Voice (Writerly Thread)

Have you found yours?

Did you find it once, then lose it again?

Can you describe yours? Could you even begin to put it into words?

Do you read your own work and recognise a distinctive voice in it?

Do others hear/see it, but you can't?


Beyond technical ability, I think having a distinctive voice is one of the crucial parts of being a good (successful?) writer.

Of course, there is being able to tell a tale, create interesting, believable characters and captivate a reader and enable them to immerse themselves in the world you've created, those are incredibly important, but I believe it's our distinctive voices that get readers to come back to our stuff time and time again, no matter what we write.

I've written within many categories here at Lit (not even taking into account what I write outside of Lit - my "serious" novels) and I do believe my voice comes through in all of them, and is especially noticable in my later stuff.

When I was finding my feet, I didn't even know what "voice" meant, let alone recognise that I might have found mine, but now I believe I have.

How to describe my own voice, within my writing... now, that's tough.

I had some really great feedback today, which made me think of my voice within my writing. The guy said (amongst other things), "your straight forward but eloquent descriptions really made me horny."

"Straight forward but eloquent descriptions", yes, I like that, I like that a lot! And, I think the reader recognised something in my writing that I hadn't even put my finger on before.

My own voice (signature) in my writing, I believe, is not being overly descriptive, but describing sex - or anything, for that matter - in a very real and palpable way, and not being afraid of calling a spade a spade (or a cunt a cunt, if you like). I am direct with the reader; I don't feed them bollocks (unless it's that kind of story ), but I do know how to put things in such a way that they don't come across as crass, crude and downright smutty (but, don't get me wrong, smutty can be good!). Of course, my voice goes beyond how I write descriptives - my sentence structure, the narrative within my stories, etc, etc, but that piece of feedback really opened my eyes. I thought it was brilliant!

What about you? How would you describe your voice?

Lou

I liked what Perdita said on another thread somewhere, though the context was different . . . it is about seeing. I will get back to you at length on this.

CharleyH said:

I liked what Perdita said on another thread somewhere, though the context was different . . . it is about seeing. I will get back to you at length on this.

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Cool, cheers, babe!

I liked a lot of what Perdita had to say; very insightful that lady.

It'd be based on the influences most likely though I will caveat that I am nowhere near as talented as any of these guys. The tendency to favor melodrama, eccentric characters, and mixing tragedy with a bit of comedy comes from Shakespeare and also vast amounts of sci-fi/fantasy. Love of ironies, eccentric characters, and the feel of my humour likely has a lot of Adams influence or Pratchett influence in it. Overall surrealism probably could be traced back to Bradbury.

I think those points are likely the staples of one of my works, what has arisen in my voice. The bizarre humour, radical mixings of mood, flair for melodrama and surrealism, lack of truly straight-man non-eccentric characters, tragedy tempered with humour will always be there despite the tone or the style or how experimental I am, I think.


Overall, I might be one of the least qualified to judge my own work. Only recently did I notice the melodrama portion and for years I had thought Bradbury had been my biggest influence until I noticed all the Shakespeare and Adams stuff I was subconsciously trying to copy. So someone else will have to tell me if I'm even close in pinpointing what my voice is and contains.


Oh and to answer your earlier question, yes, I can see a distinct voice and tendency in my writing, and its definitely one I'm "settling down" into. I'm just trying to figure out what its all connected to.

I know what you're referring to. There's a manner of putting things I've "heard," and "heard" more strongly and distinctly in the last couple efforts. I'm too new at the game to be sure it won't change, but I hear a cadence that is mine.

The highfalutin and the contrasting Anglo-Saxon in the same phrase-- that's distinctive. I prefer to use verbals if I want an adverb; my sentences are burdened with verbals. There are patterns in the rhythm of my paragraphing. Some characters seem to notice smells a good deal, and everyone does at crucial points. I dunno how to isolate the elements of it, but I hear it when I read. It's much fainter in the first ones.

Yui's words have a distinct feel to them, and she is body-centered. It happens emotionally, and it is rooted in the body, for yui, although it may just be that the two I read were like that.

