CHAPTER 8
VOICE: THE SOUND OF A STORY

BY HARDY GRIFFIN

When I started writing, I couldn’t figure out what “voice” was, so I skipped it and spent my time learning how to create characters and plots out of nothing. I figured I’d just go ahead and write and use whatever “voice” showed up naturally.

That is, until my friend showed up instead and asked me to read some fiction in a reading series he was coordinating at the corner restaurant. Suddenly my little apartment was full of my nervous, frustrated, bewildered voice while I spent the better part of a week pacing from the sink to the couch and back, reading and editing a simple three-page story about a young man (half me and half fiction) at his grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving. Nothing sounded right, from the Southern accents to the lemon meringue pie to the fireflies in the deep blue dusk.

I stepped into the exposed-brick basement of the restaurant where the reading was and got a gin and tonic right away (for the Southern accents, you understand). It was packed and I was freaked out. But when my turn came and I stood in front of everyone and started reading, something happened. The thing in my hands didn’t feel like my story so much as my narrator’s story, as if the words on the page had come together and formed a new person who was speaking and who the audience in the cafe wanted to listen to.

Three things popped out at me about voice after that night. First of all, the voice of a piece is what makes it special, what sets it apart and makes it feel lived. On the other hand, voice isn’t half as ephemeral as critics and academics make it sound. But most important, it’s essential that your narrative voice sounds natural. Your storyteller should be relaxed and absorbed in the fiction so your readers can be too. That’s what worked in my piece for the reading—even while I was in a sweat, my narrator’s voice was completely involved in telling the story.

But what is this mysterious thing, voice?

One of my favorite oxymorons is the often-repeated phrase “a writer’s voice.” Just how much sound can a bunch of black marks on a piece of paper make, anyway? I don’t know about you, but the only sounds I make as I’m writing are the tap of the keys and various inarticulate groans. Obviously these aren’t the voices that readers, academics, and critics are always talking about.

Simply put, voice is what readers “hear” in their heads when they’re reading. Voice is the “sound” of the story.

In every strong work of fiction, one voice rises above the din to unify the piece and lead the reader through the thicket of characters’ voices. This voice is the most important for the simple reason that, after finishing a good story or novel, it’s this overarching voice which continues to ring in the reader’s mind. And yes, you guessed it—the voice of a story is the voice of the narrator.

My fiction students often get confused between the voice of a piece and the writer’s voice, and with good reason. If a number of works by the same author have a similar tone, then people often lump them together as that writer’s voice or style. However, the best thing you, as a writer, can do is to concentrate on the narrator’s voice of each individual piece of your fiction. Someday, a critic may see what your varied works have in common and write an admiring article that defines what your voice as a writer is like. Until then, your job is to focus on the voice in each individual story.

TYPES OF VOICE

The amazing truth is that your chosen voice can take an infinite variety of “sounds.” So how do you pick what kind of voice to give your narrator?

More than anything else, your choice of voice is related to your point-of-view choice. If you’re using a first-person narrator, then your voice will need to match the personality of that particular character. If you’re using a second-or third-person narrator, then the narrator will be a storyteller, who may or may not sound like you. Also, the sound of the second-or third-person narrator will be affected by the emotional distance with which this narrator is telling the story. A first-person narrator will naturally tell a story in a way that is close to the action because he or she is inside the story. But this isn’t the case with a second-or third-person narrator. Such narrators may be emotionally close to the characters, as in a first-person POV, or they may be telling the story from a more remote distance, as if they are standing outside the story’s events, like those broadcasters on TV commenting on the golf match in whispered, reverant tones.

To help you get a sense of your voice options, let’s break voice into several general types. Although these titles aren’t as official as those for POV, placing voices into general types can help you make choices about your voice and also help you tell if a story has drifted from its originally intended route.

CONVERSATIONAL VOICE

Everybody knows somebody whom they don’t have to dress up for, whether this person is a close friend or family member. Just like it sounds, the conversational voice feels a lot like the narrator is having a casual conversation with the reader.

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a prime example:

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth mainly. There was things which he stretched but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary.

Here Twain believably captures the voice of a hillbilly kid, namely Huckleberry Finn. Before Huck appeared on the shelves in 1885, most fiction had an elevated voice, but Twain threw all that away and truly let Huck speak for himself. The result is one of the most nonpretentious and entertaining voices in all literature.

J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye also belongs in this category:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

You can probably guess from these first couple of lines that the voice is that of a personable and often sarcastic teenager. As we find out at the end of the novel, Holden Caulfield has been telling his story to a psychiatrist the whole time, which is exactly how the narrative sounds, as if a real person is speaking his mind.

