Here’s a post at Writer Unboxed: Dissecting Voice.
Recently, I commented that I personally like Rex Stout a lot better than Arthur Conan Doyle and that I like both Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin a lot better than Sherlock Holmes or Watson.
Thus, the way this post opened caught my eye at once:
Consider this snippet of dialogue:
“What’s her name?”
“Janet.”
“I don’t feel comfortable calling anyone by their first name, especially a woman. Do you know her last name?”
“No, I don’t. You’ll just have to call her Janet, I guess.
Perfectly good, serviceable stuff, right? Clear, fairly concise, smooth. Now look at how Rex Stout actually did it in the short story “The Cop Killer:”
“What’s her name?”
“Janet.”
“I call few men, and no women, by their first names. What’s her name?”
“That’s all I know, Janet. It won’t bite you.”
The same information, but you can hear Nero and Archie in the second version. That difference is voice.
Yes, it sure is, and what a great choice for this topic. The author of this post goes on:
I’ve written before about how elusive voice can be. I’ve suggested possible places to look for it and covered some of the hallmarks of good dialogue. Today, let’s take a deeper dive into how it can be done.
So you may want to click through to those posts as well. Meanwhile, here’s a suggestion (that I have never followed and don’t intend to) (but I think it sounds sort of neat, though):
Take all the dialogue spoken by one of your characters, put it into a single file, and read it through, all at once. Then do the same for another character, and another. Can you tell the difference between the characters just on the basis of their dialogue? Remember how easy it was to distinguish Nero and Archie were in just two lines.
Doesn’t that sound like fun? Except for crying out loud, who has the time to copy and past all the dialogue for one character into a separate file? (!!!??) I’m trying to imagine spending minutes of my life … hours of my life … doing this, and all I can say is: No. But it STILL sounds like it would be sort of fun and possibly informative to read through the dialogue file once you did in fact do this.
Here’s one I’ve heard of that sound a lot more doable: Flip the book open anywhere (or scroll to a random page of text), read the dialogue, and ask yourself, can you tell who’s speaking just from what they’re saying? I can also see copying and pasting the dialogue just from two or three randomly chosen pages and trying this. Without the names on the page, can you still tell who’s speaking just from the lines of dialogue?
I basically write from the pov of whoever’s voice is clearest to me, but this does mean that sometimes I struggle to find the voice of an important secondary character.
For Marag, everyone’s voice was clear — Sinowa, Marag, Koro, all very clear. Nagaro, Sinowa’s poet cousin, emerged from the story.
For Rihasi, Rihasi’s voice was clear to me from the beginning, but Kior wanted to sound like Esau, until I paused and firmly told myself, no, look, Kior is a better-educated man, much more serious, far more ready to assume betrayal is right around the corner.
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Recently I have found voice to be one of the most important determiners of whether I want to continue a book I have picked up. I want the main character to be distinctive, not in a gimmicky way, but in having something that makes them a unique individual, not a blurry copy of a hundred other characters. There needs to be something that makes me want to keep listening to them. Of course it’s also possible for a character to have a strong voice that I just don’t like…
I can generally tell who’s saying what by the purpose that they are pursuing in the dialog.
The viewpoint character’s voice tends to come through in the prose style, sometimes to my surprise.
And, for the love of all you hold dear, if you do not *have* a voice for your character, don’t tell the tale in first-person from their POV!!!!
This is even worse when it’s TWO characters, alternating their chapters, BOTH in first-person, and you have to keep looking at the character’s name at the start of the chapter just to keep “okay, who’s narrating this bit now?” straight. (I read a book last week that did this. It was a fair mystery book, plotwise… but the “which narrator?” did NOT come through in the prose or the dialogue style. And I hardly remember a thing about it except my irritation at this one aspect. It would have been ten, twenty, a HUNDRED times better had the authors told it in third-person and kept out of their main characters’ non-differentiated heads! I didn’t even *care* about either character by the time I’d fought my way through all that, and I started off vaguely-liking them in the first chapter. And to cap it all off, there wasn’t any reason to have them alternating viewpoints anyway. They were mostly in the same place and thought the same thing about events… aaaaaargh!!! Thoroughly UNlike Ryo and Aras, or Aras and Nikoles, or Esau and Keraunani, or Suelen and anybody from the Ugaro tribe he visited, or any same-place pairing of characters with differing brains and knowledge and preconceptions and desires etc!!! It RUINED the book.)
Of course, when that alternating-viewpoint-character DOES work, it’s dynamite. John Marsden’s “Letters from the Inside”, for example. You’d never mistake Mandy for Tracey. And the plotline absolutely demanded the alternating viewpoints – it’s a series of letters between penpals and you never, ever see either of them outside their letters to each other. (If a *children’s author* can do it…!)
agreed on first-person POV – if there isn’t a distinctive voice, might as well be 3rd person.
Murderbot by Martha Wells is an excellent example of 1st person POV done right. It’s one of those works where you *must* have the first-person POV, because the voice is so distinctive it’s what makes the book. It wouldn’t be Murderbot without it!
I agree with both of you about how essential voice is in first-person narratives, but I’m not keen on non-distinctive voice in third person either. That is, the overall narrative doesn’t need to be distinct in that case, but every single time a character opens his or her mouth, they should speak in their own voice, in close OR distant third. I’d say that if third person is ultra-close, then voice is just as important as it is in first person.
Totally agree about Murderbot. Those stories just wouldn’t work without Murderbot’s distinct voice.