Thursday, March 20: Femme Fatale
CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?
Deborah Elliott-Upton
In her Tuesday column, Melodie touched on how each of the Criminal Briefers were different in their pacing practices. The same goes to another vital distinction among writers: our voice. Voice can be defined as personality on the page.
As a Personality Trainer with CLASServices, I am fascinated by how personality traits show up in our writing, whether it is a professional level or just when you scribble a grocery list or jot off a thank you to your aunt for remembering you on a special occasion. There are a myriad of personality tests – many can be found on the Internet with a simple Google – for us to discover more about ourselves and those who share close proximity space with us on this planet.
As a writer, I am always interested in knowing more about a subject. My husband calls it “having an edge up.” I usually call it research, but some people have told me it’s just being nosey. I really don’t care. I like digging beneath the surface to uncover facts that someone else may have missed. In another life, I may have enjoyed being an archaeologist, a detective and certainly a scientist of some sort. Except, I don’t like to get too dirty, be in fear for my life or deal with mathematical equations. I let my characters do those things. It seems like a good fit.
Some good advice I received along the way was: Be yourself on the page.
“This above all: to thine ownself be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not be false to any man.” –Shakespeare, Hamlet
In my writing classes, I witnessed what could be good writers stumble around trying to imitate their favorite writers. Imitation, although flattery, is always second best to the original. Think about it, who would you rather hear sing, Elvis or an Elvis imitator? Sinatra or an impressionist? Streisland or someone trying to be “just like her.”
“What you can do – better than anyone – is write it your way, no matter what they say.” — Joel Saltzman, If You Can Talk, You Can Write
Class after class, my students share similar problems. They think they need to use “better” vocabulary. Maybe they do, but no reader wants to need a dictionary next to him while he’s reading. My advice has always been: if the reader stops reading and remembers he is reading for any reason, then you’ve lost the sense of suspended belief while he was immersed into the story.
Any word that doesn’t mesh with the characters’ dialogue choices jars the reader from believing the story is happening as he reads it. A Texas sheriff saying “Fuhgettaboutit” isn’t going to cut it with readers any more than an on air TV anchor spouting slang words left and right. Likewise, if the situation and corresponding dialogue doesn’t explain a “better vocabulary” word, then please rethink your word choice.
Just because we devour someone’s book doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re propelled the characters, the setting or even the plot. It may be we really enjoy the voice or the personality of the writer coming through the words on the page.
Not everyone likes the same people. My guess is most of us don’t like a lot of people we deal with every day. Not everyone may like us, but I bet a lot of people do. Finding an author we enjoy reading time after time has an awful lot to do with his Voice.
As Melodie pointed out, each writer on Criminal Brief has a different “pace.” We move through our stories on different feet. So are our voices different – and that’s a good thing. I would think if our bylines were removed from the articles we post here and scrambled from our usual positions, the readership would probably be able to decipher whose work belonged to whom, strictly by the voice.
So, can you hear me now?
It took me a long time to understand what voice meant and even longer to trust my own, but I think you are right in stating it’s importance. Good voice/bad plot I can read but never the other way around.
I’m not sure I agree with your premise that an author’s personality is revealed in his prose as it relates to fiction. A good writer is really something of a chameleon — e.g., the literary voice I use in the Treviscoe stories is 180 degrees out from the one I use in the Cal Ops stories. (Assuming, of course, that I may be considered a reasonably good writer, he said, with manly modesty.)
When the writer writes as himself, meaning to express himself as himself as I am doing now, of course you are completely correct. Speech is one of the gauges of personality.
From an authorial view, though, I view voice less as an expression of personality than as a technique, not any different from POV or rhetoric.
Polonius’ pompous advice to Laertes is not there to benefit the audience — it’s there to set up what a windy old hypocrite Polonius is in the sequel. Shakespeare was being ironic.
And I myself would never consider a motivational speaker like Joel Saltzman any kind of authority on anything at all. His job is to pump you up into thinking you can do anything — he’s a pyschological con artist, a secular revival tent preacher. Especially galling is the idea that if you can talk, you can write. That’s like saying if you can add and subtract, you can perform differential calculus, or if you can run and throw and catch, you can play football. It is true only at the most minimal level of skill.
Now, I’m not saying that finding one’s voice is artificial, that it is simply the application of rules and drill. Writing is an art, and like all art, it transcends rational exposition and analysis. But I do know that the art doesn’t always tell you much about the artist, especially if the artist doesn’t want it to.
Great article, Deborah. Voice is hard to define in writing, and for some, in verbalizing. Most writers have a hard time defining their own voice when someone else is setting the format, the pacing, and even the formula for who, what, when and where, no matter the genre. The personality thing is interesting in that it allows one to think outside the box. Since I am definitely an outside-the-box-in-daily-life, I find it intriguing that I can kill people on paper, seduce people on paper, make people laugh or cry on paper, i.e. I can indeed bring a voice of perhaps the darker side of my personality.
Moot point to some, but I like being “pumped up” on ocassion by motivational speakers who’ve “made it” being a con-artist.
The thing is, which I think you’ve pointed out, is different strokes for different people. The reason I like this is because it gives me the whatever-I-need to keep going in a dog-eat-dog profession.