Another example is Dorothy Parker’s “The Waltz.” Here a woman agrees to dance with a man when she doesn’t want to, and then she starts to think about what she could have said instead of agreeing:

I most certainly will not dance with you, I’ll see you in hell first. Why, thank you, Yd like to awfully, but I’m having labor pains. Oh, yes, do let’s dance together—it’s so nice to meet a man who isn’t a scaredy-cat about catching my beri-beri. No. There was nothing for me to do, but say I’d adore to. Well, we might as well get it over with. All right, Cannonball, let’s run out on the field. You won the toss; you can lead.

Most of the story is made up of this woman’s sarcastic thoughts as she struggles with her dance partner, tearing him to pieces in her mind but every now and then exchanging pleasantries with him out loud.

YOUR TURN:
Take the above passage from Dorothy Parker’s “The Waltz.” Rewrite and expand it using the third-person objective point of view. Remember, in the objective POV you don’t enter the minds of characters. You simply show the action, as it’s been recorded by a journalist. In fact, keep the writing very dry and factual, distant from the actual emotions of the woman. But strive to convey the woman’s thoughts solely through her actions and, if you desire, dialogue. Then compare your version with Parker’s, noting how the same event can be told with very diverse voices.

The conversational voice is almost always in the first person and it usually employs colloquial speech patterns and slang. So a conversational voice would opt for See, this woman’s following me, like she has for the past two whole weeks rather than Two weeks ago, a woman started following me, and I saw her again behind me today.

The great thing about this voice is that you can let your first-person narrators go full throttle with their personalities. And they can pretty much tell the reader anything. Which can also be the downside. If you’re not careful, it may sound like your narrator is blabbing out all her intimate details for no good reason.

INFORMAL VOICE

You can dress down, but at least tuck in that shirt. Informal voice is a fairly broad category that’s not as casual as the conversational voice, but it also doesn’t quite have the dressed-up feel of the more formal voices.

Take Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” for example:

I remembered having read somewhere that the blind didn’t smoke because, as speculation had it, they couldn’t see the smoke they exhaled. I thought I knew that much and that much only about blind people. But this blind man smoked his cigarette down to the nubbin and then lit another one.

See how this first-person narrator isn’t as chatty or colloquial as the conversational narrators, but at the same time, he’s an average sort of guy who drinks, smokes pot, and thinks he knows only one thing about blind people before a blind friend of his wife’s comes to visit.

Another example in the first person is John Cheever’s “Goodbye, My Brother”:

I don’t think about the family much, but when I remember its members and the coast where they lived and the sea salt that I think is in our blood, I am happy to recall that I am a Pommeroy—that I have the nose, the coloring, and the promise of longevity—and that while we are not a distinguished family, we enjoy the illusion, when we are together, that the Pommeroys are unique.

The secondary-school teacher who narrates this piece strikes a balance between the “blue-blooded” roots of his family and the openness of revealing the family’s problems. The informal voice allows this line to be walked.

In the informal voice, the narrator uses casual, everyday language but isn’t as personality-heavy as the conversational. But, as you can see in the difference between the Carver and Cheever examples, there’s a lot of leeway in what can make up casual language for different narrators.

This informality can also come through with a third-person narrator. Check out how Amy Bloom’s “Song of Solomon” has a similar voice to the Carver story:

Sarah had stopped sucking a little sooner than usual, and Kate was so grateful she sang to her all the way through burping. Everything went smoothly; little Sarah, stoned from nursing, was completely content to lie in her crib and murmur to the world. Kate dressed like a surgeon prepping, precise and careful in every movement. She checked her watch again. Twenty-five minutes to get to the temple.

Though the narrator isn’t a character, the voice sounds rather like that of a real person, someone we might know relating a story to us in their living room. And Bloom’s relatively close third-person narrator conveys Kate’s slightly nervous actions and thoughts, but isn’t so close to Kate as not to convey a sense of the child’s serenity. A first-person narrator would not have maintained quite as much balance between the emotions of Kate and the baby.

Let’s return to an example that appeared in chapter 4, from “Earth to Molly” by Elizabeth Tallent. Here you’ll see an informal third-person narrator who inches very close, emotionally, to the POV character:

Molly was sorry for having needed her to climb the stairs, but of course the old woman complained her stiff-legged way up them all the time, showing lodgers to their rooms. Why, oh why, would anyone spend the night here? A prickly gray carpet ran tightly from wall to wall. It was the color of static, and seemed as hateful.

Here the voice of the third-person narrator sounds pretty similar to the voice Molly might use if she were telling this story herself in the first person. If you use a third-person informal narrator, you’ll usually want to make this narrator somewhat close, or very close, to the emotions of the POV characters. Otherwise your readers will feel like someone’s just told them to make themselves at home in a living room packed with priceless antiques.