I think I might recognize shereads' prose.

I love impressive's stuff, and there's a crafty quality and a fine pace. But I'm not sure I could pick it out of a lineup. The concept is a subtle one.

Lucifer_Carroll said:

It'd be based on the influences most likely though I will caveat that I am nowhere near as talented as any of these guys. The tendency to favor melodrama, eccentric characters, and mixing tragedy with a bit of comedy comes from Shakespeare and also vast amounts of sci-fi/fantasy. Love of ironies, eccentric characters, and the feel of my humour likely has a lot of Adams influence or Pratchett influence in it. Overall surrealism probably could be traced back to Bradbury.

I think those points are likely the staples of one of my works, what has arisen in my voice. The bizarre humour, radical mixings of mood, flair for melodrama and surrealism, lack of truly straight-man non-eccentric characters, tragedy tempered with humour will always be there despite the tone or the style or how experimental I am, I think.


Overall, I might be one of the least qualified to judge my own work. Only recently did I notice the melodrama portion and for years I had thought Bradbury had been my biggest influence until I noticed all the Shakespeare and Adams stuff I was subconsciously trying to copy. So someone else will have to tell me if I'm even close in pinpointing what my voice is and contains.


Oh and to answer your earlier question, yes, I can see a distinct voice and tendency in my writing, and its definitely one I'm "settling down" into. I'm just trying to figure out what its all connected to.

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Thanks, Luc. I think you nailed it, btw, about your own writing. I really must read more of you.

You raised a very important point there: our influences and how they affect and even help to mould our own voices.

I think the biggest influences on me are contemporary horror writers. Those I love to read are very direct (hard hitting, perhaps?) in their writing - I am not talking Stephen King, Anne Rice or Dean Koontz here, btw, as all three of them do tend to be overly-descriptive. I'm talking Richard Laymon, Edward Lee, Ray Garton and other writers in that vein. They tell it how it is and concentrate on the characters and moving the plot along through them, not the scenery. Those are "habits" I've picked up and I think are reflected in my own writing, subconsciously.

So, a further question: as writers, are we what we read?

I don't really recognize it, but Colly has mentioned something along the lines of a "cloudy story" several times, meaning it's typically me. I take it as a compliment, honestly.

You'll have to ask her what she means but she said once that it was the ebb and flow of the story that made it a typical cloudy story.

cantdog said:

I know what you're referring to. There's a manner of putting things I've "heard," and "heard" more strongly and distinctly in the last couple efforts. I'm too new at the game to be sure it won't change, but I hear a cadence that is mine.

The highfalutin and the contrasting Anglo-Saxon in the same phrase-- that's distinctive. I prefer to use verbals if I want an adverb; my sentences are burdened with verbals. There are patterns in the rhythm of my paragraphing. Some characters seem to notice smells a good deal, and everyone does at crucial points. I dunno how to isolate the elements of it, but I hear it when I read. It's much fainter in the first ones.

Yui's words have a distinct feel to them, and she is body-centered. It happens emotionally, and it is rooted in the body, for yui, although it may just be that the two I read were like that.

I think I might recognize shereads' prose.

I love impressive's stuff, and there's a crafty quality and a fine pace. But I'm not sure I could pick it out of a lineup. The concept is a subtle one.

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Thank you, Cant! Yep, all of that is exactly what I was getting at.

I loved how you described how you hear a cadence that is unique to you in your own writing, and also how you've seen that in others. Being told this kind of thing really is good for our writerly souls.

cloudy said:

I don't really recognize it, but Colly has mentioned something along the lines of a "cloudy story" several times, meaning it's typically me. I take it as a compliment, honestly.

You'll have to ask her what she means but she said once that it was the ebb and flow of the story that made it a typical cloudy story.

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Yep, high praise indeed! And well deserved, I must add!

Colly, care to elaborate?

I'm pretty sure I'd recognise your 'voice' Lou and charley's - you both have distinctive styles.

As for my own, it seems fairly clearly defined though I 'shocked' one fan recently by my use of strong language in a posted story, it was a deliberate attempt to move away from my customary style so you might say I suceeded. I'm posting three stories over the next month, one in my normal style and two slightly more salacious. I'll be watching their progress with interest.

