What does it mean if your writing is voice-y?  How do you give your character a natural voice? We approach this question from the high-level perspective of craft, and the granular level of word choice and sentence structure. Erin talks about the research she did about Appalachian English for her short story Wolfy Things. And Mary Robinette Kowal tells us what it’s like to be an audiobook narrator, and how this helps her bring characters to life on the page. 

Just a reminder that our final episodes of the year will be guided by three of host Erin Roberts’ short stories: Wolfy Things, Sour Milk Girls, Snake Season. Note: these books involve some darker themes. All of these short stories are available for free online and also have audio versions available. 

Homework: 

Listen to someone’s voice (a person in a coffee shop, someone on a podcast, etc.) Now write a scene from your WIP trying to approximate the essence of that voice. 

Thing of the Week: 

“Exhalation” by Ted Chiang 

Liner Notes: 

“A House with Good Bones”by Ursula Vernon/ T. Kingfisher

Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Voice? Mechanical, aesthetic, and personal voice. Mechanical, 1st person, 3rd person, YA, genre? Aesthetic, what does it sound like, rhythms? Personal, idiosyncrasies. The telegraph operator’s fist. Develop your personal voice, learn to trust your own taste. What makes one voice sound different? Pacing, sentence structure and punctuation. Accent, sentence structure and word choice. Attitude? Are you smiling, mad, or what? Character background. Accents? Go to original sources. Get an author/editor from that community to translate into dialect. Be wary of dialects. Remember that voice is not static. A hack – re-key a page of an author with a strong aesthetic voice before writing your own story to get their rhythm. Soundtracks may also help you get the right feel. 

[Season 18, Episode 49]

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[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 18, Episode 49] 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Giving Your Story a Voice.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you’re in a hurry.

[Howard] And we’re not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I’m DongWon.

[Erin] I’m Erin.

[Howard] And I’m Howard.

[Erin] And we’re back to the deep dives. We hope you had an amazing NaNoWriMo, that you one, if you even wrote one word, you’re a writer in my eyes. But…

[Mary Robinette] Same.

[Erin] I hope you had a great, great time. Now we’re going to come back. I think this is actually a really great time to come back to the deep dives, because we’re going to be talking a little more about sort of craft on the page level. Before we left, we were talking big worldbuilding things. Now we’re going to be getting into the nitty-gritty, starting with voice. The reason I picked this topic is because I have been accused, in addition to being accused of writing horror…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I have also been accused of writing voice-y stories. Which I actually do agree with. And that the stories that I write have sort of strong character voices driving them. So I wanted to talk about what voice even means. I feel like it’s one of these words that gets thrown around a lot, and, like, people say it and everyone nods, and then you go away and you’re like, “Did I mean what they meant?” So I’m kind of curious, when we talk about a voice on the page, what does that mean to you all? Like, what is that… What is the absence of that?

[Mary Robinette] So, I have… I, likewise, have strong feelings about voice…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And the fact that we use it so indiscriminately. But I think that we use it to mean three different things. Surprising no one, I’m going to use puppetry as an example. So, I think that voice means… That there are three things that we’re talking about, the mechanical voice, the aesthetic voice, and the personal voice. So when you think about puppetry, mechanical… You say, what is the style of puppet, mechanical style is, is it a marionette, is it a hand puppet, what is it? With voice on the page, is it first-person, is it third person, are you writing for YA, like, what are the mechanics of that voice? The aesthetic is what does it… What does the puppet look like? Does it look like a Muppet, like a handcarved puppet from Appalachia? Voice on the page is what does it sound like? What are the rhythms of the voice, what are the… Does it sound like Jane Austen, does it sound like someone from the Bayou, does it sound transparent? Which basically just is a… Means fashionable. Because Jane Austen was writing transparent prose in her day, and the people writing transparent prose these days are people who are…

[DongWon] Just means mainstream.