The main advantage of the informal voice is that it’s middle of the road. If you’re working in the first person but don’t want the narrator’s voice to dominate the story, this is a good pick. It’s also a good pick if you’re working in the third or second person but don’t want to sound too much like a “writer.” Actually, it’s hard to go wrong with the informal voice, and for this reason it’s probably the most commonly used voice in contemporary fiction.

FORMAL VOICE

Even the word formal makes me think of some boarding-school prom night with a row of girls in strapless heels and boys in navy suits, but in practice, the formal voice doesn’t have to be awkward at all.

In the old days most all fiction leaned toward the formal, as in this example from Leo Tolstoy’s “Master and Man”:

Suddenly a weird, startling cry sounded in his very ears, and everything beneath him seemed to heave and tremble. He clutched the horse’s mane, yet found that that too was quivering, while the cry grew ever more and more piercing.

As you can see, the formal voice doesn’t have the same chattiness or spoken-story qualities of the conversational or informal, often conveying, instead, a certain detachment from the characters. In this passage, even though the man is panicked and on the edge of death from freezing, the third-person narrator stays fairly observational. You’ll see what I mean if you compare how close you feel to this narrator’s emotions with those of Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield.

This kind of dressed-up style can work in contemporary fiction too. If you’re working on an epic story that, say, covers multiple generations, a number of locations, and a large cast of characters, the formal voice is a good bet because it lends itself to the story’s “big screen” sweep.

Look at the opening to Gabriel Garcia Màrquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

As the novel moves back and forth over a century of one family’s development, strange, detailed, and beautiful descriptions of Macondo village put the reader in the setting, rather than sticking us with a single character. Which is a good thing because Màrquez ends up using more than twenty major characters. And the formal voice gives the book the depth and importance of a historical (albeit fanciful) chronicle.

The formal voice is perhaps most commonly found in the third-person POV, but it’s not restricted to this. It can work with the first person as long as the first-person narrator has a formal enough personality.

For example, Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, is the son of the owner of a luxury hotel on the French Riviera. Early in the novel, we discover that Humbert attended a good English school and later became a literature scholar. So it’s certainly fitting that he speaks in a formal tone, to the point of pretentiousness:

And less than six inches from me and my burning life, was nebulous Lolita! After a long stirless vigil, my tentacles moved towards her again, and this time the creak of the mattress did not awake her. I managed to bring my ravenous bulk so close to her that I felt the aura of her bare shoulder like a warm breath upon my cheek.

Very few people actually sound like this, but Humbert Humbert happens to be one of the people who does.

Another example is the voice of Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Nick is also well educated enough to pull off the formal voice. Here he is describing his first glimpse of Jay Gatsby:

The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.

It’s worth noting that Nick’s observations are distant enough that he sounds more like the writer than a distinctive character, and this could almost be switched into the third person. But then we would lose the sense of Nick as a witness to the story’s events.

Go for the formal voice if you want a certain high style in your prose, but make sure you’re not just trying to sound like a writer and, if you’re using this voice for a first-person narrator, make sure it’s someone more likely to write with a Montblanc pen than a chewed-up pencil.

YOUR TURN:
Two cars collide at an intersection. Write a brief passage describing this event from the POV of a teenager, then again from the POV of a socialite, then again from the POV of a cowboy type. You decide how these characters were involved in the collision. In all cases, let the character be a first-person narrator. So pick the voice type—conversational, informal, or formal—that seems most appropriate for your narrator. Conversational may work well for the teenager, but then that depends on your teenager, doesn’t it? Whatever you come up with, each passage should sound different from the others because these are three very different characters.

CEREMONIAL VOICE

You’ll have to get your tux out of storage if you want to be the master of ceremonial. A good way to get into the mind-set of this voice is to imagine you’re old Abe Lincoln about to give “The Gettysburg Address”: “Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers …”

You wouldn’t think that ceremonial voice would come into play very much in fiction, but many writers have used it to great effect. Take this passage from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist:

Oliver Twist’s ninth birthday found him a pale thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature, and decidedly small in circumference. But nature or inheritance had implanted a good sturdy spirit in Oliver’s breast: it had had plenty of room to expand, thanks to the spare diet of the establishment; and perhaps to this circumstance may be attributed his having any ninth birthday at all.

Look at how detached this narrator is. Basically, Oliver’s starving and abused, and the only thing that’s kept him alive up to his ninth birthday is his spirit, but the narrator’s far enough from the boy’s suffering to be half-joking about how empty his stomach is. But perhaps this kind of mocking ceremonial is what allows the reader to absorb Oliver’s painful, bleak story over the course of the novel’s four-hundred-plus pages.

At the same time, the following passage from Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha, a novella about a black woman’s life in Bridgeport, Connecticut, around the turn of the twentieth century, shows a different side of ceremonial:

Melanctha Herbert was always losing what she had in wanting all the things she saw. Melanctha was always being left when she was not leaving others.

