Oh, Those Voices!

Techniques to find, fix and flaunt your voice(s). You were born with a voice. So why is it when we talk about writing we have such a difficult time understanding voice and working with it? “Your [writing] voice is actually a very ordinary thing: it is just who you are, projected artistically. It is often linked to your speaking voice, and your breath, and the rhythms and sense of pace you draw on . when you are too absorbed in what you are saying to listen to yourself from a distance.” Raw voice! ~~FINDING YOUR WRITER’S VOICE by Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall It starts out as simple as being yourself. However, as writers, we must learn to shade our raw voice in multiple ways so we work with our “voices.” *See handout for exercises in doing this. Attitude You’ll need three words that begin with the letter “A.” . Authenticity . Authority Attitude (what you bring to the page): --how you feel about your characters (it will show), --how you feel about the events of the plot, --how you feel about the approach you are using to tell the story. (Commit to it! Uncertainty will show through.) Those who don’t know any better come into our neighborhood scared. They think we’re dangerous. They think we will attack them with shiny knives. They are stupid people who are lost and got here by mistake. But we aren’t afraid. We know the guy with the crooked eye is Davey the Baby’s brother and the tall one is . “ Sandra Cisneros from: The House on Mango Street The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another his mother called him “WILD THING!” and Max said “I’LL EAT YOU UP!” so he was sent to bed without eating anything. Maurice Sendak from: Where the Wild Things Are Authenticity: --is about how honest (committed) your attitude is, --how open and understandable the emotional arc of your writing is, --how willing you are, as a writer, to expose raw feelings. From Marcus Zusak’s THE BOOK THIEF: Death is the narrator. Here is a small fact: You are going to die. I am in all truthfulness attempting to be cheerful about this whole topic, though most people find themselves hindered in believing me, no matter my protestations. […] The question is, what color will everything be at that moment when I come for you? I do, however, try to enjoy every color I see—the whole spectrum. A billion or so flavors, none of them quite the same, and a sky to slowly suck on. It takes the edge off the stress. It helps me relax. […] (From Death’s diary: It was a year for the ages, like 79, like 1346, to name just a few. Forget the scythe, Goddamn it, I needed a broom or a mop. And I needed a vacation.) Bradley Chalkers sat at his desk in the back of the room—last seat, last row. No one sat at the desk next to him or at the one in front of him. He was an island. If he could have, he would have sat in the closet. Then he could shut the door so he wouldn’t have to listen to Mrs. Ebbel. He didn’t think she’d mind. She’d probably like it better that way too. So would the rest of the class. All in all, he thought everyone would be much happier if he sat in the closet, but, unfortunately, his desk didn’t fit. Authority: --how unhesitant you are about where you’re headed, --picking a direction/voice and sticking with it, --how invested your narrator is in the story. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. Ernest Hemingway from: A Farewell to Arms Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and more unacceptable than dirt itself. Charles Dickens from: Great Expectations Different tones. Both with authority. Funny. Slave masters thought they were making a difference in black people’s lives too. Saving them Attitude from their “wild African ways.” Same shit, different Authenticity century. I wish people like them would stop thinking that people like me need saving. Authority Angie Thomas from: The Hate U Give Narrator & POV Attitude Authenticity Authority Tense & Word choice? Is the narrator More than one the main narrator? character? Who’s telling the story? Is the narrator a secondary or Omniscient & minor character? invisible or with attitude? Narrators: Every story has a teller. --is/are your narrator(s) reliable, or not? --if in first person, the narrator is usually the protagonist— but not always! (The “I” could be the narrator as in The Great Gatsby.) --if in 2nd person (seldom done), what’s the goal of the narrator concerning “you” the reader? --if in 3rd person there is a variety of positions your narrator can take in relation to the story. --if your narrator never appears in the story (as in most 3rd person fiction), still . flesh your narrator out in your own mind! He or she has a voice. What kind of voice is it going to be? Reliability of the narrator Sensory detail What you reveal Regardless of who is telling the story, your raw voice will peek through via . Paragraph & (But there are ways to control these aspects. sentence More on this coming up.) length The seller of lightning-rods arrived just ahead of the storm. He came along the street of Green Town, Illinois, in the late cloudy October day, sneaking glances over his shoulder. Somewhere not so far back, vast lightnings stomped the earth. Somewhere, a storm like a great beast with terrible teeth could not be denied. So the salesman jangled and clanged his huge leather kit in which oversized puzzles of ironmongery lay unseen but which his tongue conjured from door to door until he came at last to a lawn which was cut all wrong. Ray Bradbury from: Something Wicked This Way Comes It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. Ray Bradbury from: Fahrenheit 451 My name is India Opal Buloni and last summer my daddy, the preacher, sent me to the store for a box of macaroni-and-cheese, some white rice, and two tomatoes and I came back with a dog. This is what happened: I walked into the produce section of the Winn-Dixie grocery store to pick out my two tomatoes and I almost bumped right into the store manager. He was standing there all red-faced, screaming and waving his arms around. “Who let a dog in here?” he kept on shouting. “Who let a dirty dog in here?” At first, I didn’t see a dog. There was just a lot of vegetables rolling around on the floor, tomatoes and onions and green peppers. And there was what seemed like a whole army of Winn-Dixie employees running around waving their arms just the same way the store manager was waving his. Once, in a house on Egypt Street, there lived a rabbit who was made almost entirely of china. He had china arms and china legs, china paws and a china head, a china torso and a china nose. His arms and legs were jointed and joined by wire so that his china elbows and china knees could be bent, giving him much freedom of movement. […] In all, Edward Tulane felt himself to be an exceptional specimen. Only his whiskers gave him pause. They were long and elegant (as they should be) but they were of uncertain origin. Edward felt quite strongly that they were not the whiskers of a rabbit. Whom the whiskers had belonged to initially—what unsavory animal—was a question that Edward could not bear to consider for too long. And so he did not… It wasn’t about anything, something about making punch, and then we started fighting and I slipped and he had me down kneeling on my chest and choking me with both hands like he was trying In the late summer of that year to kill me and all the time I was we lived in a house in a village trying to get the knife out of that looked across the river and my pocket to cut him loose. the plain to the mountains. Ernest Hemingway from: After the Storm Ernest Hemingway from: A Farewell to Arms How do you get your voice to go from where you are (your raw voice) . to where you want it to be? First, you need to get out of your own way . 1. Don’t write like you think an “author” should. Write like yourself, but . 2. write with intention. That is, know how you want to modulate your voice for a project. This may change as you go along, but stop and think about it before launching in. Too often we jump in with the excitement of beginning. 3. Know who your narrator is and how your narrator feels about what is going on. Who is telling the story and how close that person/object/abstraction is to the action is one of the most important decisions affecting voice—even if the storyteller never appears in the story.

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