Writing with Your Own Voice

I do not usually take life or myself terribly seriously and this shows in my writing. I do have a serious side, though, and it too shows up in my writing. Most of my romance novels are lighthearted, with an underlying serious theme. My suspense novels are serious, but leavened with humor.

As one example, one of my romances, Until October, is a happy romp between a chiropractor and a children's zookeeper, but it also deals with what happens to children when their mother deserts them.

This Time Forever, on the other hand, deals with the subject of reincarnation seriously, but the main characters have a well-developed sense of humor. In other words, I write from my own"split" personality. I write with my own voice.

I delayed beginning to write because I was sure I didn't know anything that would be useful in fiction writing. Eventually, of course, I realized that I do have quite a lot of knowledge and experience. I have seen death. I have seen a baby born. I have loved someone who didn't love me. I have loved someone who did love me. I have known jealousy and greed and hope and hatred and envy, pain and joy and shame. All of this became part of my writing style, my voice.

As a child, I read mostly English classics--Thackeray, Dickens, Austen. I also read the kind of books that had to be kept secret from parental eyes, usually in my bed under the blankets by flashlight. I read constantly, avidly, indiscriminately, but I did not draw deliberately or consciously on any of these reading experiences when I finally got around to writing myself. Every once in a while, I come upon advice to beginning writers that suggests that they should read their favorite author and try to write in that style until they develop a style of their own.

This advice appalls me.

In my opinion, the only way you can develop your own voice is to live your life as fully as possible and spend a great deal of time listening to what is going on inside your own head. Everything you have seen and done and smelled and touched and listened to and experienced has gone into making you the person you are. And if your writing is to be original and authentic it

is this person's voice that should come out on paper.

Years ago, I read Eric Berne's handbook of transactional analysis, The Games People Play. There's a story in there about a little boy who:

"sees and hears birds with delight. Then the `good father' comes along and feels he should `share' the experience and help his son `develop.' He says: "That's a jay, and this is a sparrow." The moment the little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing. He has to see and hear them the way his father wants him to. (The emphasis is mine.)

The first time I read this story, I pondered it for a long time. It had touched a chord inside me, and it took me a whileto realize why. The story of the little boy and his father gave me permission to stop listening to other people's voices. I had certain opinions, as most of us do, opinions about life, politics, sex, relationships. But when I started listening to my own voice I realized these opinions were not really my own. They were either opinions I had copied from others, or opinions I had developed in opposition to others. I began asking myself, Is this really what I think? Does this seem true to me? All of this questioning became part of my writing voice. I enjoy visiting art galleries. The paintings I like are all very different at first glance, but a more careful study shows that they have something in common--none of them is representational. I don't care for painted images that could have been taken with a camera. I want art in which the artist shows me a different way of looking at things--his or her way, a way that I would not have seen without his or her help.

Helping the reader see things through your eyes, your thoughts, your attitudes, is part of writing with your own voice.

When I decide on a background for one of my novels, I check the accuracy of everything I want to write about. And this search for authenticity is part of my voice.

I love to travel. I love to meet people, especially unusual people. Parts of them and parts of the places I visit go into my novels, and my voice is there showing the reader, through my characters, how I feel about these people and these places. With this approach your work will be unique and original because no one else will have exactly your reactions.

I draw heavily on my own experiences, as I'm sure most writers do. Almost every activity you find in my novels, I have done. Read my books and you will know me. The food the characters eat is food I have enjoyed or hated. The wines, the emotions, the flowers, the allergies are all mine.

I will concede I have written of murder without murdering anyone. But I have had murderous thoughts on occasion. Who among us has not? I have also had experiences that made my heart race with fear. I've heard things go bump in the night. I can draw on the emotions and the physical reactions I had to those experiences even if I don't use the actual experiences. (Mostly they were too tame to scare anybody but me.)

Most real experiences can't be used in fiction exactly as they happened. Viewed through our characters' eyes, instead of our own, those experiences change. Often I have read a passage in a beginning writer's manuscript and have commented that it's not too believable, only to have the writer tell me, "But you said to write from my own experience and that's how it really happened."

Yes, by all means, use your experiences if they lend themselves to your stories, but allow them to change, to evolve, to entertain, according to the needs of your story and its particular fictional reality. Use them as a jumping-off point.

Your stories can say something. Some writers insist you should be able to sum up your novel's meaning in one sentence. I'm not sure that's always possible, but it's a good idea to keep track of what your novel as a whole is saying and whether this is what you want it to say.

Reading the manuscript of a children's book recently, I had to point out to the author that the story as a whole was saying that if you played hooky from school, you could get all kinds of rewards. This was not the message the writer had in mind!