Melanctha Herbert always loved too hard and much too often. She was always full with mystery and subtle movements and denials and vague distrusts and complicated disillusions. Then Melanctha would be sudden and impulsive and unbounded in some faith, and then she would suffer and be strong in her repression.

Melanctha Herbert was always seeking rest and quiet, and always she could only find new ways to be in trouble.

Stein creates an almost biblical rhythm through the repetitious language and the odd sentence phrasing. By using a ceremonial voice, the narrator elevates Melanctha Herbert’s life nearly to the level of a prophet, and her struggles suddenly don’t appear to the reader as worthless or squalid in this light.

Just as conversational is hardly ever in the third person, it’s also quite rare to find a first-person ceremonial narrator. The advantage of the ceremonial voice is that it slows the reader down, giving a great sense of occasion and importance to the story. The disadvantage is that it can seem stilted and suppress the story’s energy.

OTHER VOICES

Once again, let me say that these voice types are just arbitrary terms to help you get a sense of the options and to help you stay on track. Really, the voice of a story can take on any conceivable “sound” as long as you have a reason for it. Literature is filled with unusual voices that don’t fit anywhere on my clothesline of types.

Take, for instance, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary:

TUESDAY 3 JANUARY

130 lbs. (terrifying slide into obesity—why? why?), alcohol units 6 (excellent), cigarettes 23 (v.g.), calories 2472. 9 a.m. Ugh. Cannot face thought of going to work. Only thing which makes it tolerable is thought of seeing Daniel again, but even that is inadvisable since am fat, have spot on chin, and desire only to sit on cushion eating chocolate and watching Xmas specials.

The unique voice here comes from the fact that the whole book is written as a diary, the diary of a contemporary, smart, and somewhat neurotic thirty-something woman. It’s very casual and often quite embarrassing, as you would expect from a diary.

A voice can become lyrical to the point of sounding a lot like pure poetry. Listen to the narrator of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

Here the narrator is a soul-searching, usually inebriated beatnik (with a beatnik’s bent for the poetic). You can almost see this guy stumbling and rambling drunkenly down the street.

Such poetry can stretch even further into stream of consciouness, where the writer attempts to portray a character’s thoughts in the random manner in which they play through the human mind. The final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses consists of a forty-five-page sentence that careens through the mind of Molly Bloom. To save paper, I’ll just show the end of it:

. . .he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

No, those aren’t typos in there. Remember, there is no editor in the deeper recesses of the psyche.

Is this getting weird enough? We can perhaps get even weirder. Take a gander at this from Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange:

The chelloveck sitting next to me, there being this long big plushy seat that ran round three walls, was well away with his glazzies glazed and sort of burbling slovos like “Aristotle wishy washy works outoing cyclamen get forficulate smartish.”

Huh? What? Relax, you’re not going crazy. This novel is set in the future and the writer has created a whole new vocabulary (a mix of hallucinogenic and Slavic) to suit the time and the personality of the narrator.

YOUR TURN:
Return to something you have written, perhaps from a previous exercise. Rewrite a portion of it using a different voice. You may do something simple, like shifting from formal to informal. Or you might want to try something fun, like using a voice reminiscent of, say, a film noir detective story or a fairy tale. Or you may go for stream of consciousness. To accommodate the new voice, you might end up using a different POV. Look for a voice that will shed an interesting light on your story.

STYLE

You’ve seen a number of authors parading before you and you’ve checked out their checks, plaids, and stripes. Now it’s time to hit the sweatshop floor and see just how these voice-suits are put together.

People often use the terms voice and style interchangeably, but there’s an enormous difference from the writer’s perspective. Style consists of various technical choices made by a writer, and the voice is the sum result of those choices. If voice is the velvet dress, style is the fabrics, threads, buttons, and such that create the garment.

The dirty truth is that a piece’s voice is created by the most elemental tools in writing—namely, what words you pick, how you string them together in a sentence, and how you mix and match your sentences to form paragraphs. Hemingway used short sentences. Short sentences and repetition. Dorothy Parker liked to throw around the slang, know what I mean. Nabokov favored amplitudinous words. Though these things may seem very technical, you’ll see just how closely stylistic choices relate to the personality of the narrator and the story’s content. So let’s take a look at how to use these very handy tools of style.

WORDS

To see how deeply word choice, often known as diction, affects voice, consider the following two examples that both deal with a first-person narrator musing on sleep. First up is Haruki Murakami’s “Sleep”:

All I wanted was to throw myself down and sleep. But I couldn’t The wakefulness was always there beside me. I could feel its chilling shadow. It was the shadow of myself. Weird, I would think as the drowsiness overtook me, I’m in my own shadow. I would walk and eat and talk to people inside my drowsiness …

Here, Murakami has used an informal voice for this man who’s remembering his casual life at university. Murakami opts for everyday one-or two-syllable words, except for wakefulness and drowsiness, for which there aren’t any options with fewer syllables. And I’ll take these two words as random examples of how nearly everything in this quote is informal: imagine if he had switched wakefulness and drowsiness for insomnia and lassitude—these new choices would have shoved the narration right out of the informal voice and into something more formal for no apparent reason.

