The Form/Content Connection

Unfortunately, a more typical title might be “Form versus Content.” How often teachers and critiquers isolate these components, as in “You have a beautiful voice, but I can’t relate to any of your characters,” or “An outstanding plot, but your sentences are wordy and clumsy.”

Of course there’s some truth in “Sounds good, but what does it mean?” Or “I wish your vocabulary matched the appealing plot twists you offer.”

So to a certain extent, everyone knows what everyone means by dividing fiction into what you say versus how you say it. But pause to reflect on novels you love, the ones you’d reread over and over if you had all the time in the world. Would you really separate what happens from how a talented author captures it? Aren’t form and content interwoven?

Unless an author consistently provides both, one senses something missing, no matter how powerful the voice or plot. To illustrate, most people enjoy gazing at bodies of water, just as those people enjoy light wherever it appears. But the synthesis of light shining on water grips more intensely than water or light alone.

Add two powerful elements, and the whole becomes far more than the sum of its parts. In We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates describes James Baldwin’s prose this way:

Baldwin’s beauty—like all real beauty—is not style apart from substance but indivisible from it. It is not the icing on the cake but the eggs within it, giving it texture, color and shape.

 And here are two examples of that beauty:

Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

and 

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

If language and idea are inseparable, where would you start synthesizing?

~ Probe your novel’s structure deeply.

The more familiar with your plot and characters then the more nuanced both become.

~ Don’t get stuck in synonyms.

Sure it’s fun to substitute “crimson” for “scarlet.” But maybe a more useful task is finding the perfect word to transport readers where you want them to go.

~ Visualize the scene.

Incorporate your other four senses, as well. You’ll not only write a better scene but discover the words to convey it.

~ Fix every mediocre sentence.

Whenever you revise the words, you’re not just smoothing but envisioning more deeply.

Tip: Use style to enrich content—and vice versa.

The Novelist’s Vocal Chords

As D.W. Wilson noted in The White Review,

Voice is not talking. In fact that makes no sense – the written word being an inherently silent medium. We say we like the sound of a writer’s voice, but this is purely metaphorical, this is hand-waving, this is gross simplification of the highest order. What we actually like is some analogue of sound in a writer’s voice, some approximation of how the voice-as-written represents the voice-as-spoken.

Voice in fiction is so elusive that it’s as difficult to define as to release. But every novelist must grapple with it, because “if you like the person telling you the story—which is to say the voice, not the author—you generally will let them tell you a story” (Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic).

 Like sinful chocolate or cheese, satisfying complex voice teases and fulfills, begins as one flavor and ends with another. That can’t happen with a simplistic taste or sound. Instead, it’s an immersion in sensation: the result seems as original as it is familiar.

The source of this rich stuff is a combination of elements: innovation plus tradition, inventive plus archetypal, subjective and socio-political, and not just dramatic or poetic or side-splittingly hilarious, but the magic of seamlessly interweaving those.

Thaisa Frank and Dorothy Wall call their book Finding Your Writers’ Voice. This implies that it must be lost, so you must you find it. But how can you with that “must” daring you to screw up? Threatening not only humiliation, but the consequences of lacking the fresh and innovative sound that every agent, publisher, editor, and reader seeks? Voice synthesizes “must” and “can.”

In fiction, great voices suggest not one singer with a guitar, but an entire band or orchestra. How do you avoid sounding like a one-note wonder?

~ Personality.

How do you sound when you’re really yourself? Uncensored, and thus possibly whiney or arrogant or meticulous or—the person no one else can earth can be. This fosters sound enhancing language while imagery enhances meaning. It comes from going deep inside yourself while remembering that you’re not doing this just for yourself:

The issue in most manuscripts, then, is not whether the author has a voice but whether they are using it to maximum effect. Does the language of the novel light it up? Does the story stab our hearts? Does its passion grip us? Do we see the world in new ways? – Don Maass

~ Impersonality.

“The individual voice is the communal voice,” Joyce Carol Oates reminds. Want to be so much yourself that you write only for yourself? Fine, just don’t ask anyone else to read it.

Tip: Ironically, voice is the paradoxical merger of tightening up and letting loose.