Developing a voice here has been crucial to my development as a writer, it has given me the confidence to expand my writing horizons and to experiment with different formats and genres. I would urge people serious about their writing to use Lit to entertain and to broaden their own abilities by pushing at boundaries - you won't get better feedback from anywhere else. Use Lit as a tool, but don't forget you owe a duty to your readers to entertain and titilate (even in non-erotic).

neonlyte said:

I'm pretty sure I'd recognise your 'voice' Lou and charley's - you both have distinctive styles.

As for my own, it seems fairly clearly defined though I 'shocked' one fan recently by my use of strong language in a posted story, it was a deliberate attempt to move away from my customary style so you might say I suceeded. I'm posting three stories over the next month, one in my normal style and two slightly more salacious. I'll be watching their progress with interest.

Developing a voice here has been crucial to my development as a writer, it has given me the confidence to expand my writing horizons and to experiment with different formats and genres. I would urge people serious about their writing to use Lit to entertain and to broaden their own abilities by pushing at boundaries - you won't get better feedback from anywhere else. Use Lit as a tool, but don't forget you owe a duty to your readers to entertain and titilate (even in non-erotic).

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Hear hear! Well said, Neon.

Cheers, mate!

I do believe you have quite a distinctive voice, even when you fool people into thinking you are a woman, through your writing.

You tend to have very strong, but at the same time, tender, characters. Your writing is clever, without being aloof, and it's evident you know your stuff - you do some fine research, if you don't already know it! I always enjoy reading you.

Another comment I've gotten several times, that I forgot to mention, is my tendency to use other languages to set up characters and settings.

In my halloween story, I used Creole, in a dragon story that isn't finished yet, I used some Welsh, and in the story that I'm working on finishing up for the Magic chain right now, I use some Chickasaw...but I'm one of those people that language comes fairly easy to.

Tatelou said:

So, a further question: as writers, are we what we read?

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I don't believe that we are what we read, though there is definitely some influence on us by our favourite/most read authors I'd say. But influence is hardly the entire whole. Personally, I don't have the slightest clue what influences any writers have had on me, but I've only written one thing that I really felt was "mine", or from me. It was one of my rewrites of chapter one of the novel I've been working on for entirely too long.

I've not been able to recapture that style in anything else I've written, not that I write very often anymore but thats besides the point.

Anyways, as I was saying, influence is only that, an influence, a hint of something. We are all our own writers, except those of us who purposefully mimic someone's style every time we write. (I did a short story once in english class in the style of Tolkien, wasn't very hard)

What about you? How would you describe your voice?

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God, I am so bad at really putting a finger on such things. Plus, from what I can see of it, my narrative voice isn't always the same as the one I use when writing in memoir-style first person...

damn...now I have something else to think about this evening...<sigh><g>

hehehe

Charley's! Yeah! The girl writes from a point of view wholly her own. The things you expect to see she doesn't tell you, but you get these sharply-focused, revealing little details of breath and gesture, you're told about the play of eyes. In a word, I guess, social. The focus in Charley's work is resolutely on the social. Nonverbal communication, subtle group interactions, social signals pre-eminent. It is a feminine style, too, right to the very bone, despite its freedom and its muscularity.

When I write I try to be both rich and spare at the same time.

Rich, in that I try to use my vocabulary to evoke the setting, character descriptions and character emotions fully.

Spare in that I try to keep the words to the minimum possible to be rich. I don't ever want to snow the readers with words.

A friend of mine who works for Harlequin as a copy editor described my style as 'complex, yet easy to read at the same time'. Others have said much the same. That makes me feel good, it does.

An important part of my 'voice' is also the tenderness I try to project. Had so little of that, it's bound to show up in my stuff. We are writing fantasies after all.

As far as influences go, quite a number. I would never try anything in another style though. Just being myself is enough work.

I don't know that I have a particular "voice". Yui and a few others have said I have an ability to write in different voices. I write charcters and put them into situations to make a story out of it. So I guess if writing different characters means different voices I can be happy with that.

