Our featured writer today is our very own Frankensteinbeck. Let’s give him a warm welcome!
I had to look up necromancer, wondering if a necromancer is someone who has sex with dead people. Happy to say that it is not!
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PLEASE DON’T TELL MY PARENTS I SAVED THE WORLD AGAIN.
by Richard Roberts
Voice!
How many of you are already nodding? Balloon Juice is full of authors.
For those unfamiliar, Voice is a major writing technique, but control of it is kind of advanced stuff. It’s one of my strengths, so I thought it would make a neat lecture while everyone buys my new book: PLEASE DON’T TELL MY PARENTS I SAVED THE WORLD AGAIN. It’s about a teenage necromancer and a cyborg.
Ahem.
Voice is the speech pattern of writing. Characters have a Voice. Narrators have a Voice. If you can tell which character in a book is speaking just by what they say, then they have strong Voices. If the text is fun to listen to, that’s a strong Voice. Among commenters here, Betty Cracker, Rikyah, and Baud all leap to mind as having strong Voices. When they post, you don’t need to read the byline, you know who it was.
So, how does Voice work? I figured I’d share some of the strategies and gimmicks I use. Some of it’s blunt. Penny Akk said ‘criminy’ all the time and readers loved it. Irene stuffed her sentences with alliteration and puns, and was never ashamed to make them forced and eye-rolling. Magenta went in for bizarre, dramatic, extended metaphors. Cassie constantly makes up new nicknames for people. In my WIP, my main character imagines sound effects for people, so the text is full of woosh and crackow!
But it gets subtler. The theme of Mirabelle’s life is feeling restrained. When she speaks, she never uses contractions, and doesn’t go for exclamations. In Wild Children I leaned heavily into the easiest trick to make text sound like a child – start lots of sentences with ‘and’. Vanity Rose leaned heavily to sarcasm. Even though her accent doesn’t show in her internal monologue, Avery Special uses southernisms like ‘expect’ and ‘mighty’.
It gets subtler than that. Narrative text, even third person, reflects the personality of the main character. What they notice, what they think about, creates a book’s voice. Penny was kind, but self-centered. She described things in terms of how they affected her. In my WIP, popularity-obsessed Stella pays even closer attention to body language and clothing than my text normally does, and is always assessing what impression she gives.
Okay, other authors. I’ve shared some of what I do. Got any tricks of your own to share? Non-authors, any examples of strong voices from books you’ve read?
We can also talk about this book in particular, too, if you like. Conversation does not need to be limited to discussion of “voices”!
Frankensteinbeck
As always, I would like to start by thanking WaterGirl, whose helpfulness and hard work keeps this blog together. I see what you did there, and it was good.
EDIT –
Technically, it just means someone who performs divination by speaking to the spirits of the dead, but that’s one of those definitions that has been completely steamrolled by common usage.
WaterGirl
Frankensteinbeck, please let us know when you get here!
edit: You beat me by mere seconds! :-)
re: “I see what you did there, and it was good.” Last minute change, didn’t have time to check with you, glad it worked out.
When I looked up necromancer, this is what I got.
Baud
You are a master titler.
Frankensteinbeck
@WaterGirl:
That is how the word is used!
EDIT – @Baud:
I wish. While a clever title is fun, a title is advertising. I need something that will get people to look at my book from among a thousand others, and have the person who looks be interested in this kind of book. I try hard and most of the time feel like I’m flailing, as with everything advertising related.
Writing itself, that I feel solid about.
Mr. Bemused Senior
I haven’t read the Caves of Steel in many years, yet what jumped to my mind is Elijah Bailey saying “Jehoshaphat.”
[ETA now I wonder how often it happened. There’s a scene in the Naked Sun where another character points it out.]
Dorothy A. Winsor
I don’t know that I have any tricks. But someone once told me that, when you’re talking about the point of view character, voice is what turns a pair of observing eyes into a character.
