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understanding the concept of Voice in fiction

What is this thing called Voice?

What is it?

The elusive concept of Voice is one of the most difficult aspects of the craft of writing to explain in words. Like persona in Jungian psychology, it is more easily understood as a metaphor; persona is often explained in terms of actors on the stage hiding behind different masks or personalities. In the same way, there is something mysterious and ineffable about the way writers can suggest different “voices” through their craft. The image of a ventriloquist projecting his voice onto a dummy is, perhaps, suggestive of the mystery and artifice of the concept of voice.

a ventriloquist doll

Definitions of Voice

An academic definition details it as an author’s distinctive literary style, basic vision and general attitude toward the world. This “voice” is revealed through an author’s use of syntax (sentence construction); diction (distinctive vocabulary); punctuation; characterisation and dialogue. (AP English Glossary of Literary Terms)

http://www.oxfordtutorials.com/AP%20Literacy%20Glossary.htm

A more writerly description of voice is “the heard quality of writing”. (Donald Murray, The Craft of Revision, 2001).

The well-known quotation that “writing is the painting of the voice” has been attributed to Voltaire, and is another metaphorical application of the human voice to the written word.

Voice is, thus, the distinct personality of a piece of writing or of a whole text. One way of developing a certain voice is by communicating strong feelings about a subject. Another way is by revealing an authentic, individual, and original personality through the choice of a narrator, characters, and vivid language.

A good example of a clearly “heard” voice is when a writer manages to put his or her personality into the words of a text, creating the sense of a living and breathing person concealed therein. This persona is known as the narrator. (The protagonist is the character the novel is “about”).

First Person Point of View

This is when a character is the narrator of his or her own story, relayed in present tense as it unfolds or in past tense from after the events have transpired. Because of the reliance on a single main character, first-person stories usually require the same type of linear plots as close third-person limited POV.

First Person POV presents the smallest emotional distance between the reader and the main character. Thus, first person is a great choice when the story is more about the inner character arc than it is about the outer plot. It is also the hardest POV to write well because it demands a very strong, compelling voice.

Third Person Omniscient Point of View

This is the classic external narrator POV, in which an abstract and “God-like” persona tells the reader everything that’s happening. The omniscient narrator can relay the thoughts and feelings of all or any of the characters in the narrative. Another name for this is the “fly on the wall” narrator. The omniscient narrator often moves into and out of different characters’ heads, so that the reader may not relate deeply with any one of them.

Third person omniscient is a great choice when you have a complex plot with several main and minor characters, who follow multiple story lines, moving towards a final resolution. It is ideal if your goal is to allow the reader to watch everything unfold, while the characters themselves aren’t aware of what’s going on. It is an excellent choice for certain genres, for example, a plot-driven crime thriller.

Third person omniscient can be emotionally very cold, because it is the most distancing in terms of the reader and the characters. When it’s extreme omniscient, it might seem old-fashioned to the modern reader.

Third Person Limited Close

The main difference with Third Person close is that this POV focuses closely on one main character. In fact, the entire story is narrated from one character’s viewpoint. You, as the writer/narrator, can show what the POV character sees, hears, thinks, believes, and feels. But you can only show those things and nothing more. Showing anything the POV character doesn’t directly experience is out of bounds.

This limited viewpoint gives the POV character and the reader the same information. It thereby closes the emotional distance between them, and is very effective at letting the reader share the character’s experience of the story.

Third Person limited offers a nice balance between a plot-driven story and a character-driven story. It is often a good choice when the outer events of a linear plot are closely tied to the protagonist’s spiritual growth.

Third Person Multiple is similar, but with two or more focus characters.

The Camera Analogy

With 3rd person, a scene might first be described from on high, through a neutral narrator’s voice. Afterwards, the narrator will need to enter the body and mind of the viewpoint character/s, to take on their persona/s, describing what they see, hear, think and smell, as well as how they talk and what they say.

man-with-camera The camera metaphor is perfect for writing third person prose, as it is impossible for machines to have attitudes or to offer up opinions. They can only record what is in front of them. For example, when viewing a wide-angle scene, ordinary camera lenses record only what is in focus. However, the narrator/camera is a magic one that records sounds, smells, tastes and even textures. It can also pick up the thoughts and feelings of the viewpoint characters.

However, keep in mind that variety is important within the context of the whole novel or text. Sometimes, the narrator will choose to launch directly into the action right at the outset, rather than establishing the scene first.

