Levels of Voice

I often talk about writers needing to be Jacks (or Jills) of all trades. Yes, we are in the business of creating stories that make people think or feel or laugh. But in order to do that successfully we need to conjure up the senses like a Michelin-starred chef. We need to bring whole worlds into being like a visionary architect or a landscape artist. We need to help our cast come to life like the great directors of cinema or stage. But one of the hardest skills to master is that of the ventriloquist—throwing our voice so it adapts to narrative and character.

Voice is hard because it has a mercurial quality we often don’t appreciate. It is neither one concrete thing nor does it stay perfectly the same from one moment to the next. It comes at different levels and I tend to think that those levels arrange themselves a little like a mobile hanging above a baby’s crib.

Author Voice

At the top of the mobile, we have “author voice.” The way we speak is as unique as our fingerprints. It is a thing affected by hundreds of parameters – family, geographical location, gender, age, sexuality, religion, education, work, interests – and it is made up of (1) the words we use, (2) the way we form these words into sentences, and (3) the way we shape those sentences into sound; or to put it more succinctly, (1) vocabulary, (2) grammar, (3) accent. And I could push even further into specifics. Accent, for example, is made up of a palette of sounds. It is tone and timbre. It is also volume and speed.

Voice is therefore a complex phenomenon. Even the idea of our own “author voice” is something that a lot of us don’t feel confident with. I see people talking about “finding your voice as a writer”, but I would say that is the wrong thing to search for. Our voices are unique and they are wonderful in their uniqueness. However you speak, however you write, your voice is what sets you apart from everyone else – so, I would change that quest of “finding your voice” to “finding CONFIDENCE in your voice”, accepting that YOUR VOICE needs to be heard just as much as anyone else’s voice.

Narrative Voice

Underneath “author voice” is what I would call “narrative voice.” This is the voice we choose for any individual story. If the story is told in first-person perspective, then it is the voice of our narrator. If the story is told in close third-person perspective, then it carries the essence of your protagonist without being quite as focussed as we would see in first person. And if the story is told in a more omniscient perspective, then there is a decision for the writer to make, what does that God-like figure who is telling the story actually sound like?

The narrative voice is distinct for each story. A story set by the sea and a story set in a bustling city require different words to paint the landscape, they need a different palette of sounds, a different approach to rhythm, a different approach to theme. The key, for me, when conjuring each “narrative voice”, is to find that distinct flavour but in a way that is still infused with your “author voice.” When I contemplate those writers who I consider to be expert voice-chameleons (someone like David Mitchell), I still find plenty of the “author voice” woven within the seams – a stamp of uniqueness which tells me that this story could only have been written by this particular writer.

Character Voice

Next, we come to “character voice.” This is the voice that each particular character speaks with. What is it that makes that character’s voice unique? Looping back to what I said above, ideally, every character should sound different to every other character even if the difference is only very nuanced.

And there is an extra layer to the equation in that we all speak in slightly different ways depending on the people we are speaking to and the situation we find ourselves in. A character will speak differently when speaking to a child than they would do speaking to a police officer. A character in a job interview would use a different vocabulary to what they would use down the pub. Our voices change as we age. Our voices change if we move to a different place. Our voices change as our perspective on the world changes.

And moving back up through the levels of voice, each of the other levels have that same quality of shifting sands. A narrative voice might shift depending on the emotional place in which the story finds itself. Your author voice will transform over time – the more we experience, the more we learn, the more our voice adapts.

Harnessing Voice

It is all well and good, of course, talking about these various levels of voice, but how exactly do we go about capturing different tones and putting them on the page?

The first thing I always suggest is that the art of ventriloquism (at least how it relates to writing) is a subtle one. For example, here is a sentence in my “author voice”:

“In the park the other day, a woman was feeding sparrows from a tin of Quality Street.”

I quite like this odd observation, so perhaps I might include it in a story I am writing where the “narrative voice” is more old-fashioned than my own:

“In the park a few days back, a lady was feeding sparrows from a tin of Quality Street.”

It is almost the same sentence – just two small alterations – but a small shift nonetheless. In a single sentence, it doesn’t look like very much, but over the course of a whole story, hopefully we have enough shifts between “author voice” and “narrative voice” that the effect becomes clear in a reader’s mind without us overdoing things.

Taking my observation further, maybe I might put it into the mouth of one of my characters:

“In the park a few days back, a lady was flinging breadcrumbs at the spuggies from one of those posh chocolate tins.”

Again, the differences are only small. I’ve not specified “Quality Street” because it doesn’t feel as though that would be in my character’s field of reference. I’ve also chosen a dialect term for “sparrows” and shifted “feeding” into “flinging breadcrumbs at” to paint the picture more firmly through my character’s eyes.

Often when I’m trying to find a particular voice, I think about “touchstone” words or expressions. What would my character choose that is different to what I myself would choose? How can I make best use of these choices?

People-listening

In many ways, I would suggest the best quality a writer can have is that of a squirrel. I always advocate scribbling down observations about how the weather is on a particular day, about the taste and texture of a new food, about the exact way you feel after a new (or repeated) experience. When it comes to creating characters, I like that we as writers have the perfect excuse for people-watching, but maybe we sometimes do too much watching and not enough listening. Next time you’re on the bus or sitting in a waiting room, listen to the conversations going on around you. What are the unique characteristics of these people’s voices? Can you bottle up the essence of each voice so it is ready for you to make use of at a later date?

And with all the asterisks I’ve already outlined above about the brilliant uniqueness of your own “author voice”, I think we can also listen to the people we encounter in other writer’s stories. For me, so much of learning about craft comes back to peering as close as I can to the writing of those writers I admire and thinking about how they conjure place or sensation or voice. With that in mind, I’m finishing this article by sharing some brilliant pieces of flash fiction that you might read as inspiration for conjuring voices of your own.

Illustrating the difference between levels of voice

Cat Barbecue (Tim Craig | Atticus Review)

My Brother, the Skyscraper (Jo Gatford | The Molotov Cocktail)

Conversational voice

What We Say For Love (Joshua Jones Lofflin | Vast Literary Press)

Jerry Under a Pine Tree (Paul Ruta | Cheap Pop)

Omniscient voice

Mountain Song (Busayo Akinmoju | Welkin Prize)

Historical voice

Tyn (Avitus B. Carle | FlashBack Fiction)

Finding humour in voice

Just Outside the Tunnel of Love (Francine Witte | XRAY Lit Mag)

Laughing Tiger Buckles Slowly: a T’ai Chi Lesson (Tom Walsh | Janus Literary)

Leaning into dialect

An Orange Fruit Will Ripen In Its Own Good Time (Kathy Hoyle | WestWord)

Popman’s bin (Maria Thomas | Oxford Flash Fiction)

Code-switching

in ache (Melissa Llanes Brownlee | SmokeLong Quarterly)

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