In my various writings I have addressed the subject of what we are doing to our oceans; the often rocky relationship between parents and children; how to deal with grief and misplaced guilt, among other issues. The issues I use in my novels are issues about which I personally feel strongly. Your issues are probably different. They should be. If those issues will illustrate the themes of your novels, use them. Use them as part of your own voice.

None of this means that you, the writer, or your characters, should get up on a soapbox and begin preaching about your favorite causes. Instead, let your characters' actions illustrate your themes.

Finding your own voice is not easy. Beginning writers often talk to me about their lives in a manner that is witty and articulate and intelligent. And then I read their manuscripts.

What happens? Why do so many bright people think that the only good writing is "highbrow" writing? Why do they become stilted and stiff and clichéd the minute they start talking with their fingers on a keyboard? Their characters move with all the enthusiasm of Lot's wife, after she turned around for that last lingering look. These same characters interject, interpolate and discourse, harangue, and disclaim. They never just say something. And when they discourse or interject they use words like opprobrium, and disestablishmentarianism.

It is wise for us all to remember that good writing is clear writing, writing that gets the job done, writing that communicates.

When I first arrived in this country from England, I wrote a shopping list and my husband went to the local Air Force base commissary to buy the groceries. He was soon home again, without several items. He'd had no idea that "a joint" was meat for roasting. He didn't know "serviettes" were paper napkins, "jelly meant gelatine, not jam, "treacle" was molasses, or that when I asked for "a packet of biscuits" I didn't want biscuits, I wanted cookies. Obviously, I had to learn to communicate with words that meant something to him.

This is the whole idea behind any kind of writing, whether it's the great American novel or a letter to the editor, or a memo to the boss. The person on the receiving end, your reader, has to be able to understand what you are saying.

While developing your own style, then, remember that the best writing is not purple or flowery prose or writing that is meant to impress the reader with your esoteric knowledge. Simple writing, clear writing, straightforward writing, can be beautiful enough to move a reader to tears.

In 1859, Charles Dickens, writing A Tale of Two Cities, began:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair...

Today's reader might possibly stumble over "epoch." I had to look it up myself to be sure--it means "a particular period of history." Other than that one word, the passage is as easy to read and understand as it was when Dickens wrote it. I wonder though if it was easy to write. Perhaps for Dickens it was. For me, it never is. The easier it reads, the freer it sounds, the more I've had to prod and poke at my brain to produce the words I want.

Hemingway said:

"The first and most important thing for writers today is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone."

I don't always get my prose pared down to the bone, though it's something to aim for, and I do try to eliminate the fat, the extra words, the words that are not necessary to tell the story. And the adjectives. Writers are always being advised to toss out all their adjectives. Well, I'm rather fond of adjectives. I think prose loses a lot of its color if you take out all the adjectives. "A bony woman with a flat nose," gives me a more vivid picture than "a woman." Ditto, a portly man wearing a tweed cap.

All the same, I try to avoid using more than one adjective at a time, or at least more than two at a time, and I do cut them out when I'm absolutely sure they aren't serving a legitimate purpose.

I have to watch out for adverbs too, which I tend to sprinkle liberally after "said" in the first draft. "He said softly." "She said lovingly." I know all the arguments. "He whispered" and "she murmured" are stronger. But sometimes "He said softly" sounds right.

Moderation is the key word.

I do follow most of the rules of English grammar, with some exceptions during dialogue sequences. Most people don't use proper grammar in conversation, especially if they get excited. But when you as the author are writing narrative sequences or transitions, the grammar should be as good as you can get it.

This goes for spelling, too. Computer spelling checkers are not infallible--they don't notice if you type too instead of to, or stare instead of stair or their instead of there, since these are all real words, and the spelling checker therefore accepts them as correct, even if they are wrong in a particular context.

I try to write visually, remembering to use strong specific nouns--"the brownstone" or "the bungalow" rather than "the house." I look for active rather than passive verbs, verbs that help to paint a picture: "He strode across the empty lobby," or "She jogged along the boardwalk," or "The German Shepherd darted between parked cars and into traffic."

Strong active verbs can do wonders for your style:

"Claire attacked her oysters."

"Sailboats scudded across the Sound."

"Dan scuffed sand with his bare toes."

As a last comment on writing with your own voice, I'd like to share with you the words of a woman named Margaret Fuller Ossoli, writing in The New York Tribune in 1846:

Truth is the nursing mother of genius. No man can be absolutely true to himself, eschewing cant, compromise, servile imitation and complaisance, without becoming original, for there is in every creature a fountain of life, which, if not choked back by stones and other dead rubbish, will create a fresh atmosphere and bring to life fresh beauty.

Copyright 1995-2010, Meg Chittenden