Whenever you read manuscript wish lists of editors or agents, there is a term that will pop up over and over: voice. Voice is something publishers want, but it can be an elusive thing to understand. A quick Google search will tell you a lot about voice.
According to the Indeed Editorial Team, voice is “the unique style, personality of perspective of a piece of writing. It can often set the mood or tone and varies by author or the type of work they write. Literary voice incorporates many elements, including language, writing style, points or view, and tone.” Sounds inclusive, doesn’t it? Let’s keep digging.
literaryterms.net says voice “expresses the narrator or author’s emotions, attitude, tone and point of view through…word choice and diction.” They go on to list things voice can be: “formal or informal, serious or lighthearted, positive or negative, persuasive or argumentative, comical or depressed, witty or straightforward, objective or subjective.” And voice can be any of those and more.
SuperSummary.com says “voice is the opinion or attitude authors express in their writing” and that “voice is the personality of a piece of writing.” This last bit is interesting. If voice is the personality of a piece of writing, that would suggest that voice doesn’t have to be the same for every piece of writing someone creates. And this is true. Voice is about personality in a moment.
That Elusive Voice
One of the reasons voice isn’t a constant for any writer is because voice and mood are so tightly bound together. Years ago, I wrote a piece in college that I really liked. Unfortunately, my plotting skills back then were fairly sad and the piece doesn’t end well. Over the years, I’ve tried many times to rewrite the piece to make it work in terms of story, but every time I do that, I find I simply cannot reproduce the voice in any believable way.
The reality is that the bright-eyed girl who wrote the original piece and the post-menopausal person I am today are simply not the same people. I can try to imitate her voice, but it rings false. There are many good things about my writing today. It reflects years of honing my craft and building skills, but I still cannot capture the voice of the girl who was simply throwing emotion at the page and hoping it turned into something engaging. That girl vanished in the process of becoming this woman.
Voice changes. And even when your skills are not all that you might hope they will become, there is something absolutely amazing about your writing voice right now. At least there is when you relax and simply write. As a writing instructor, I sometimes worked with writers who were working in English, though it was not their first language. And the process of writing in a language that sometimes frustrated them also brought along with it a unique voice element of its own, something a writer TRYING to sound like will never reproduce correctly. Even the struggle sometimes produces something quite wonderful in terms of voice.
Because there is something unique, engaging, and special about the voice of every person who approaches writing, it’s important to recognize and protect that. You will need to build skills. You will need to learn to understand plot, narrative/dialogue balance, and a zillion other things in your writing journey. But right now, you have something special. So right now you need to be writing as much and as naturally as you can so that you can hang onto the best elements of voice that you bring to your writing right in this moment.
Why Folks Tell You Not to Edit as You Write
Do you ever wonder about that advice and even get frustrated by it? I know I edit as I write. I also tend to open new writing sessions on a WIP by editing the last chapter I wrote as a kind of warm-up exercise before I jump into the new one. Some of that is to help me get into the headspace I was in when I did the previous writing, so I have the best chance of having a smooth writing voice throughout the piece. I need to get back to being the person who wrote the piece, even though a day has passed or a week or a month. Editing helps me do that.
But the advice not to edit as you write does have a purpose. It is given to help you avoid stifling your voice. It’s about relaxing and letting yourself write. One of the most problematic things new writers do is to get too writerly. They launch into a piece trying to sound literary. They use big words they have never really made their own. They twist sentences into odd shapes to sound more formal. They get too fond of the thesaurus. The result is clunky and inauthentic. So, when folks urge you not to edit as you write, what they’re often trying to get you to do is relax, shake off thoughts of how you “should” write, and simply write the way you do. Anyone can try to copy the writerly. Only you can write like you.
Thinking too much about voice while you are writing can make it harder to capture an engaging and authentic voice. What can you do to capture an authentic and engaging voice? There are quite a few things, beginning (as so many things do) with your characters.
Create Characters You Can Care About
The narration of your story will not be an exact match for all of your characters. It may not be an exact match for any of them. And you don’t want it to be. You want each character to speak in their own voice. And the only way to create an authentic voice for each of them is to (1) know them well and (2) care about them. The worst character voices always come from people you don’t care about.
I have a writing friend who writes wonderful spooky stories, but she falls apart any time she includes a religious character. She isn’t religious, and she generally is distrustful of religion and religious people. As a result, her religious characters tend to be one-note and unbelievable. She doesn’t understand religious life, and it shows.
This is a problem for many people when creating an antagonist from a group the writer strongly dislikes. If you are distrustful of the police, every police officer becomes a dim-witted bully. If you have bad memories of being at odds with “popular” kids, then any kid who is popular in your story will tend to be vain, stupid, and spiteful. Your feelings about these folks will replace any deep understanding and the characters will have a one-note voice as a result. They won’t be believable.
An interesting thing happens when we connect with a character and think more deeply about them when we care about them. The character’s voice will become clear in your head. You might not admire the character or want to hang out with them, but the more you care about them, the more real and believable they will sound. And sometimes a character is meant to be just passing through will become something more in the story and readers will care about them too because they have a voice we believe in and want to listen to more.
Feel What They’re Feeling
Clear voice can also be about the emotions of the writer. Whatever you’re feeling will affect your word choice, your pacing, your decisions about characters, and your decisions about setting and action. Writing, as with all art, is an emotional job, so your emotions are far more important than you think. One of the reasons I struggle to get into the voice of the college-written story is because I’m emotionally such a long way from the girl who wrote it. To write in her voice, I need to feel her feelings.
