Does ‘voice’ mean the voice of the writer or the voice of the character? This is a good question, and one that I hear regularly from students. Each character has a distinct ‘voice,’ or way of speaking, and you want to present your characters, when they speak, in their own voices. However, every author, too, has her/his own “voice,” and here it really means “style,” such that their narratives are recognizable as theirs.
An example: In Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, you have the father and mother characters, and Benjy, Caddie, Quentin, Jason, Dilsey, etc. Now, Dilsey has a certain manner of speech, and it is very different from Father’s manner of speech, which is different from Quentin’s, and different from Caddie’s, and so forth. And each of these characters speaks very differently from one another. When you hear father speaking, you would never confuse him with Quentin. Or mother for Dilsey. These characters have their own distinctive voices.
Okay. But, all of it sounds like Faulkner, no matter who is speaking, who is narrating, who is the center of the action, it’s all Faulkner, and Faulkner’s voice is unmistakable. Take the opening of Barn Burning:
The store in which the justice of the Peace’s court was sitting smelled of cheese. The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish – this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood. He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his father and his father’s enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and hisn both! He’s my father!) stood, but he could hear them, the two of them that is, because his father had said no word yet:
“But what proof have you, Mr. Harris?”
You see, this paragraph could only have been written by William Faulkner, the voice (style) is distinct, and no one else writes this way. This is the Faulknerian voice.
Another example, from Hemingway’s “Indian Camp”:
At the lake shore there was another rowboat drawn up. The two Indians stood waiting.
Nick and his father got in the stern of the boat and the Indians shoved it off and one of them got in to row. Uncle George sat in the stern of the camp rowboat. The young Indian shoved the camp boat off and got in to row Uncle George.
The two boats started off in the dark. Nick heard the oarlocks of the other boat quite a way ahead of them in the mist. The Indians rowed with quick choppy strokes. Nick lay back with his father’s arm around him. It was cold on the water. The Indian who was rowing them was working very hard, but the other boat moved further ahead in the mist all the time.
“Where are we going, Dad?” Nick asked.
“Over to the Indian camp. There is an Indian lady very sick.”
“Oh,” said Nick.
Across the bay they found the other boat beached. Uncle George was smoking a cigar in the dark. The young Indian pulled the boat way up on the beach. Uncle George gave both the Indians cigars.
They walked up from the beach through a meadow that was soaking wet with dew, following the young Indian who carried a lantern. Then they went into the woods and followed a trail that led to the logging road that ran back into the hills. It was much lighter on the logging road as the timber was cut away on both sides. The young Indian stopped and blew out his lantern and they all walked on along the road.
They came around a bend and a dog came out barking. Ahead were the lights of the shanties where the Indian bark-peelers lived. More dogs rushed out at them. The two Indians sent them back to the shanties. In the shanty nearest the road there was a light in the window. An old woman stood in the doorway holding a lamp.
Inside on a wooden bunk lay a young Indian woman. She had been trying to have her baby for two days. All the old women in the camp had been helping her. The men had moved off up the road to sit in the dark and smoke out of range of the noise she made. She screamed just as Nick and the two Indians followed his father and Uncle George into the shanty. She lay in the lower bunk, very big under a quilt. Her head was turned to one side. In the upper bunk was her husband. He had cut his foot very badly with an ax three days before. He was smoking a pipe. The room smelled very bad.
This could only be Hemingway, the minimalistic, simple declaratory sentences. Pure Hemingway, and no one else writes this way. This is the Hemingway voice, or ‘style.’
One more, From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens — finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.
…
We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.
Where Hemingway’s language is minimalistic, Fitzgerald’s is beautifully poetic. That’s his voice, his style. And yet you will find that Jay Gatsby speaks completely differently than Tom Buchanan, same with Myrtle Wilson and her husband George, the car mechanic. Listen to them speak, they all sound different. But the scenes in which they appear are unmistakably Fitzgerald, his voice, his beautiful poetic style.
So, you are striving to write in your character’s voice, when they are speaking, or narrating, but with a voice or style that you develop as the voice you use to tell all your stories.
And yes, style and voice are very much linked. You could substitute style for my use of voice in the passages above and you will be talking about nearly the same thing. Style relates to whether a writer writes in an elegiac, high style (polished, like Fitzgerald), or a colloquial, low style (like Charles Bukowski). The poetry of Alexander Pope is very high style; that of Dante’s Divine Comedy very low (containing many vulgarities: he wrote it not in Latin, the elegiac language of the 13th century, but in what he called ‘the vulgar tongue,’ the language of his people: Italian). T.S. Eliot, high, W.B. Yeats, low. Do you write with polished prose, as in the Queen’s English (Jane Austen), or with a more street-lingo (Junot Diaz). That is style, but it comes through in voice, too.
FINDING OUR VOICE:
NOW, the learning writer inquires further: but how does one develop his or her distinct voice? Well, that’s a great question, and there are probably as many schools of thought on this as there are schools. My thought is that you develop it by simply writing, writing, writing. Moreover, write stories from your personal life, such as anecdotes and personal narratives. These are stories, told in the 1st Person POV, about things that happened to you, so that you can only tell them with your voice. When we try to make up stories, and characters, and write them in different, made-up voices, we often sound artificial. But when we tell our stories, we can only use our voices, and that helps to develop your voice and style.