Voice: Vocal Cords and Chords

While vocal cords don’t literally deliver voice in fiction, they do symbolize the mechanism that lets what’s inside strike a chord with reader needs, beliefs, and expectations.

Chords—three or more harmonious notes heard as one—can impart pleasing complexity. Writers who can alternate between funny, poetic, and insightful often entertain more than those who only offer one thing.  A wide range adds complexity, as does leaving plenty of room for reader chords: for what their inference and imagination can add.

No finite boundary exists between your voice and what readers absorb, because no one approaches a novel without expectations and preconceptions.  This is so subtle that you can lose sight of the reader while writing.

Novels aren’t just author, narrator, characters. Readers participate, because each of them differs in optimism, vocabulary, tolerance for ambiguity, fondness for digression, loathing of short or long sentences, and so on. In Every Day, David Levithan reminds us that “The sound of the words as they’re said is always different from the sound they make when they’re heard, because the speaker hears some of the sound from the inside.”

Of course you need your gut to tell you what matters. But that’s not the whole story. Unless you’re journaling, your concern with reader response matters at least as much.

Tip: “Who Are You Writing For?” isn’t the main question. It’s the only one.

You can focus more on your readers by reading aloud or considering these questions:

~ Does a fondness for tautness or rhythm interfere with the accessibility of the prose?

Making syntax more important than the reader is self-indulgent.

~ Do you use the concept of “voice” to rationalize long-winded or awkward passages?

Making syntax more important than the reader is self-indulgent.

~ Do you provide the details that readers need—when they need them?

            Readers want details to serve the story rather than the author.

~ Do you use your fiction primarily to instruct or persuade?

            Learning along the way is great, but readers choose novels for pleasure.

~ Do you use your own emotions to deepen those of your characters or to grind axes?

            Writing fiction can be therapeutic, but that’s not its main purpose.

W.H. Auden put it really well: “All I have is a voice.” Indeed. But that voice is not only for self-expression but for reaching, touching, and perhaps transforming others. After all, as Zora Neale Hurston put it, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” Unless your readers “hear” you, that’s a lot like silence.

Beauty and the Written Word

People rarely compare novels or the sentences composing them to sonnets or cathedrals, to sculpture or symphonies. Yet the artistry is parallel—meticulous engineering that results in capacity to mesmerize. Great plots amaze: A woman proves her loyalty by each night unraveling the tapestry she’ll reweave the next day; a man dooms ship and crew because he confuses the death of a white whale with justice; a boy travels down the Mississippi fleeing “sivilization” and finds it in a runaway’s heart, or a girl discovers how many kinds of mockingbirds exist and why they deserve protection.

What makes these plots gorgeous? For a start, each says something not just important, but profoundly so—about who people are and who they might become. Each plot synthesizes behavior and thought, proving its hypothesis with events both probable and essential—each incident leading inevitably to the climax. That has the haunting power of a symphony, no?

Novels depend on plot. But the best novels contain sentences rivaling the magnificence of scenario, scene, or theme. Here’s a tiny sample.

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.”  -- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“All he knew, really, was digging.  He dug to eat, to breathe, to live and sleep.  He dug because the earth was there beneath his feet, and men paid him to move it.  He dug because it was a sacrament, because it was honorable and holy.” -- T. Coraghessan Boyle, “The Underground Gardens”

“The aspects of his life not related to grilling now seemed like mere blips of extraneity between the poundingly recurrent moments when he ignited the mesquite and paced the deck, avoiding smoke. Shutting his eyes, he saw twisted boogers of browning meats on a grille of chrome and hellish coals. The eternal broiling, broiling of the damned.” --Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

How do you start producing increasingly beautiful sentences?

• Know what you want to say—something original. Important. Yours alone.
• Listen for rhythm—in everything you read or hear. It begins with noticing.
• Explore all five senses, and “explore” never means the first thing that leaps to mind.
• Replace vague, distancing constructions like “There were” and “It is.” Tighten up. Get close.
• Take risks. But take them thoughtfully.
• Never rationalize the weaknesses you pretend not to notice in your prose. Ever.

 Tip: Aspire to beauty. You’ll never let your readers down.