Discovering your true voice and style.

FICTION WRITING LESSONS, December 2006

DISCOVERING YOUR TRUE VOICE AND STYLE, AN EXERCISE AND DEFINITIONS
by zentao

EXERCISE TO FIND YOUR TRUE VOICE AND STYLE:

The next time you are REALLY angry, sad, totally overcome by emotion or moment, grab the keyboard and pound out the incident. Now read it. That's YOU. Everything else is put on, pretentious and false. Now, this isn't to say that you can't write with a "persona," and some genres, especially epic Fantasy and Horror, require a persona, but you must OWN that persona. It must be so much an extension of you, so intrinsically incorporated into your writer's psyche, that it IS just as much you as your more normal, casual true voice and style. What you, the writer, cannot do is try to "make" a voice, make a style, "wearing" it like you might put on a costume for a Halloween party.

HOW TO DEVELOP YOUR TRUE VOICE AND STYLE

You have to let go when writing. You can't force it, plan it, rationalize it, make it up, or contrive and manipulate it. You MUST, instead, allow yourself to write, to "drop in" -- into your story, your fiction writing -- totally absorbed by it to such an extent that the house could be burning down around you and you would fail to notice were your father, mother, sister, brother, husband or wife not beating down the door and screaming. Once you master losing yourself, not paying attention to the words you are writing, but living the story moment by moment, the words streaming from your fingers through the keyboard onto the screen, then and only then, once you "wake up," once the trance has completed itself, can you read back and begin to be able to literally (an intentional double entendre, by the way) hear and recognize your style and voice. Mastery of voice and style development comes with writing "in trance" over and over for years. And, yes, some writers master several voices, one for each genre and subgenre they write. Then they will further hone one and another voice, tweaking it to a perfection designed for one book or one series of books.

SO WHAT IS VOICE? WHAT IS STYLE?

VOICE

AUTHOR'S VOICE - Distinctive qualitative and quantitative "literary inflections" of attitude, ideas, and perspective. An author's voice expresses that author's subliminal world view and perspective in a literary "vocalization" inherent in their exposition. It comes to full development only once an author has "come into her/his own," muting most of the influences of other teachers and authors whom he or she has understudied or emulated. This is not to be confused with "style," which is closely related.

GENRE VOICE - Some authors who write multiple genres or subgenres will develop a specific voice for that genre or subgenre. While their author's voice still underlies this genre voice, there are significant characteristic differences between that author's voice when writing in one genre verses another.

STORY VOICE - Every short story, book, and series has (or should have) its own "story voice." This voice is the inner "narrator's" voice that "speaks" to the reader from the narrative or expository portions of the work. It carries the current of the story's overall tone, attitude and presentament, registering a specific articulation unique to the story in the reader's mind. A book's voice is a subset of the author's voice and genre voice, if applicable, (see above) and contributes to what is called a story or a book's tone. Books by the same author in the same genre will usually have the same author's voice, but the story voice will change, book by book, story by story. A story voice is unique to one book, story, or series. A story voice can change, usually with dire consequences when an author of a series "farms" out that series to another author. Examples of that happening can be seen in Clark's Rama series with the latter books "ghost written by" or "co-authored with" another writer. It is vividly seen in the later Pern books written by authors other than Anne McCaffrey. This produces books that dramatically change, not only the style, but the story or series voice, which can be disastrous, regardless of where the reader begins the series.

CHARACTER VOICE - When a writer successfully develops and absorbs the "persona and psyche" of a character, that character owns a voice unique to that character. Character is again a subset of "author's voice, genre voice, and story voice, all. A character voice has little to nothing to do with dialectical choices, but rather to the specific "audio timbre and flavor of persona" that rings within the mind of a reader. Sometimes character voice is so strong that dialog tags can be reduced to the very minimum or, if combined with dialectical nuances, are not required at all except to smooth the read.

STYLE

Style is essentially that unique stamp that underwrites every word an author writes. It is, in fact, the nuance of phrasing and methodology of thought which guides an author's story construct and the underlying structure of his or her syntax -- the structure inherent in an author's "word strings."

Every literate person owns a writing style. Every writer not only owns a style, but that style develops, gaining depth, edge, and character as they hone and perfect their craft, turning craft into their own unique creative literary expression. While an author can change "voices," an author cannot, unless suffering schizophrenia, change his/her style, though, with work, style can masked when necessary. Style is an author's literary signature or fingerprint -- uniquely their own.

Lesson TOC (Table of Contents)...4

Benefits of Joining

Access to all lessons, plus access to both editors, zentao and womblin, to whom you may pose questions.

Join Now & Save

Right now, for a limited time, we off a special introductory membership fee of only $49.95 per year, regularly $60. Save 20% by signing up now, and get that introductory price “grandfathered in,” locked in for as long as you remain a subscriber.

FICTION WRITER'S RESOURCES

FWW editors critique you

The Editorial Department ($2/pg) & will fix your mss

ONLINE FICTION


HOME	EDITORS CRITIQUE YOU	FICTION WRITING	NOVEL WRITING	SHORT STORY WRITING