Frankensteinbeck
@Mr. Bemused Senior:
I don’t know the book, but yeah, a distinctive vocabulary leaps out at you and sticks, doesn’t it? Alas, that’s not something you can depend on forever as an author, but there’s lots of more subtle stuff.
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
That’s a funny description to hear for me, because I’m always thinking about it from the opposite direction. I have the character. How do I make the text sound like her?
MuSquared
Thank you for helping me understand something that really makes a book for me. I just happened to read Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m a Supervillain this past week, and Penny’s voice was definitely part of what I enjoyed so much about it.
My favorite series these days is the Murderbot Diaries, and Murderbot’s voice is probably about 80% of why I like it so much.
NotMax
@Frankensteinbeck
And then there’s the technomages.
And again.
:)
WaterGirl
@MuSquared: Welcome! I had to manually approve your first comment, but now your comments will show up right away for everyone.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@MuSquared: I love the Murderbot, and her voice is everything.
ETA: I know the Murderbot is a they, but I still think of them as female.
Frankensteinbeck
@NotMax:
I’ve got that one covered twice!
In You Can Be A Cyborg When You’re Older, there’s a counterculture that has taken advantage of body sculpting, high tech, and really big basements to create a little LARPing world where they can live (and die, this being cyberpunk) in a convincing replica of a magical world.
And the book waiting for my editor is Skip School, Make Dragons, about a post-post-apocalyptic world where society collapsed when magic replaced technology, but people still approach magic in technological ways. They carry around little rectangular tablets with useful household spells written on them, for example. The main character is a bioengineer – she operates a ‘soul forge’ that creates or transforms living creatures.
Frankensteinbeck
@MuSquared: and @Dorothy A. Winsor:
Love me some grumpy, cynical, leave-me-alone Murderbot. I’ve only read the first book, but I plan to read the rest.
Mr. Bemused Senior
[free associating] I’m thinking about N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series now, where [slight spoiler alert] she gives a single character different names representing different stages of her life. It was [for me] a very effective trick.
[ETA I don’t usually think about details of writing this way. Guess I’m not a natural author :-) ]
NotMax
@Mr. Bemused Senior
“Oh come on. Enough is too much. ‘Gandalf the Paisley?'”
:)
Frankensteinbeck
@Mr. Bemused Senior:
I like that idea. I like that a lot. Like all good writing I see, I will tuck it away in the back of my head and it will become something, sometime.
@MuSquared:
Oh, and I always love hearing this! I hope you love my books! Everyone loves Penny and gets sad that she is only the main character of the first five books, but I also love her. I love her too much to stretch out her role past her story. It ended, and she is now a background character to the adventures she inspired other kids to have.
Wapiti
@Frankensteinbeck: Oooh, looking forward to that one. I like techno-magic crossovers.
Frankensteinbeck
@Wapiti:
It was fun to world-build and fun to write. I liked thinking about the things that were lost, the things this new civilization could now do that ours can’t, and the things that the new magical world would want to keep so badly that they would find a magical replacement – like refrigeration.
Tony Jay
This is all great stuff. Voice, and how understanding the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of each voice allows you to tell each character’s story in a way that brings the reader right into that character’s world own world. That’s what really good writing is to me.
One day I’ll get it.
Ray Ingles
I’m a longtime lurker who’s posted maybe two comments. Your comments about voice really resonate. My own debut novel is coming as soon as the artist I’ve commissioned delivers the cover, and nailing the voice(s) was critical.
Really weird things happen, but the consequences are as real as I can make them. The voice needs to be sardonic enough to acknowledge the weirdness, but sympathetic enough to sell the emotional responses to an impossible situation. Especially because it’s presented as a ‘found memoir’ with the main character telling his story. So, he’s sarcastic and prone to understatement and implying rather than outright stating.
(“I’m going to assume you, dear reader, have never been stranded in a completely unknown alternate universe. So trust me on this: it’s a wee bit disconcerting.”)
The voice itself has to change with the tone of the events. For example, there are scary or dangerous scenes where the humor recedes. For certain traumatic events, there’s no sarcasm at all, and the prose is less polished – a first draft the author never revisited, because it was too painful.
