Avi

word craft

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The chatter about “voice”

There’s a lot of chat­ter about “voice” in fic­tion, which I take to mean the pre­sen­ta­tion of the nar­ra­tive, its mix­ture of tone, char­ac­ter, syn­tax, and vocab­u­lary. Com­plex and impor­tant, writ­ers can and do spend years per­fect­ing voice though some come to it quick­ly and nat­u­ral­ly. It can be very dis­tinc­tive, as per Hem­ing­way and Dick­ens. Per­haps the most influ­en­tial voice in the Eng­lish lan­guage was the six­teenth cen­tu­ry King James trans­la­tion of the Bible. And we some­times for­get that Shake­speare was a great inven­tor of words, such as gloomy, crit­ic, bump—and many more. I won­der how Eliz­a­bethan audi­ences respond­ed to such an inven­tive vocabulary.

Books with distinct voice

I’ve nev­er devel­oped a spe­cif­ic voice for my work. I want the voice of my fic­tion to be part of the sto­ry. The voice of Crispin: The Cross of Lead is utter­ly dif­fer­ent than the voice of City of Orphans or Pop­py. In Sophia’s War I worked hard to cre­ate an eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry voice, using lots of words used then, but no longer.

When I tell a sto­ry, I want the read­er to hear, each time, a dif­fer­ent voice. And not mine.

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