act. But writers are often afraid to pack that boldness into the writing itself. As a result, characters never get too angry or too ecstatic or too reckless or too mean, and so forth. The narrative holds back from relentlessness or a galloping pace or high-stakes anything.
It’s as if we mistake writerly “control” for a well-executed voice, when in fact, we’re cheating ourselves of truly getting the most compelling voice onto the page.
It’s also as if we’re mistaking fictional reality for the real world we inhabit—a world with rules of civility, including expectations about how to behave. In fiction, those rules can and should be broken with abandon—and expectations about them subverted at every opportunity. And consequences? We want them messy in fiction, even if that notion makes us uncomfortable in real life.
An underlying cause of a writer’s timidity may be that we’re so worried about what people will think about what we’ve written that we pull back from writing what we really want to say.
On top of that, we’re so unsure about the quality of our work, we keep nibbling around its edges, rather than pushing deeper and finding the language to go as big and bold as we should.
As I’ve said before, voice is a choice—but that doesn’t apply only to, say, whether we’re going for satire or psychological horror. It also means consciously choosing to write far outside our own temperaments (if not also our lived experiences), to risk strong emotions we ourselves may rarely experience in real life, and to make ourselves uncomfortable, if possible, with respect to the story-world we’re building.
I know first-hand what the hesitation feels like. I know what it’s like to write a scene and then think, The reader won’t like this character; I’d better make her nicer. Or: Will I offend readers if my characters say ‘fuck’ a lot?
A pox on that!
That’s fear speaking, not literary intention. We allow a form of meta-cognition to get in the way of creativity, which doesn’t want to be polite or held back or told to wait on the sidelines. We’re pre-judging how work that’s barely begun will be received while at the same time judging ourselves for under-executing…which leads to avoiding taking the big risks with storytelling that we should, indeed, be taking.
We must get out of our own way, though I know it’s hard.
Your job is to lean all the way into brash storytelling. It’s better, in my view, to prune the melodrama later than to commit to safe blandness all the way through.
As with every single thing about writing, this is all to do with mindset.
As you write, notice the kinds of questions you’re asking yourself:
Are you questioning your competence and therefore limiting your palette?
Worrying about revealing too much of your inner self by putting strong emotions on the page?
Wondering constantly if a reader will “like” your book?
Try to set these kinds of questions aside; they’re not helping your process. Instead, ask yourself:
What happens if my characters can barely contain their emotions?
What’s the worst thing that can possibly happen to anyone in this story? Will they survive? What if they don’t? How will everyone truly feel?
What if I allow myself to write characters and storylines diametrically opposed to my own temperament? (So where I’m shy, they’re super-extroverted. Where I’m even-tempered, they’re quick to explode.)
When it comes to defining the writer’s voice, the overall tone and theme of your story depends not only on your raw mechanical storytelling powers, but on your ability to resist every tendency to contain your story for the sake of pleasing some imaginary broad audience that acts like the Tolerance Police.
Remove all the guardrails, throw all caution to the winds, and write as fiercely and impolitely as you can. That’s where you’ll find your voice.
WRANGLING THE DOUBT MONSTER: FIGHTING FEARS, FINDING INSPIRATION
“A compassionate truth bomb on every page.”
--Stacy Frazier, Write it Scared podcast