[Mary Robinette] Mainstream. Yeah. Then you have the personal voice, which is the thing that you… Idiosyncrasies that you yourself bring to it. So when you hand the same puppet to two different puppeteers, it will look like a different character. Like when with Kermit the frog, when Jim Henson died, and Steve Whitmire took over, people freaked out. Because Kermit just looked like a different character. So I think what happens with when we’re talking to writers, is that that all of the personal experience that you’ve got, all of your taste, is going to affect the way you’re writing. What I see happen to a lot of early writers is that they fall in love with another writer and they try to match their aesthetic, not understanding that the aesthetic for that writer arises from their personal voice. So they will actually overwrite their own personal voice in trying to chase an aesthetic. Which isn’t to say that you can’t like do a pastiche that isn’t… That also reflects your personal voice. But I think that you’re not approaching them consciously to some degree, or if you’re not aware of the differences, that it can be very easy to suppress what is important, why you yourself is the person who should be telling a story.

[Howard] Those first two, the mechanical and the aesthetic, are things that you can lean on craft and you can adjust. The third one is extremely difficult to adjust because that’s the one that is the most embedded in who we are. In the age of telegraph and all through… All the way up through World War II, telegraph operators had what was called a fist. A recognizable… You could tell who the telegraph operator was just by the way they did the dots and dashes. That was something that code operators knew happened, and they would try to change it so that they couldn’t be identified. They very rarely succeeded. I bring this up just because if someone tells you, “Oh, I can hear your voice,” and you’re uncomfortable with this… Get comfortable with it, because your voice is important, and changing it is hard.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think Howard’s kind of hitting on something really important there. Which is… People ask me all the time what am I looking for in a project, what do I look for… When do I get excited about a submission, a query, whatever it is? For me, the thing I always say is I need to be able to read the thing that you’re working on and see you in this. I want to know who the writer is. I want to feel like you are the only person who could tell this story in this way in this moment in time. That’s not true for everybody. That is a very personal thing that I get most excited about. But I think Howard is absolutely right, that the first two things that Mary Robinette was laying out are craft things that you can adjust. Right? You can adjust sort of the mechanical thing to fit your audience. Right? Are you writing YA? Are you writing a mystery? Are you writing a thriller? These will require different kinds of beats and pacing and sentence structures, and also, the aesthetic voice is very much a personal thing, but you can shift that too. You can shift to certain dialects from story to story to story. You’re often going to want to move that a little bit to match the setting, the type of story, whatever it is. The last one is the most interesting to me, and is the most [garbled setting] to me, because I think Howard’s right that you can’t change it. So what you need to do is change everything around it to reveal it in ways that are exciting to the reader. You… Bringing out what is important to you, what your point of view is, what your perspective is, into the fiction is the thing that almost, like, you’re choosing how to reveal it and how to make it felt in the fiction. You’re not trying to change who you are, you’re trying to let me know who you are in a way that makes it legible to me and exciting to me and engaging to me, the reader.

[Erin] The funny thing is that I agree, but I disagree.

[Laughter]

[Erin] The reason that I slightly disagree is, for me, those last two things, the aesthetic voice and the personal voice, are a bit of a slider.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So, when I write, I actually try very hard to get deep into the character voice, and you have less of a personal voice in the story, if that makes any sense. There are things that are… I think of them as like tells in a certain way, which are, like, I tend to like compound… Longer compound sentences, I love the word just which I probably shouldn’t love as much as I do. But, that part of recognizing a story that’s by me is in the subsuming of voice, of my voice inside the voice of the character.

[DongWon] But I think that’s aesthetic voice. Right? In terms of the personal voice, I read all three of those stories and I say, “These are Erin Robert’s stories because they are interested in certain topics. They have a certain perspective. The world is rendered in certain ways.” Right? The connection between Sour Milk Girls and Snake Season… Aesthetically, they could not be more different. Right? Like, they’re coming from different settings, different voices, different styles, different moods. But I look at both of these and like, “Oh, these are stories about people trying to survive in a world that is set against them. These are stories about empathizing with people who would be monstrous in other ways.” That feels like something that you yourself are interested in. I know that’s not how we normally think about voice, but it’s so subtle and so woven through the story, that to me, I don’t know where else to put it. Right? It could be themes, in some ways, but it’s not that cold. It is more… It really is just kind of this metaphor of the telegraphers like fist and tapping things out. It’s almost… It’s an uncontrolled, unconscious thing in some ways that kind of can’t be erased. In a way that’s exciting and you lean into it in ways that make me like, “This is dope. I love this.”