Look at the passage again, and watch how every word is short, to the point, and fits with a certain kind of jerky insomnia. You can feel how the narrator’s movements are quick and even stunted from his lack of sleep through his simple words. Weird pops out as an almost conversational word, and the slight jump in voice adds to the jittery quality of the prose.

Now compare this with the opening to John Updike’s “Falling Asleep Up North”:

Falling asleep has never struck me as a very natural thing to do. There is a surreal trickiness to traversing that inbetween area, when the grip of consciousness is slipping but has not quite let go and curious mutated thoughts pass as normal cogitation unless snapped into clear light by a creaking door, one’s bed partner twitching, or the prematurely jubilant realization, I’m falling asleep. The little fumbling larvae of nonsense that precede dreams’ uninhibited butterflies are disastrously exposed to a light they cannot survive, and one must begin again, relaxing the mind into unravelling.

Throw a dart into that paragraph and chances are you’ll hit a three-syllable word. This narrator uses the formal voice, marking him as a different type of person from the one in the previous example. Such words as traversing, cogitation, and larvae would feel out of place in the Murakami piece, but they feel quite natural here.

The words also help to show how the insomnia of Murakami’s narrator is different from that of the Updike narrator; the former is much more zombie-esque in the way he stumbles about, having no energy to sound impressive, while the narrator in the Updike story is concentrating wholly on the act of falling asleep, and all the fancy words and modifiers help to show his obsessive personality.

Choosing the right words basically boils down to this: know your narrator and what sorts of words this person is inclined to use and make sure your word choices are working with the general type of voice that you have chosen. But don’t worry about it too much as you’re writing away. You can always go back and take out any incongruous fellas that sneak in.

SENTENCES

Words alone don’t create the voice; how they’re thrown together into a sentence is what really gives writing its flow. I’ll tell you something surprising: how you place words in a sentence is the most important stylistic choice you’ll make.

A sentence is just a new thought, although that can mean anything from a one-word fragment sentence to a twisting, Route 66 of a sentence. And then within any given sentence there are a thousand things that can happen. But your choices with sentences come down to two basic things: sentence length, and the structure of the sentence, which is often called syntax.

Let’s check out the difference between how Hemingway and Fitzgerald handled sentences. These two contemporary writers are both credited as being voices for the Lost Generation of Americans in the years shortly after World War I. Both Hemingway’s novel-in-stories, In Our Time, and Fitzgerald’s short story “May Day” focus on the end of the war and how it affected individuals and society as a whole.

Here’s the opening of Fitzgerald’s “May Day”:

There had been a war fought and won and the great city of the conquering people was crossed with triumphal arches and vivid with thrown flowers of white, red, and rose. All through the long spring days the returning soldiers marched up the chief highway behind the strump of drums and the joyous, resonant wind of the brasses, while merchants and clerks left their bickerings and figurings and, crowding to the windows, turned their white-bunched faces gravely upon the passing battalions.

These long, grandiose sentences almost give the writing a mythic quality. Fitzgerald’s third-person narrator picks up right after the war’s end on the night of May 1, in the midst of the victory festivities. He uses an expansive writing style as his narrator hops among the celebrations and sufferings of multiple main characters—an expansive voice precisely because “May Day” is a mini-epic, a collage encompassing half a dozen of the thousands of stories packed into ten blocks in New York City on a given night. The long sentences reflect the mythic quality of the occasion and the busyness of the festivities.

The sentences are also long because Fitzgerald loads them with plenty of adjectives. (Clearly, Fitzgerald did not agree with Henry David Thoreau’s famous advice to writers: “As to adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.” Either that or Fitzgerald didn’t have any doubts.) For his narrator he has chosen a florid language to match all the flowers and parades, and you can feel the mood of this great city through the modifiers he’s chosen, such as conquering, triumphal, and joyous, resonant wind of the brasses. And he has used a somewhat complex sentence structure to accommodate all the pomp.

Now contrast this with Hemingway’s description of soldiers marching under the spell of a different kind of happiness:

Everybody was drunk. The whole battery was drunk going along the road in the dark … We went along the road all night in the dark and the adjutant kept riding up alongside my kitchen and saying, “You must put it out. It is dangerous. It will be observed.” We were fifty kilometers from the front but the adjutant worried about the fire in my kitchen. It was funny going along that road. That was when I was a kitchen corporal.