As for style, I like writing from first person. I like putting that character on and living it while I write. I like writing good dialogues that put the reader into the character's head.

I'd say I have been infkuenced to an extent by Heinlein, He's the best dialogue and character writer I have ever read. If I could be half as good as he, I'd be happy.

And neon makes a point. In our longer, more relaxed works, the voice comes through better. Experimental ones, within impressive's works, are different-sounding, for example, than her straight-ahead tales.

My pencil renderings can be rather generic, you know, like they could be anybody's, especially when I am working very hard on them, as I did with sarahh's torso portrait. When I am looser, the pencil ones get more, uh, mannered; more individual. And when I am doing graphic work, like the toucan on the t-shirt, or the blue bloaters, the little guys with the cannons-- that cartoonish style has a "line" that is my "line." It simply looks like my stuff, altogether. So context is important. Hesse sounds like Hesse in Demian or Glasperlenspiel, but Siddhartha is really polished and gemlike, with a tendency to shorter words and more colors-- an experimental one, I bet.

My voice? Hmm I think it is really difficult to pin down your own voice, your own style as it's often difficult to look at your own work and really evaluate it.

My voice is soft,sexy, romantic yet not too soppy. It has a light feel, it's often humourous and flirty but always passionate. It is poetic but practical and although the point of view may change the voice is always the same.

At least I think so anyway *L*

Damn, I just returned and I need to blush before I post, now. Thank you, Neon and CantD.

Ok let me think. I feel pressure for profound . . . LOL. . .

Simply, my style is a reflection of who I am at varying times, a reflection of how I see and hear the world more than look and listen. It is - perhaps - these things that make my style distinctive to me. I don't see too many others that write in the same style as I do, but an editor once thought I was influenced by Marguarite Duras. Although I have become a fan, I had never heard of her prior. My influences are twofold, despite that I love reading absurdists and existentialists: non-fiction (theory, history, information) and poetry. I am a whore for both.

My themes vary, but there is a similar thread of contrasts and dichotomies that dominate simply because those are the things that fascinate me. Reality vs. illusion is a main theme in the stories I have worked on the most. I don't really think too much about the stories I write just to fulfill an obligation for a chain story or a contest, but I do believe I pursue those stories with just as much passion, though not as much care.

How did I find it? I didn't. My style has simply been a part of the ever changing me, and therefore it is also subject to change as my perspective does, as I do.

- God, I hope that makes sense -

I think that my 'voice' is too recognisable, even as jeanne_d_artois, but perhaps not as Jonathan Swift.

It has developed over several years and I can see the changes in my posted stories.

I suspect that many people on the AH could recognise an Og post, even without my name attached. Hint - too many commas.

Og

I have no voice, yet I must scream....

My style is long sentences, most of them involving commas or semi-colons, as I very rarely write with just one-clause sentences. Also a lot of my writing involves thoughts and some internal monologues. I'm sparing with description, except when I'm writing Lit stories. Then I go into great detail when the clothes come off, but usually about how thinks feel and sound rather than how they look.

You may not know what colour clothes my Lit characters are wearing, but you know what sounds they make after they've removed them.

The Earl

TheEarl said:

You may not know what colour clothes my Lit characters are wearing, but you know what sounds they make after they've removed them.

The Earl

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I'm the same way when I write. Who the hell cares what kind of clothes they're wearing? When I'm reading porn, I want them naked anyway.

SJ

Tatelou said:

Yep, high praise indeed! And well deserved, I must add!

Colly, care to elaborate?

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I'll try.

Cloudy's works contain an ebb and flow that is distinctive. We talk often about pacing of a story, carrying the build up and back ground through stages to a climax. Cloudy's works have a pacing that I find distinctive, not repeticious or formulamatic, but a more cat and mouse approach to reaching the climax, with advances and retreats, as opposed to many who build like a wave, growing stronger as it gets closer to the climax.

She also has a distinctive descriptive style, visually more nebulous, but still producing strong pictures in the mind.

It's hard to put in words, but that's my humble best effort.