[Howard] Circling back to the I have been accused of being a horror writer, or accused of writing things that have…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I… If it’s good art, and you’re accusing me of something, I want to be found guilty.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I want to be demonstrably guilty of this. If my voice is something that is unique and has value, but people tell me they can hear it in multiple stories, I need to be okay with that.

[Mary Robinette] This is the thing for me about the personal voice. You’ll hear people say, “You need to develop your voice,” or, “Don’t worry about your voice, it will develop on its own,” or whatever. I think that you do need to develop your personal voice. But what that means is learning to trust your own taste. That, for me, is that slider that you’re talking about, Erin, is that you have learned to trust your own personal taste. So your personal voice then affects the aesthetics of everything that you choose.

[DongWon] I will also say your personal voice does change over time.

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely.

[DongWon] It’s not a fixed point. As you read things, as you write things, as you live in the world, you change as a person, and that can be felt in your fiction too, in ways that I think are exciting. That’s why I love watching a career develop. I love reading through an author’s career, like, what were they writing when they were starting out, what were they writing later. William Gibson’s one of my favorite writers, but William Gibson writing Neuromancer versus William Gibson writing the Millennium trilogy versus writing the Jackpot series, just three wildly different people. I can see the thread of that person growing over time, but it has been so thrilling to watch his thought and perspectives develop over the decades. When you get to see that in a writer, I think that’s tremendously exciting.

[Erin] Yeah. Agreed.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] We are about to take a break. When we come back, I want to dive a little bit into the aesthetic voice, and actually how do you make stories sound different and bring the character to life through voice. We’ll be right back.

[Mary Robinette] I have another short story. This is Exhalation by Ted Chang. I was just completely captivated by this short story. It is one of those that is all aliens all the time. Where he really trusts the reader. He starts, and he does not explain what’s going on. You have to put the pieces together as he goes, and it’s deeply compelling. How it unfolds, the things that you learn about it, the many layers of worldbuilding that you get in this very, very tight space. Exhalation by Ted Chang.

[Erin] We are back, and we are still in our own voices.

[Laughter]

[Erin] But what makes our voices different from each other? I’m curious, like, what makes one voice… Not sort of the personal kind of… The fist voice, but, like, the voice of one character sound different from another. Mechanically.

[Mary Robinette] There’s so many different things that can do that. It really depends on what you’re looking at. But, there are 4 basic things. There’s… This comes from me being an audiobook narrator. So, voice, for me, like, for you, comes really naturally, and I had to reverse engineer what I was doing. When I was being trained to do voice work, you’ve got pitch, placement, pacing, accent, and attitude. Pitch is how high or low, you cannot represent that on the page. Placement is where it resonates, again, can’t really represent that on the page aside from reporting. But, accent, attitude, and pacing, you can. So, pacing is all about the sentence structure and punctuation. Punctuation exists on the page, as if for me as a narrator, to record the breaths and pauses. That’s where… That includes paragraph breaks, that includes italics, all of that is to describe the non-pronunciation parts of language. Then you’ve got… So you’ve got pacing, you’ve got accent. Accent is about sentence structure and word choice. Like, coming from the south, when I’m talking to you all, I will say you all, when I’m talking to my parents, I’ll say y’all. I’m often throwing an extra just like weird flourishes to the language that it doesn’t need, like, instead of “I’m going to the grocery store,” “I’m going to go on over to the grocery store.” What the extra words are doing, I have no idea. So you don’t… This is not to say that you need to like put phonetic representations on the page. But, you do think about the sentence structure and word choice. Then, attitude, when you’re talking to someone on the phone, you can tell whether or not they’re smiling. You get the email that you’re like, “Oo, they are really mad.” That changes the way we approach language. So you can think about these things and adjust them in a very mechanical way, or you can just think about trying to replicate something that you’re hearing.

