The Voices on my Page

I have a confession to make: I wrote a book a couple years back. Finished it in 2005. It was horrible. Truly, truly bad. It was 165,000 words long. L-o-o-o-n-g. I tried to revise it; tried for five years, off and on. Couldn't do it. My mind was shot. Part of the problem, that I recognized even in '06 during my first attempts to rewrite it, was that I didn't have a voice for the narrator. Took me six years to find that voice. Here's how.
Whenever I started a revision, I'd get a few pages in and something would just snap. I'd get into a character's head or his mouth, but when I came back out I didn't actually come out; the narrator had become the characters. Oftentimes, the narration would sound suspiciously -- and horribly -- like dialogue. But the narrator was omniscient; objective, most of the time. Suddenly he's talking like one of the guys. Or it would go the other way: often simply from speech-tagging switching from "Geoffrey said" to "said Geoffrey" and all of a sudden my narrator is Victorian British. What? But two things happened to help me find my voice.

First, I read a lot. Not just for fun, but also for classes. And I got to be lectured on what authors did in their works. It's where I learned of the idea of an omniscient "objective" narrator peering through the eyes of a character and suddenly becoming a little less "objective." Because when you get into a character's head, you describe things the way he or she sees them, not the objective way things are. It helps the reader see what's going on with the character. It's not the easiest thing to spot, always; sometimes the narrator is still speaking in their "voice" but its up to the reader to recognize that the actions and thoughts are centered on a character: thus the clue that the narrative presented may not be wholly objective.

Second, I wrote a lot. But not more novels: those weren't working. Instead I churned out about six or seven short stories, these for a correspondence course. (I wasn't trying to make a living off what I learned through the course, but if I could be forced to write... *shrug*) I got to experiment with all those short stories, all those characters, and all those voices. I started to develop patterns of speech whenever the narration moved slightly off first-person (all but two, I think, were first-person). After a year-and-a-half, two years, suddenly I found myself with a voice, all equal parts what I loved to read and what I loved to write.

Other classes introduced me to rhetoric, to sound and sense, to views on interpreting stories, to the idea that a reader brings something to the table, and that not only what is said but how it's phrased can help guide a reader to a certain perception, a certain reading experience. Sometimes, all I learned was what an already-developed skill was called -- that didn't diminish the learning, because then I could do it with intention, where previously it was haphazard.

We all need a voice. A lot of agents and publishers are looking for fresh new voices. I don't know how fresh mine is; but it's mine. Now go get yours.

See you Friday.

You can find the short stories which helped me develop my voice here.