There are also plenty of footnotes (the MC’s an anthropologist, which is the only thing that makes the situation even theoretically survivable) but by their tone the reader gradually realizes they were added later, by an older version of the narrator who’s seen some stuff and is in a different place, mentally and emotionally.
Even when I’ve sorted out the outline of a story (basic plot and character arcs) I’ve got to figure out how to tell it. Voice is one thing you have to nail down first. If you figure it out later, it’s “throw it all out and start from scratch” time.
WaterGirl
@Ray Ingles: You’ll have to let me know when your book is coming out so we can have one of these Authors posts for you!
Frankensteinbeck
@Tony Jay:
You focus on wit. That gives you a strong voice, but it does make it hard for characters to have strong voices. They’ll all be saying whatever sounds good instead of what conveys their personalities.
Wit is very popular! It was the basis of Douglas Adam’s work. You see how people here eat it up with a soup ladle.
@Ray Ingles:
This is hugely important, wise stuff. When my character is feeling tense, the writing gets shorter, punchier, focused on exactly what’s occupying their attention, because their thoughts aren’t wandering. They’re in tunnel vision mode. When a character takes a moment to relax, that is when I go into lengthy descriptions of the surroundings, slowing down the text. It’s also good for when a character is dazed, because their thoughts are wandering. Word choice gets uglier and more judgmental when a character is angry, and so on. You won’t be doing it exactly the way I do in a memoir style narrative, but yes, you have nailed a major technique.
EDIT – @WaterGirl:
You are the BEST. You know that, right? You try so hard to make this blog a good experience for the readers.
Frankensteinbeck
Okay, folks. Two hours was all I had to watch this blog closely. I’ll try to peek in again when I get chances during the rest of my day. Thank you to everyone who commented, and everyone who just read, and many thank yous to everyone who bought the book! Leave a review, pleeeeeease!
MomDoc
@Frankensteinbeck: Congratulations on the new book! I totally understand about trying to stand out in a sea of new books. It is daunting, isn’t it?
As for voice: I know the mother of my main character has a very distinctive voice. And there are specific words or phrases that I am starting to assign to specific characters (my book is part of a series). I am still learning!
Tony Jay
@Frankensteinbeck:
This is smart. How do you write an interesting character when they are, basically, a bit duller than the story you’re telling?
I suppose that’s where the scenario comes into its own. If the scenario Keith Greyscale is boringly reacting to is well-described and full of background information, that can be even more engaging as a first person narrative than the viewpoint of Gary Bigchuckles.
Did I ever mention I really like your writing? If I didn’t, I do.
SomeRandomGuy
Yes – necromancer was known to those of us who played D&D 2e, because it was the level title for (I think) a 9th level Magic User. Then I was confused in “The Once And Future King” when I came across “nigromancer” which meant “practitioner of the dark/black arts” but I was too proud to use Google in that day.
(What? Invent a time machine, and go forward in time, like, 10, 15, years, just to use a search engine to look up an odd word? No – that is beneath me! I asked this cute chick with a sense of curiosity what she thought of that oddball word, *she* looked it up in the Google-of-its-day (for words), the Oxford English Dictionary, which, in that day, wasn’t the name of a search engine, and was… never mind, you kids today wouldn’t believe me. Anyway, next day, I got to smile superiorly while she spoke about that really neat word – we both played D&D, you see – before admitting that I pranked her. NEVER do this if you’re not good at winning tickle fights.)
Ray Ingles
@Mr. Bemused Senior:
[ETA I don’t usually think about details of writing this way. Guess I’m not a natural author :-) ]
“Engineering does not require science. Science helps a lot but people built perfectly good brick walls long before they knew why cement works.” – Alan Cox (software engineer)
When I started writing (fanfiction mumble years ago) it was instinctive; I’d read so much, the rules and tropes and style options were all processed subconsciously. But hanging out with other authors on forums, and reading stuff on writing, helps bring those into focus and let you reason about them more explicitly.