The key to mastering writing in the Third Person is to learn how to control the camera. After setting up the scene, the narrator must move the camera behind his/her eyes, in order to reveal the viewpoint character’s personality. Because it is a magic camera, the narrator and the reader can begin to hear the character’s thoughts, and to suggest the words and the speaking voice of the viewpoint character.

Another meaning of the term under discussion is the recognised Voice developed by a certain author over time. For example, Ernest Hemingway has a very distinctive voice.

My closing comment:

Dear Readers (old-fashioned omniscient voice!), as you can see, voice and point-of-view are closely related. However, that’s not the whole story, is it? Please add any other observations you may have about this elusive concept, in the comments to this post. This is merely an attempt to get my head around the differences between omniscient and more modern POVs, and to understand better, in order to write better.

Yours sincerely
The author

September 23, 2015 0 comment

Writing

Examples of Voice in Fiction

Point of view refers to who sees the action within a story or novel. You can have multiple points of view, so long as shifts from one character to another are adequately marked, by way of punctuation; for example by starting a new paragraph, or a new segment, for a change in point of view. Traditional novels of the nineteenth century were often recounted by an omnipotent narrator, one who saw everything, knew all that was going on and oversaw the voice or voices of the novel in an explicit way. Individual characters’ voices were portrayed mainly via dialogue. This was true of the Russian novels (e.g. The Idiot by Dostoyevsky), often resulting in large works that had a wide focus: social, temporal and spatial, united by the voice of the narrator.

It is not always easy to explain the concept of Voice, and there is a great deal of confusion surrounding this concept. The omnipotent narrator is a dying breed today, and most writers are able to call upon different voices for different creative purposes. In more recent times, the person who tells the story, the narrator, is linked to the question of voice in an often implicit way. It is, perhaps, better to give examples of this.

One good example of a perfect use of Voice, is by Tim Winton in his novel That Eye The Sky. He writes in the first person, vividly depicting the voice of an eleven year old hero, Ort Flack. In doing so, he uses a lot of grammatically incorrect sentences and sentence fragments, just as in dialogue, suggesting the young person’s voice, while at the same time being careful not to overdo the technique:

I don’t sleep that good. Never have. Even when I was little and Mum or Dad put me to bed, I’d lie awake until they’d gone to bed themselves—longer even. It’s lonely in the middle of the night with just you and the sky and the noises of the forest. There’s no one to talk to except that big sky. Sometimes I talk to it. Sounds funny, but I do. Ever since they brought me home from the hospital the time I was so sick, I haven’t slept good….Dad won’t sleep much good when he gets better, that’s for sure. Still, he’s not much of a sleeper anyway. (Penguin, 1986, p.13 )

Grammatical correctness is thus sacrificed, from time to time, for the sake of the voice: “Tegwyn and me are walking.” (p.31); “Mum makes herself a second cup, and me too; makes you feel real grown up, two cups. She looks like she’s gonna say something for a sec…and says nothing. She smiles.” (p.91)

Winton combines several techniques for portraying voice. One of these is his use of colloquial language and special vocabulary, including slang, and another is his use of short abrupt sentences interspersed with longer ones. In this way he manages to produce Ort’s voice, without overdoing any one strategy all of the time.

Another example of an effective use of Voice that I came across recently is in a short story “Dying, Laughing” by Susan Johnson, a writer who has recently returned to live in Brisbane after ten years in London. The story about a young Aussie mother is told in the third person. Kylie is totally out of her depth in disciplining her two young boys; and yet she comes across as a strongly rebellious personality, fighting depression, angry but also capable of nurturing; all shown by way of the narrator’s voice, impersonating someone like Kylie. The story contains aspects of satire, irony, humour and blackness interwoven and held together by the tell-tale voice. As in Winton’s story, the writer intersperses sentence fragments with longer sentences, and uses slang and colloquialisms to add humour and colour:

Children wanted everything! All the time, all at once! If she’d realised what a child was, before she’d accidentally made one, she would have run a mile… Bloody Nixon, born whinger, crying when he came out, starting as he meant to go on. Nixon her first born, skinny and long as a rabbit, crying on the roof. … On the floor, where he usually laid himself, full-length in front of the fridge, to be exact, his mouth open so that you could see the black pit leading into his gullet. Sometimes she wondered what she could stuff in there to stop the sound: honey? Lollies? Her fist? He had the largest pair of tonsils she had ever seen: two fat glistening nubs of flesh decorating either side of his throat, two undulating, pulsing, alien attachments that fascinated her… She knew she didn’t know much about anything, not really, so now she thought about it she wasn’t even sure they were tonsils. (GriffithReview32, p.59)
Susan Johnson’s website bird-tree-singing

January 17, 2015 0 comment