[Howard] On one level further up from that… Fair listener, you probably absent the total differences between my voice and Mary Robinette’s voice, Mary Robinette will lean into puppetry metaphor. I will lean into audio engineering and music metaphor. Because we have different backgrounds. That is an aspect of character voice that you should delight in. Knowing a character’s back story and knowing that the way they were raised, the career that they followed, the parents they had, the culture they had, will affect the way they narrate their point of view to the reader.

[Erin] One thing… Getting back to accent specifically, which is a really interesting one.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] How do you make it work, and especially, you may be thinking I’m writing a secondary world where accents are completely different than the way that we think about them. I did a lot of thinking about this for Wolfy Things, which has, I would say, a flavor of Appalachian English to it. But I actually went and did a bunch of reading, I listen to recordings of folktales being told by some folks in the mountains.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I tried to figure out, and I think this is something, Mary Robinette, you said before, the difference between sort of the essence of what they were doing and how they were expressing it. I was, like, I’m not going to attempt to write in a full accent and actually like do exactly the way that they would do it. But as I was listening, I started saying, what are some commonalities that I’m hearing in the way… What are words that people are using, like y’all and ain’t. Our sentences shorter or longer? Where are people putting the emphasis? Then said, “Well, I can take that and put it in my story.” That way, it’s not like I’m trying to, like, it can feel like a mockery I think when you try to exactly copy someone’s accent from a group that you don’t belong to, because there are rules going on beneath the surface that are hard to understand.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Dialect is superhard and dangerous. Yes.

[Erin] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] So, with dialect, one of the things… Yes, I’m 100% with you on this. I did a thing with Of Noble Family, where it was set in Antigua and I wanted to represent the dialect and also knew that there was no possible way I could get it. Because it’s… I’m not from there, there’s so many layers of that. So I wrote it with the rhythms that were natural to me, and then I hired an Antiguan author and editor to translate it into the dialect. She would periodically be like, “What is this?” I’m like, “Well, uhm…” I would have to translate my dialect back into standard English so that… It was this whole fascinating process because their… Dialects are so widely varied. I think that one of the things that people will do is they often have a media representation of dialect in their brain. So I think what you’re talking about is like going to listen to primary sources. So important.

[DongWon] Yup. I mean, southern accents on TV, you’ll get for different regions in the same town that apparently… That supposedly, no one’s left in their whole life. You’re like…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] “I don’t know. This is a lot…”

[Mary Robinette] Uhm, no. That is actually… That is a thing that absolutely happens.

[DongWon] It can, but…

[Mary Robinette] No. Okay, I know what you’re talking about.

[DongWon] You know what I mean, though?

[Mary Robinette] Sorry. My favorite thing that will happen to me as a narrator is that I will narrate a book, set… I just narrated House of Good Bones by Ursula Vernon, set in North Carolina, which is where I grew up. The number of reviews that say they should have gotten a real Southerner…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Because they have a very specific idea of what a southern accent is.

[DongWon] Exactly. I mean, this might be opening a little bit of a can of worms, so I don’t want to go too deep on this. But one of the reasons, just to make it very explicit, that you need to be careful of dialects is that when you come from a lot of populations, sometimes it’s southern populations, but, for me, coming from a family of immigrants, accent, language choice, all of these things are tools that are used against us in very explicit ways. Right? The pronunciation of my name, the way my parents talk, certain things are… I was trained to speak in a very specific way, to not have an accent, and all of these things because my parents believed that it was very important for us to be able to fit into American society. I have complicated feelings about that at this point, but I understand where they were coming from, because they felt it was very difficult for them to have a place in the world, to get ahead in business, or things like that, talking the way they did. So, when you are thinking about wanting to represent a community, a particular people, on a page, I think there’s a natural instinct to be like, “Oh, well, they sound like that, they should look like that on the page.” But when you’re not from that community, you… There are subtleties and nuances that you will stumble into by accident that will end up being very hurtful to people from that community. So that’s just things you need to be aware of when you’re looking at dialect. So, going back to the list of things that Mary Robinette had in terms of, like, those aspects of voice, there’s a lot of things you can do with cadence and pacing and rhythm that will give a gesture towards it. It can be a very subtle thing that will make things feel very different on the page without flipping into caricature, without being in that Mickey Rooney breakfast at Tiffany’s space that you don’t want to end up in.