First, you’ll notice shorter sentences. In roughly the same amount of space, Fitzgerald uses two sentences and Hemingway uses eight. Admittedly, this is partially just a stylistic difference between the two writers, but it’s also shaped by the differences in these two pieces. Hemingway’s first-person narrator, Nick, fights in World War I and then travels around aimlessly after the war—shell-shocked and withdrawn from the company of other human beings, finding solace only in the natural world. No wonder his sentences are short and spare.

There also isn’t a single adverb, and you can count the adjectives on one hand. Hemingway’s narrator keeps all of his sentences simple—simple structure and simple words, from the adjectives—drunk, whole, funny—to the verbs—was, went, kept, put.

Whether you lean toward short or long sentences as a rule, you always want to make sure that you vary your sentence lengths once in a while. If all your sentences are exactly the same length, your reader will get bored pretty quickly, just as you would if you were talking to someone who said:

I went to the store and bought some milk. I saw a man I knew in aisle 4. We spoke about the price of figs and fish.

Even if the next sentence is a real eye-opener, like I wondered about his two-headed child, the reader may skim right over it because the unchanging length has lulled her into a kind of reading trance.

Which brings us to the question of rhythm. Working together, sentence length and syntax often create a rhythm, and you can manipulate this rhythm to great effect. Look at this passage from Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea:

The shark’s head was out of the water and his back was coming out and the old man could hear the noise of skin and flesh ripping on the big fish when he rammed the harpoon down onto the shark’s head at a spot where the line between his eyes intersected with the line that ran straight back from his nose. There were no such lines. There was only the heavy sharp blue head and the big eyes and the clicking, thrusting all-swallowing jaws.

Here Ernest went for an especially long sentence, and a bucket-load of adjectives. Both the length of that long sentence and the structure of it, piling one thing on top of another, give a rhythm that reflects the confusion and action of this struggle between man and fish. Also notice how well Hemingway mixes up his sentence lengths, following the long sentence with a short and then a medium sentence.

Let’s look at a passage from James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” This story is narrated by a schoolteacher whose brother, Sonny, is a jazz musician who struggles with heroin addiction and goes to prison for a short time. At the end of the story, the narrator goes to watch Sonny play his first jazz gig after he’s been released from prison, and for five beautiful pages, Baldwin ushers the reader into the jazz bar and Sonny’s blues:

Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.

Baldwin plays with rhythm throughout this passage, using longer and shorter sentences with a lot of strategic word repetitions. Not only that, but the narrator enhances the sentence rhythms by manipulating the sound of the words.

See how alliteration affects this sentence, letting the reader practically hear Sonny’s breath coming faster as he works the music:

Sonny’s Fingers Filled the air with life, his life.

And check out this sentence that comes later:

I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his …

Notice how the words sound like a pair of brushes sweeping the snare drum. At first, the words begin with soft letters—s, t, h, w—until we get to the harder 6 in burning and the ds in had and made. Then comes the second half of the sentence:

… with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting.

Here it seems the drum is being tapped. The b and d sounds repeat in the next phrase, except that the b and d come sooner, and then we get the drawn-out sound of yet followed by the hard k sound in make and could.

Okay, all right, maybe this is a bit much, but you can see how there’s a rhythmic quality to Baldwin’s sentences that matches the jazz club and, more importantly, the narrator’s respect for Sonny’s struggle and his music.

PARAGRAPHS

The length of your paragraphs also has a big influence on voice. As with sentences, you want to vary the length of your paragraphs to prevent a sense of stagnation or predictability. But beyond that, you can manipulate the feel of your voice by leaning toward long, winding paragraphs or short, snappy ones or somewhere in between.

Generally a new paragraph signals a shift in thought, either major or minor, or a jump in time or space. But there is a lot of room for interpretation on when you want to make these paragraph shifts. Some writers may cram a bunch of thought shifts into a single paragraph while other writers may separate each thought in a new paragraph. Similarly, you could move freely through time and space in a single paragraph or use a new one for each shift.

You can see what I mean in the first paragraph of Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Fine Mist of Winter.” Right off the bat, the author has made clear decisions about the paragraph (and sentence) lengths that set up the voice for the whole piece:

Some time ago in Eden County the sheriffs best deputy, Rafe Murray, entered what he declared to the sheriff, and to his own wife and man-grown sons, and to every person he encountered for a month, white or black, to be his second period—his new period, he would say queerly, sucking at his upper lip with a series of short, damp, deliberate noises. He was thirty-eight when he had the trouble with Bethl’em Aire, he would say, thirty-eight and with three man-grown sons behind him; but he had had his eyes opened only on that day; he was born on that day; he meant to keep it fresh in his mind. When the long winter finally ended and the roads were thick and shapeless with mud, shot with sunlight, the Negro Bethl’em and his memory had both disappeared from Eden County, and—to everyone’s relief, especially his wife’s—from Murray’s mind too. But up until then, in those thick, gray, mist-choked days, he did keep what had happened fresh in his mind; memories of the fine driving snow that fell on that particular day, and of his great experience, seemed to recur again and again in his thoughts.

This paragraph containing several thought shifts and one time shift could easily have been broken into two or more paragraphs. Throughout the story, the twisting, rambling voice (shown often with long paragraphs) contrasts with the simple life that the people of Eden County enjoy (shown with dialogue and humdrum actions). Oates has also made a decision regarding time throughout the piece in the first paragraph by not splitting the previous winter and the current springtime into two separate paragraphs. You can sense that time’s a bit fluid in this piece because even as Murray has forgotten the day that began his second period, the narrator hasn’t—and the narrator makes sure to circle back to it.

At the other extreme, you shouldn’t be afraid of using short or even one-line paragraphs.

For example, the main characters in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things are a twin sister and brother who are so close that one can recall the other’s dreams. But as children, they become separated. Have a look at how the short paragraphs (and sentences) work soon after brother and sister are reunited as adults:

But what was there to say?

From where he sat, at the end of the bed, Estha, without turning his head, could see her. Faintly outlined. The sharp line of her jaw. Her collarbones like wings that spread from the base of her throat to the ends of her shoulders. A bird held down by skin.

She turned her head and looked at him. He sat very straight. Waiting for the inspection. He had finished the ironing.

She was lovely to him. Her hair. Her cheeks. Her small, clever-looking hands.

His sister.

You can feel the push and pull of the siblings’ intimacy and awkwardness simply through the spaces between the paragraphs. Then the last paragraph—containing only two words—stands out dramatically, as if it were a tear on his cheek and yet not so melodramatic.

These short paragraphs have a dramatic feel to them. Contrast the punch each one carries with the descriptive winding of the earlier Oates example. In each piece, the general paragraph lengths are largely determining the quality of the voice’s energy. Oates gives a circuitous discussion, while Roy is blunt to the point of being brutal.

Another use of paragraph breaks is to separate narration from dialogue.

This shifting between narration and dialogue also offers an interesting energy to a story’s voice because the narration and dialogue often have different levels of language from each other. Either the language of the narration is more formal than the dialogue or vice versa.

Take Virginia Woolf’s story “Kew Gardens.” In the following passage, you can see how a simple, nearly laughable conversation between a young woman and man in love can be turned into an interchange of great (and almost lewd) importance:

“Lucky it isn’t Friday,” he observed.

“Why? D’you believe in luck?”

“They make you pay sixpence on Friday.”

“What’s sixpence anyway? Isn’t it worth sixpence?”

“What’s ‘it’—what do you mean by ‘it’?”

“O, anything—I mean—you know what I mean.”

Long pauses came between each of these remarks; they were uttered in toneless and monotonous voices. The couple stood still on the edge of the flower-bed, and together pressed the end of her parasol deep down into the soft earth. The action and the fact that his hand rested on the top of hers expressed their feelings in a strange way, as these short insignificant words also expressed something, words with short wings for their heavy body of meaning, inadequate to carry them far and thus alighting awkwardly upon the very common objects that surrounded them, and were to their inexperienced touch so massive; but who knows (so they thought as they pressed the parasol into the earth) what precipices aren’t concealed in them, or what slopes of ice don’t shine in the sun on the other side?

Who knew you could get so much out of pushing an umbrella into the earth and a simple conversation about a park entrance fee? And the beauty of the story is that it’s all like this—spare conversations are reinvented by the narrator as deep connections are made between different pairs of people. The dynamic tension between what’s actually said and the narrator’s elegant interpretation continuously gives off interesting sparks.

YOUR TURN:
Find an annoyingly dry and difficult piece of writing, preferably a legal document or a manual for some kind of appliance or equipment. Then rewrite the piece, turning the writing around 180 degrees, making it ecstatically poetic or down-home friendly or anything else you like. Use the third person. But employ drastically different words and sentences and paragraphs than found in the original document. You’ll begin to see the profound effect of stylistic choices. And you will certainly provide a more entertaining document than the original.

CONSISTENCY

In addition to being determined from words, sentences, and paragraphs, voice is a result of every type of choice made in a work of fiction, sticking its dexterous fingers in every slice of the larger craft-element pie. Is there a lot of description or are there just a few telling details? Is the language filled with imagery and poetic devices or is it straightforward? Are the characters described from their hair to their shoes, or is a lot left to the reader’s imagination? How many characters are there, a multitude or a few? Does the story have a plot with tight curves, or does the plot seem to be almost meandering? What’s the balance of dialogue and narrative?

It’s important that all of these elements coalesce into a unified voice. The key is consistency. As with POV, you make an unwritten agreement with the reader about how the general voice of the piece is going to sound. Readers like the sense that someone is telling them a story and they want the same storyteller to be there at all times, unless you are using a multiple-vision POV. If the narrator seems to change unwittingly from Uncle Remus to Ishmael in the middle of the tale, the reader will become confused, and, worse, the reader will stop believing any of it.

