Writing is more than a collection of words strewn across the page. It has life and voice. We hear it when we read to ourselves. It speaks to us and takes on a life of its own depending on the author.
The voice of a story is what makes it come alive in the reading and it is the most important skill a writer can have. It’s what sets one writer apart from another—a Hemingway (short, short sentences) versus a Faulkner (who goes on and on), a Gaiman from a Melville. These are not the same voices. They sound different in our heads. The way these authors string words and sentences together creates different rhythms and cadences as we read along. They pull at us differently.
Below are a few examples of voice in writing. The first example is from one of my favorite authors. I cannot read her books without lapsing into my own Southern accent. She pulls it from me with the first word and my diphthongs stick around until I have read the last, to the utter horror of my friends and family who thought I had lost vestige of my youth that long ago. They are not wrong; I did, mostly, but not when I read Joshilyn Jackson.
“There are Gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel’s, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus. I left one back there myself, back in Possett. I kicked it under the kudzu and left it to the roaches.”
Gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson
Voice Is a Skill
Voice is a rare skill that transforms ordinary words and sentences into a form of magic that makes those words sing. It is a skill that writers must learn and practice. Voice is what will make you succeed, more than anything else. The rest can be edited. Voice cannot. It is unique to the author.
The best way to find your own voice is to read and write. Voraciously. Look for examples of voice in everything and analyze what makes some writing sing and others lay silent on the page. Why do the passages sound different from one other? What makes the voice stand out?
Examples of Voice
Here are a few examples of voice. There are thousands upon thousands out there. If you have a favorite, please share it in the comments section.
Look, I didn’t want to be a half blood.
If you’re reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close the book right now. Believe whatever lie your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life.
Being a half-blood is dangerous. It’s scary. Most of the time, it gets you killed in painful, nasty ways.
The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
People usually start life by being born. Not me, though. That’s to say, I don’t know how I came into the world. Purely theoretically, I could have emerged from the foam on the crest of a wave or developed inside a seashell, like a pearl.
The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers
My history is hospitals.
[sic]
This is not, like, Little Women. Beth and her nice, invalid Beth-ness have always made me puke. The way people imagined she wasn’t dying. The way she blatantly was. In that kind of story, the moment someone decides to wrap you in blankets and you accidentally smile weakly, you’re dead.
Hence, I try not to smile weakly, even if I feel weak, which I sometimes secretly or unsecretly do. I don’t want to make myself into a catastrophic blanket-y invalid.
Bang, bang, you’re dead. Close your eyes and go to bed.
Side note: invalid. Whoever invented that word, and made it the same word as not-valid? That person sucked.
Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley
124 was spiteful. Full of baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old—as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in a the cake (that was it for Howard).
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling