Voice: keeping it straight

Voice is, for me, one of the toughest things to get right.  For one thing, it's everywhere and it's plural.  The narrative voice is the biggie, since it runs through everything and had darn well better be consistent.  But every character has a voice, and each needs to be unique and right for that character.  I don't know about you, but I have a tendency to make everyone, up to and including my narrator, sound like me at my most ironic.  Needless to say, this is not always appropriate (though I gave the first-person narrator of Murder Stalks the PTA  permission to be the snarky cynic I sometimes feel like, and she's just fine, thank you).

Narrative voice is a character, just like any other.  What kind of character is determined in part by whether you choose to write in first person or in one of the various forms of 3rd person (or, I suppose, second person, but there are good reasons why that is uncommon).  But there are still so many variations, and like any other character, it develops as I write.  That means--yup--have to go back later and make it consistent.

You all know about the different kinds of narrators.  When it comes to voice, a first person narrator is an extension of a particular character, and the narrative voice should be consistent with (but not identical to--this part is a bit fuzzy) the conversational voice (and vocabulary) of that character.  It is also limited to what that person can see and know.  Thus, in The Ninja Librarian, the narrator (Big Al) can tell only what the Ninja Librarian does--never what he is thinking or why he does something, unless he explains (something he almost never does).  This allows me to keep the Librarian a bit of a mysterious presence--something I'd lose with an omniscient narrator.  Al must also use vocabulary  appropriate to the setting of the story.  Even with a first person narrator, however, the speech of other characters should be reported in their voices, not the narrator's.  Characters must still be distinct in their speech as they are in their actions.

The author will have to decide if the narrator will report the speech of more educated characters exactly as they say it--or as the narrator understands it.  So a child narrator might report the speech of an adult with mistaken words, to indicate the child's lack of understanding--but this, I suspect, should be used sparingly and deliberately, when the misunderstanding matters to the story.  Otherwise it's just cutesy (ick).

Third person narrators are divided into several types, which are described in just about any book on writing and I refuse to go into it all here.  I already told you that know all about it anyway. I'm interested in what that 3rd person sounds like.

Any form of third person narrator is typically written in a more neutral voice (for me, that means I have to go delete the wisecracks).  I think that the omniscient narrator who speaks aside to the reader about the characters and the action is not much used anymore, though it is not uncommon in older works, especially for children (Louisa May Alcott, for example, frequently breaks the 4th wall and addresses the reader directly with commentary on the behavior of the characters.  This reads today as a charming and anachronistic stylistic quirk, or annoying preachiness, depending on what she says and how you are feeling).  Whatever it sounds like, though, your narrative tone must be consistent.

Consistency is in fact the nub of what I'm talking about.  Big Al must always sound like Big Al.  The third person narrator of Halitor the Hero needs to be the same throughout, without changing level of diction or degree of insight into people's thoughts and motives.  This is harder than it sounds.  The temptation to use some clever turn of phrase can be overwhelming.  Go ahead if you must--but be sure to edit it back out later, when you've gotten over your cleverness.  Right now I am finding that Halitor's narrator is evolving a bit, and I'll have to make some decisions about levels of omniscience and involvement, then go back and edit until it all matches.  I'm pretty sure a 3rd-person narrator shouldn't evolve through a story (unlike a 1st-person narrator, who is expected to grow and change).

If you create a narrator who only observes, who is not allowed inside anyone's head, then proof very, very carefully for any place you wrote the words "he thought" or "she felt," because that violates the narrative voice you selected.  I am finding that it is pretty easy when writing in the first person to stay out of everyone else's head.  But I am writing Halitor the Hero with a third person narrator limited to peeking inside Halitor's head, and it feels slightly frustrating.  I want so often to comment on what another character is thinking or feeling.  I suspect it is very good discipline (and definitely good narration) to beat down the temptation.

As mentioned above, there is another aspect to voice: the voices of each individual character.  This one is really hard.  You have a whole zoo of characters, and while some are minor enough not to have any real personality (but I think that's probably another red flag requiring further editing--unless a character matters enough to have some individuality, what is her or she doing in the story?), in general each is going to need to be distinct from the others.  Manner of speech, tone, the things he or she will talk about.  Listen to the people around you.  No two sound alike, and I'm not talking about soprano vs. bass.  Different vocabulary.  Different tempi.  When you read your dialog aloud, can you tell who is speaking?  No?  Time for more revisions.

It's always time for more revisions.

I was going to write a bunch more about voice and how to get it right, but I think I'll just fall back on my #1 bit of revision advice: whether you are writing fiction, non-fiction, or even poetry, read it aloud.  When you say it and hear it, you will truly hear it.  I will also fall back on my assertion that I do not know what the heck I'm doing, except learning a whole boatload of stuff that they never taught me in those useless creative writing classes I took in school back in the Dark Ages.

Cool words

Just a few words I've stumbled across that I really like.  For whatever reason.

Immiserate.  v.  I never knew there was a word specifically for making people or conditions miserable.  Just found this in 1491, p. 350.  "In their home ecosystems these species have, like all living things, a full complement of parasites, microbes, viruses, and insect predators to shorten and immiserate their lives."  Mosquitoes can sure as heck immiserate my life!