Unless … you purposely take a leap away from the original voice to achieve a certain effect. The narrator won’t necessarily change to another narrator, but he may change his voice to suit the moment. A great example of this is found in J. D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” The story begins with the following satirical voice:

There were ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel, and, the way they were monopolizing the long-distance lines, the girl in 507 had to wait from noon till almost two-thirty to get her call through. She used the time, though. She read an article in a women’s pocket-size magazine, called “Sex Is Fun—or Hell.”

This woman, you discover, is the fiancee of the main character, Seymour Glass. Most of the story focuses on Seymour as he jokes around with a little girl that he runs into on the beach. The voice continues in the same witty vein as the beginning until the narrator starts to walk back to the hotel. At that point, Seymour changes, moving into a much less humorous frame of mind, and the third-person narrator makes the shift with him. Check out how different the voice has become once Seymour comes into the hotel room:

He glanced at the girl lying asleep on one of the twin beds. Then he went over to one of the pieces of luggage, opened it, and from under a pile of shorts and undershirts he took out an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic. He released the magazine, looked at it, then reinserted it. He cocked the piece. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple.

The quick turn in the voice shocks the reader, and works with the action.

FINDING YOUR VOICE

Salinger, ceremonial, Parker, Hemingway, Murakami, chellovecks—all these voice choices are probably about to melt your brain. But don’t get all discombobulated. The biggest key to voice is not worrying about it.

Bad style often comes when a writer is trying too hard to imitate the style of other writers. You can and should admire and study the works of other writers, but if you find yourself writing in the voice of Charles Dickens or John Cheever or Toni Morrison, you’re in danger of sounding like one of those phonies that Holden Caulfìeld fears so much. Those folks aren’t you and their narrators aren’t your narrators. If you have to go through a Hemingway phase for a while, fine, do it, but don’t stay there too long.

Your own natural voice will come from regular writing practice, whether it’s in writing stories or writing in your journal or doing the exercises in this book. The more you write, the more your own voice will emerge because you’ll grow more confident and you won’t continuously pause to edit every word.

YOUR TURN:
Write a letter to someone you know well. Not a short e-mail note but a longish letter where you really talk about something. Don’t worry about voice or style or anything else. Just write the letter. Then … when you’re done, analyze the voice and style of the letter. Chances are it will be a good reflection of your natural voice, which may be similar to a storytelling voice you choose to use in your fiction. If you’re so inclined, go ahead and send the letter. If you get a response, you can analyze that person’s voice.

You can also find the voice of a story by listening to the story’s narrator. If you’re using a first-person narrator, look at all the choices you have made about that character and get a sense for how this person would tell his or her story, whether the character’s illiterate, like Huck, or pretentious, like Humbert. If you’re working with a third-person narrator, figure out what this narrator should sound like by tailoring the voice to the characters, story, POV choice, setting, and how intimate your narrator is with both the reader and what’s happening in the story. Of course, if you’ve chosen a multiple-vision POV, you may have to juggle more than one narrative voice.

But again, don’t let the details hold you back. If you have a plot or character burning in your mind but you’re agonizing about the voice for the piece, stop worrying and just write the story.

When you’ve finished a first draft, then you can think about the voice a bit more. Go back and check to see if the voice wavers in its general level of personality and formality. Pay attention to the way your words, sentences, and paragraphs are contributing to, or detracting from, the voice. If the voice sounds terribly unnatural or ill-suited to the story, try changing it to something that’s more familiar to you or something in which your story fits more comfortably. Just as you should experiment with different POVs for a story, it’s not a bad idea to do the same with voice.

At some point, you may get bolder about modifying the style to fit the story—you might, say, adopt longer sentences for a story about an obsessive person, or shorter, curt sentences for a story about an unemotional parent. You might pay closer attention to when a switch in style matches the specifics of a particular moment. For example, you might change the style of a piece to accentuate a moment of tension, as in the earlier passage from The Old Man and the Sea.

On the other hand, you can allow voice to guide you at the outset. If you’re starting a piece but no plot or subject comes to mind, start writing from the perspective of someone who has a very distinctive way of speaking and thinking, and see where that voice will take you.

Last of all, you should always test your voice with a real voice. After a draft or two, you should read the whole piece from start to finish aloud, letting your actual speaking voice merge with the voice of the writing. See if the sound of the piece fits with the voice you wanted. Perhaps you could persuade someone to read the story aloud to you so you can simply listen to the voice. Either way, you should mark down places where the voice feels particularly natural and where it feels strained. Soon enough, you’ll be able to spot the voice hiccups right away and wash them away with a glass of water.