[Erin] We definitely don’t want to end up there…

[Laughter]

[Erin] In that space.

[DongWon] I see it more often than you would think.

[Mary Robinette] Well. No.

[Erin] What you were saying about sort of how language changes and how accent changes made me think also that one of the things that I think is really fun to do with voice is that voice is not static.

[Mary Robinette, DongWon chorus] Yeah.

[Erin] You know what I mean? As you move through the world, my favorite, like, way to think about this example is, like, your boss says something really annoying or your coworker, and you’re like, “Okay. My gosh, this is so… That so-and-so…” You’re upset and you’re talking about it with your coworker, then you clear your throat and go, “Per my last email…”

[Laughter]

[Erin] You know what I mean? As you translate the way you’re really thinking into the way that is appropriate…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] Supposedly, or appropriate for that situation…

[Howard] Code switching.

[Erin] Code switching. That kind of code switching happens all the time. I think one thing that’s interesting is when characters speak out loud versus what they are thinking…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So, the thought voice, like, the voice of the perspective is usually consistent, but then you might have them speak one way in one conversation, and a different way in another. That shows, like, how familiar they are with that person, their comfort level… There’s so much that you can do in that, that’s a really fun thing in playing with voice.

[DongWon] You can do a lot with voice, especially if you’re writing in close third. I think people think, it’s like, oh, if you’re in first person all the time, then you can do this. But if you’re in close third, you can switch your narration to mirror the internal dialect or the voice of that character a little bit more closely. I mean, I wouldn’t be extreme about it, but you maybe just nudge it a little bit in a direction to be like, oh, this person’s hanging out with their friends. They’re code switching a bit more to be like this. They’re in a professional environment or they are at their job, they’re going to code switch a little bit in this direction. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] You can push voice in like… You have all these little meters and dials with voice that you can do so much with that can be really exciting and really enrich your text. That, to me, is when I start to see, “Oh, this is an author who’s very confident, who’s in control of the text.” There walking me through their story in a very, like, deliberate way that I love to see.

[Mary Robinette] One of… I’m going to give you a hack that you can use that I’ve used for a couple of different stories to get a different aesthetic voice into your rhythm. Which is to take someone who has a very strong aesthetic, like, I’ve done this with Austen, I’ve done this with Richard Kipling. I re-key in a text of the page before I start… Sorry, a page of their text before I start writing my own thing to get that rhythm into my head and hands.

[Erin] I think there’s also… This is why some people will have soundtracks that they write to.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] If there’s a specific feel that you’re going for, a specific rhythm, and you put on that song that, like, get you into the beat and the feel of it. I think that can be a great way to, like, remind yourself what the aesthetic is and what you’re going for. I’ll also say, like, voice is tricky. I’ve said this before…

[DongWon] It’s hard.

[Erin] For me, because I tend to really try to live very deeply in the voice. It takes a long time. For me, a lot of it’s writing a paragraph, reading it out loud, and just thinking something about this does not sound right.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Let me try again, until it gets… Like, the mood or the feel that I think I’m going for. But once, for me, I’ve captured that in one paragraph, then I can go ahead and like replicate it in the next. I can do it again.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I actually think that, as we’re talking about these specific tools, is a perfect time to go to the homework.

[Mary Robinette] So, your homework assignment is that you’re going to listen to someone’s voice. This can be a person in a coffee shop, someone on a podcast, anywhere that you are captured by someone’s voice. Then, write a scene from your current work in progress, rewrite it trying to approximate the essence of that voice.

[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.

[Mary Robinette] Hey, writer. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Let us know. We love hearing about how you’ve applied the stuff we’ve been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at [email protected].