Sometimes in the world of writing I’ve thought the motto should be “I’m okay YOU’RE not!” Over the years, I’ve found there are those who motivate; who share; who help one to hone their craft and to find their niche and/or voice.
I’ve found there is no formula. Just keep crafting. The voice will come.
Thanks, great thoughts, Deborah.
Good column. It stirs debate.
I think Deborah is right that readers who know our work could figure out who is writing without our bylines. Is that voice or style? I have headache. But I think the prolem is when she equates voice to personality in fiction.
JLW says something like that a writers work doesn’t tell you much about the wrter. And it shouldn’t. That s not the point of fiction. And we’d probably end up boring all the readers to tears if it were. We can’t even get writers to be honest about themselves in thier own so-called biographies.
But I’ve discovered in writing for this blog (which is non fiction with emblishments added)my personality coming through my essays. Now is that style? Voice? Or moi? I have headache.
Sometimes in the world of writing I’ve thought the motto should be “I’m okay YOU’RE not!” Over the years, I’ve found there are those who motivate; who share; who help one to hone their craft and to find their niche and/or voice.
I’m not sure what was meant by this, but if it was intended as a gentle scolding for disagreeing with Deborah’s point and somehow denigrating her for expressing her view, let me just say that
(1) my views were first expressed to Debbie privately, and she subsequently asked me to post them (except for the slam against Saltzman, but Deborah knows full well my jaundiced attitude towards self-help gurus and could not possibly be taken off guard by this opinion); and
(2) my comments were meant constructively, as a means for examining the problem of voice from all sides — if I were interested only in glorifying my own opinions, I wouldn’t have created Criminal Brief in the first place, and I certainly wouldn’t have invited anybody as talented and strong-willed as Deborah Elliott-Upton — who comes, incidentally, with her own posse — to “compete” with me as a participant!
I see personalities spilling out on the paper even in fiction. I have yet to meet a writer who won’t admit “there’s a bit of me in my main character.” It doesn’t matter if you are female and are creating a male character or vice versa. In JLW’s case, we experience pieces of his personality through thoughts he shares with us on Criminal Brief, but go to his personal web site and you’ll see even more of his mind at work in the nonfiction he’s posted there. He’s multi-faceted and IMHO, that shows in his writing in narrative phrasing, character’s expressions, dialogue and word choices. That being said, in his fiction, I see bits of him, too. In the two short story series I’ve read (Treviscoe and the Cal Ops), his personality flows through the scenarios just a bit –maybe not on the surface, but they’re there if you look hard enough.
When I judged writing contests, I could always tell if a writer entered more than once, even if they purposely changed up their format just enough to throw off any indication they were competing with themselves by doing so. Different subjects, different plotlines, even different settings or genres did not veil their voice and if I had a chance to meet them in person later, their personality. Read some Hemingway and tell me you don’t get a sense of the man who wrote those words. It isn’t just his voice, it is the essence of him behind those words. And Poe — he just wasn’t a bubbly guy.
To JLW: First I don’t gently scold, I’m pretty blunt (as a posse, a writer, a person–I mean you should only know me in real life!)
Let me please clarify what I meant–I started writing in the romance genre even though I ended up writing more nonfiction–I was told there was a formula and if I didn’t follow it, I’d never get through. I found that in (gasp, I’m gonna say this anyway–mystery, sci-fi, etc). There is a formula “except” for those who broke through those formulas to great success. That’s why it is sooooooooooo frustrating and thus my motto.
Once I started writing for me and not thee (not you, but the genre guru’s of which self-help are NOT included) I was happier and more successful in my own teensy little right.
I took your comments as constructive as well as opinionated. But I took Deborah’s article that way as well.
I mean, it’s not like I’m opinated or anything.
Thanks for the spat on the keys though, I’ll try to hold back more in the future!
Wow! Perfect! Yes, there ARE subtle distinctions in writing styles, the “voice.” That voice may be part of why I the reader enjoy the story! This post needs to be printed in a textbook. (One I wish I’d read 25 years ago when I was slavisnly copying Steven King…)
When I read James’ historical series, I think he IS Treviscoe. On the other hand, James seems a mirror image of his Cal Ops narrator.
Conan Doyle was dichotomous: Holmes represented the coolly rational, and yet Doyle himself had a deep-seated (and questionably irrational) belief in the supernatural.
When it comes to crossing the gender gap, I started paying more attention when my professor complimented me for having the ability to see inside a woman’s mind. My conclusion is that some can do it; some can’t.
Sidney Sheldon seemed to cross the barrier easily. Robin Cook I give mixed marks. Others, not so good. One male author’s female characters feel like they’re in drag, even as he stops the story from time to time to give us a fashion update. To be fair, this happened to at least one female character by a woman author; you could unplug V.I. Warshawski and plug in a male without changing the story.
It’s trendy in ChickLit to render some scenes from a male’s standpoint and the results are often ghastly. What irony: romance writers should have been paying attention to women mystery writers. With perhaps one modern exception, I give women crime writers top marks in writing from a male point of view.
To me, the mystery is why women suspense authors portray a male PoV so much better than expectedly more insightful romance writers?
Supposedly Science-Fiction writer James Tiptree, Jnr. was “outed” as being a woman (author Alice Sheldon) when she wrote a very unconvincing solo sex scene from a male perspective.
Ulp. I’m not sure I want to read that, Jeff!