It works similarly in character voice. To write the character’s voice believably, you need to feel the character’s feelings. Sometimes writers talk about not being “ready” to write a specific book. Now, they sometimes mean they haven’t done all the research they need, but often they mean they don’t yet inhabit the emotional headspace they need to do the writing. Emotion is key to believability and if you’re not feeling it, it’s really hard to write it.
Sometimes, in order to better figure out problems I’m having with voice, I list all my characters and what their primary emotion, in the story, actually is. When I wrote the stories about the kids who helped one of the group’s brother with his web show about hunting cryptids, the emotional space of my main character was often about worry. He worried that he might fail his brother. He worried that his efforts weren’t enough. His emotional headspace was usually easy for me to get into because I’m a worrier.
The second character was afraid much of the time and a little short-tempered, but also prone to silly jokes. I could relate to him as well. All of those things are bits of my emotional landscape on a regular basis.
The third kid was generally bewildered by other people but was proud of his own intellect. And honestly, I can be that way too.
I realized I’d taken my personality and broken it into bits and handed it out to three kids. This made them easy to slip in and out of when I wrote dialogue for them and gave them voices.
When you look at your characters and characterize their emotions, do you find it easy to slip into that emotional space? If not, that character’s voice isn’t going to be as authentic, or engaging. If you don’t connect with the character, how can you hope to speak for them? And if you can’t speak for them, the voice of the character won’t be individual or believable. Feel it, and you’ll find the voice.
Let Voice Flow Over You
The more you read, the more your brain will have available to write. Do you know the story of Stone Soup? In the old tale, a hungry traveler had no money, but he did have a pot and a stone. So he set up a cookfire in the middle of town, hung a pot over the fire, added water from the well and threw in the stone. Then he began to stir. And he kept commenting on how his delicious stone soup needed just one more ingredient to be perfect. So townspeople added ingredients. Each bringing just a little. And in the end, the soup was delicious.
Voice is a bit like that. You have the creativity, the pot, the water, and the stone. But you really could use more ingredients to draw upon to make a good soup. And as a writer, we tend to get those ingredients by reading—widely and constantly. Now, in this instance, “reading” can be done by reading words on a page or by listening to an audiobook. I do both, and they each add to my soup. I don’t analyze the voice of the book I’m reading or listening to. If I think the story is especially good, I may read it a second time, this time paying attention to how the author produced such an amazing voice. But most of the time, I’m simply reading to enjoy the book.
Then something interesting happens. The more I read, the better my own voice becomes. I don’t write thinking about these other books. I don’t write trying to sound like these other authors. I simply write. But because I’ve read this breadth of work, my own voice has more choices, and my stone soup gets better and better. It can happen for you too.
Read. Feel. Think deeply about your characters. And your voice will get more unique, more engaging, and more YOU. You will begin writing in voices that delight editors, agents, and readers. Just give it a try.
With over 100 books in publication, Jan Fields writes both chapter books for children and mystery novels for adults. She’s also known for a variety of experiences teaching writing, from one session SCBWI events to lengthier Highlights Foundation workshops to these blog posts for the Institute of Children’s Literature. As a former ICL instructor, Jan enjoys equipping writers for success in whatever way she can.
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According to the Indeed Editorial Team, voice is “the unique style, personality of perspective of a piece of writing. It can often set the mood or tone and varies by author or the type of work they write. Literary voice incorporates many elements, including language, writing style, points or view, and tone.” Sounds inclusive, doesn’t it? Let’s keep digging.
The reality is that the bright-eyed girl who wrote the original piece and the post-menopausal person I am today are simply not the same people. I can try to imitate her voice, but it rings false. There are many good things about my writing today. It reflects years of honing my craft and building skills, but I still cannot capture the voice of the girl who was simply throwing emotion at the page and hoping it turned into something engaging. That girl vanished in the process of becoming this woman.
But the advice not to edit as you write does have a purpose. It is given to help you avoid stifling your voice. It’s about relaxing and letting yourself write. One of the most problematic things new writers do is to get too writerly. They launch into a piece trying to sound literary. They use big words they have never really made their own. They twist sentences into odd shapes to sound more formal. They get too fond of the thesaurus. The result is clunky and inauthentic. So, when folks urge you not to edit as you write, what they’re often trying to get you to do is relax, shake off thoughts of how you “should” write, and simply write the way you do. Anyone can try to copy the writerly. Only you can write like you.
I have a writing friend who writes wonderful spooky stories, but she falls apart any time she includes a religious character. She isn’t religious, and she generally is distrustful of religion and religious people. As a result, her religious characters tend to be one-note and unbelievable. She doesn’t understand religious life, and it shows.
It works similarly in character voice. To write the character’s voice believably, you need to feel the character’s feelings. Sometimes writers talk about not being “ready” to write a specific book. Now, they sometimes mean they haven’t done all the research they need, but often they mean they don’t yet inhabit the emotional headspace they need to do the writing. Emotion is key to believability and if you’re not feeling it, it’s really hard to write it.
Voice is a bit like that. You have the creativity, the pot, the water, and the stone. But you really could use more ingredients to draw upon to make a good soup. And as a writer, we tend to get those ingredients by reading—widely and constantly. Now, in this instance, “reading” can be done by reading words on a page or by listening to an audiobook. I do both, and they each add to my soup. I don’t analyze the voice of the book I’m reading or listening to. If I think the story is especially good, I may read it a second time, this time paying attention to how the author produced such an amazing voice. But most of the time, I’m simply reading to enjoy the book.
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