Being conscious of this stuff helps, but is hardly required. And when you hit a bit of inspiration, when the words are really flowing – conscious reflection just gets in the way. Editing can come later.
narya
Ann Leckie’s “Ancillary Justice” and the next two books of the Imperial Radch collection were an interesting version of voice. It drew me in, even though aspects of it aren’t always my jam. And I’ll second the Broken Earth trilogy. Also: Daniel Abraham’s first quartet of novels (I think it’s the Long Price quartet?) also speaks to Voice, even though I think Abraham was still finding his way.
As an aside, I generally cannot get into unreliable narrators. There’s a current/ongoing series, the first book of which I’ve read but I cannot remember the author or title, and . . . I slogged through the first book, but have noped out of the rest of it; there’s so much good stuff to read!
Downpuppy
I think the toughest voice stunt is to let the narrator’s voice seep into everyone. Is there an example, other than True Grit, where that worked?
Urza
I see the first few books in the series are on audible with membership. Been looking for something new so i’ll give it a try.
Another Scott
This is a great post. I really appreciate your explanation of the details.
And it crystalizes my annoyance with popular but bad TV writing with ensemble casts. Too much of the dialog could be said by almost any of the characters. And sometimes they even finish each other’s sentences! It’s lazy and annoying. Even twins have their own personalities and personal quirks in real life.
Thanks again. Best of luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
Frankensteinbeck
@Tony Jay:
Writing anything deliberately dull is walking on thin ice. It can be done, but it’s an expert move and I’d need to know a lot more to help.
Or are you merely worried that, while interesting, the rest of the story outpaces them? That’s okay. Make the character interesting, write them as who they are, and surroundings and character will bounce off each other in fun ways.
@Ray Ingles:
Writing fan fiction is a damned good way to train writing skills.
@narya:
Those are at best a particular taste. My narrators are all unreliable in the sense that they’re reporting honestly, but they often don’t know the truth. That’s life, right?
@Urza:
Emily Woo Zeller did the first five Supervillain audiobooks and I wish we could have kept her, because she’s good. Best audiobook reader I ever got was Arielle DeLisle for You Can Be A Cyborg When You’re Older, who nailed Vanity Rose’s sarcasm perfectly. Still, between two god-tier performances, who cares if one reader was slightly better than the other?
Kristine
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
You’re not the only one. Which is why folks were surprised when Alexander Skarsgård was signed to play them.
Voice is that one aspect I have never been able to define. I guess for me it’s a blend of character’s personality plus plot plus mood of the scene. The skin covering the bone and muscle.
m.j.
Chuck Wendig writes good characters. His two books, “Wanderers.” and “Wayward.” have a particular character that no one could not love. Pete “fuckin'” Corley.
Chris
@Another Scott:
It’s what I dislike about both Joss Whedon and Aaron Sorkin. First time I watched one of their shows the dialogue was really fun. By the third or fourth one, it’s really hard to ignore that everybody sounds the same.
opiejeanne
@Frankensteinbeck: I loved those books with Penny in them.
WaterGirl
@Frankensteinbeck: Thank you!!
PaulB
This hits on something that has bugged me about a fantasy series I read some years ago. I liked the world-building, the situations the characters found themselves in, the ups and downs of their struggles to win against overwhelming odds, the main villain, etc., but really disliked that the characters all seemed to have the same snarky, sarcastic “voice,” such that you really couldn’t tell which was speaking without the author explicitly telling you.
That one flaw didn’t ruin everything, but it definitely lessened my enjoyment of the series. I figured it was a rookie mistake, but the author did it again in their next series, which was basically a repeat of the first. I didn’t finish that one.
Thad
Well this is a fun ‘small world’ type of thing. I previously bought and read (and loved) your ‘Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m a Supervillain’ and ‘Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon’ books… and now I find out you are a fellow Balloon Juice member.
My current writing project lands more in the YA camp then my previous ones, so now I’m thinking I should read a few more books in this series. Just for research purposes, mind you… not as a shameless escape from from other things I should be doing. ;)