Author’s Voice and Oral Literature

Of all the skills we’re supposed to develop as writers, voice might be the most nebulous.  Some of the most technically minded writers (meaning authors who think the most technically about writing, or so I gather from what they’ve said and written about their processes) describe voice simply as something that you develop incidentally as you write over time.  Separating author’s voice from narrative voice, character voice, perspective tools, and worldbuilding or plot-developing decisions is anything but straightforward, and editors and publishers will say contradictory things about voice and its desirability, too.  No one seems to agree on much about what voice is, much less how to develop it.

The topic came up in a recent writing group meeting, and it occurred to me that maybe this idea of author’s voice is tied to some of the ideas discussed in reference to oral literature in Bringhurst’s extensive reflections on the topics in A Story as Sharp as a Knife.  Specifically, Bringhurst writes about how each mythteller tells the stories differently, so that there is no one “true” version of a myth.  Similarly, I propose that author’s voice arises from the particular authorial idiosyncrasies that make the story distinct to how a given author would tell it, as compared to how any other author might attempt to convey the same story elements.  This, I recognize, is barely less nebulous than where we were before, but the idea has merit, I think, after further investigation and elaboration.

Comparing The Lord of the Rings books and movies presents us a fine example with which to work.  Both tell essentially the same plot, with the same characters, the same major events (give or take a few), and the same world.  And yet, there is an argument to be made that Tolkien and Jackson told different stories in their respective media.  The books place a far greater emphasis on the hobbits, lingering on their journeys and character arcs, while the movies shift the focus more towards Aragorn, his character arc, and an emphasis on his part of the plot.  We might even go so far as to say that the books are about the story of hobbits, while the movies are the story of men.  Neither is wrong, and I maintain that Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies are excellent storytelling in their own right, but they are telling a different story in that sense.  That’s why they can cut out major events like the scouring of the Shire without it feeling like something is missing.  In the books, leaving those events out would be a noticeable and dissatisfying gap.

This is something of what I mean by voice and its relationship to oral storytelling.  Author’s voice is made up of those subtle and not-so-subtle differences in emphasis and attention.  I’ve written before about how older works will tend to have much richer and more detailed descriptions of nature because those authors were more aware of and immersed in nature than are modern authors (another reason fantasy authors should go backpacking more often).  That’s part of voice, too.  Significantly, this is something an author can control, not something innate and inescapable.  We can change what we emphasize and linger over in a story based on what is most appropriate to the story and to whom we expect to be reading the story, just as did oral storytellers.

A major source of the confusion around voice arises from the oft-cited advice that you develop your voice over multiple stories, suggesting that a particular story does not have a manipulable author’s voice distinct from the narrative voice.  This is a classic case of confusing correlation with causation.  Voice exists any time you write, but identifying what your particular tendencies are when you are not attempting to manipulate your voice is easiest with multiple writing samples to reference.  You may also find that you use different voices for different types of writing – my voice for blog posts and book reviews, for instance, is rather different from the voice with which I tend to write most of my stories, and I have a few stories with quite different voices (especially if I’m writing in first person).

Most of the time, we don’t read for author’s voice, although there are notable exceptions: Dickens, for instance, is an exceptionally voice-y author, and his books are in no small part made readable and interesting by his distinctive approach to storytelling.  This would seem to imply that developing and manipulating voice is a relatively unimportant skill for an author, which may be fair in some circumstances, but should not be taken to mean that you shouldn’t bother with it.  The voice you employ is integral to the story you want to tell, and the fact that most of us don’t consciously develop it is more reflective that the types of stories we want to tell tend to align naturally with our natural storytelling voice than it is of a lack of importance of appropriate voice matching to story.  I would have to alter my voice significantly, for example, if I wanted to be an effective horror writer, since many of that genre’s techniques are undermined by the types of descriptions and scene structures that characterize my primary storytelling voice.

Perhaps the best advice I can provide to gaining a better understanding of voice is to find stories that have been told multiple times by different authors and see how they are different, like the Lord of the Rings example we used in this post (although I should note that most movie-book comparisons are not as useful, since the movies tend to diverge too far for the comparisons to remain relevant in terms of voice).  This is the part where I’ll mention, predictably, that myths are a prime catalogue to explore for this purpose.  As for better understanding and developing your own voice, the best thing to do is to keep writing, and to listen to feedback from others on your writing.  Your writing group may well have a better understanding of your voice than you do, even if they don’t express it in quite those terms.