Bloviate.  v.  To go on and on, windily and without much meaning.  This one isn't in a lot of dictionaries, which is a shame, because it was invented for politicians.  To describe them, that is.  It may have originally just meant idle chatter (see Wikipedia), but Warren Harding used it to describe political speech and there it stays.  Politicians bloviate from one day's end to the next.

Weskit.  n.  Waistcoat; what we in the States would call a vest, as a man's garment (the vest in a 3-piece suit).  Hobbits wear weskits.

Kvetchable.  I don't think this is a real word, but it was in today's paper and I love it.


Making distinctions: hurt vs.  harm.  I'm not sure that this is completely 100% per the dictionary, but this last six weeks of recovering from foot surgery has taught me the difference between hurt and harm pretty effectively.  Bottom line: lots of things hurt the blasted foot, but very few do any actual harm.  Physical therapy hurts, but far from doing harm, it is necessary if I want the thing to stop hurting.  Go figure.

And to go with my earlier post on not misusing words, this one is for the record: 
Literally.  An adverb meaning something should be taken in the literal sense, i.e. exactly according to it's meaning.  So if you tell me lunch was so late you literally starved to death, I'd better be looking at your lifeless body.  Now, my copy of Webster's admits the use of it as a form of emphasis, but the OED does not, and I'm with Oxford this time.  Using "literally" to emphasize a figure of speech makes no sense.  Just don't do it.

Lost in Space--Flash Fiction Challenge

I've bitten on another Chuck Wendig Flash Fiction challenge.  Playing on the "write what you know" meme, he asked us to take an incident from life and turn it into a bit of fiction, preferably genre fiction.  I'm going to take a pan that once went missing right in my house, and put it with a ghost on a space ship.  It's 1000 words max, but I came in well below.

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Arthur had waited a long time for the chance to steal something.  He didn't even know why he had to, but ever since he’d died he’d felt like he couldn’t move on until he stole something from the living.  And there is so little on a space ship that isn't fastened down.  He couldn't believe his luck when he saw the frying pan, just lying on the counter like an abandoned sock.  As soon as he wrapped his ghostly hand around the panhandle, the whole thing vanished into the seventh dimension, where neither ghost nor living human could enjoy it. What was the point?

 *  *  *

Sarah was unpacking the shuttle.  They'd had a good holiday Down Below, but it felt good to be home again.  She and Gil had lived aboard the Lady Luck since they were married four years ago, and this had been their first real trip dirtside.  Haven was a fully Earth-like planet, and very little developed, so they'd been able to land the shuttle where they wanted and had enjoyed a grand week of fishing--you could even eat the local fish--and a lot of lying in the sun.

 She pulled the kitchen supply bin out of the shuttle, and the frying pan that had cooked so much tasty fish tottered on the top.  She didn't want it to fall, so she set it aside on the mechanic's bench and carried the box into the dining bay.  Some spacers let the machines do all the cooking, but Sarah liked to cook. She'd grown up dirtside on Golden, and always stocked up on what she called real food.  Gil laughed at her, and sometimes grumbled about the extra space her kitchen supplies took up, but he liked her cooking and humored her.  Still, he let her haul all the kitchen stuff off and put it away.

 Sarah puttered around the dining bay happily stowing her gear, then a glance at the chronograph told her it was time to fix some dinner, so she got on with it.  Just a simple dish, the last of the campfire bread she'd baked that morning, and a bit of the local cheese.

 It wasn't until the next morning that either she or Gil remembered the frying pan, when she wanted it to cook up some bacon she’d picked up in port.  She sent him to fetch it.  Gil came back in a minute.

 "It's not there.  Are you sure you didn't bring it up here?"

 Sarah sighed.  Typical male.  Couldn’t find his head if it wasn’t attached.  "I'll go.  I know just where I put it."  She did, too.  The trouble was, it wasn't there.  The bench was cleared and secured for zero-G, though they were still running the gravitation motor.  There was no frying pan on it.  She searched the cargo bay, then each part of the ship, even the ones they hadn’t entered since returning.

 There was no frying pan anywhere.

 "Gil, it isn't there.  And I KNOW I left it right on the counter.  Could the cleaning ’bot have picked it up?"

 "I didn’t run it last night, since we’d just got back. Anyway, it’s programmed to avoid the mechanic’s bench.  We’re the only people on this vessel, and we didn’t either of us touch it.” 

Sarah looked at him suspiciously.  ‘Are you sure. . . I know you think my cooking gear is an extravagance.”

 “Swear by all that’s sacred.  Anyway, I would never get rid of that pan when you had bacon to fry!”

 “I suppose not.  It’s gone, but no one and nothing could have picked it up."

 "Only a ghost," he said, and they laughed.

 * * *

Down in the cargo bay, Arthur’s last thought as he slipped into the eighth dimension was that, at last, he knew why he had to steal.  He’d never see that pan again—but it had freed him at last of the blasted ship.