"How do writers find their voices?"

William Haskins · Sep 4, 2014

How do writers find their voices?

Survey of Edinburgh books festival authors reveals that 'hearing a character' means different things over course of a writing career

Jennifer Hodgson
theguardian.com,
Monday 25 August 2014 11.00 EDT

The idea that writers can somehow "hear" the voice of their characters is a familiar one, as is the notion that characters seem to write themselves: that the author is merely a kind of conduit for voices that seem to have lives all of their own.

However, describing where that voice comes from, what it sounds like and how it feels to experience a character so intimately is a much more difficult – and more fascinating – matter, as a team of Durham University researchers have been discovering at the Edinburgh international book festival.

Contributors to the project have already written a series of blogs on those writers who have been able to talk about it, including Hilary Mantel, Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens.
More than 100 authors have now completed our questionnaire about how they experience their characters' voices, and we're currently conducting a series of in-depth interviews further exploring how they imagine, hear, listen to and converse with the voices of their characters or subjects.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/bo...al-edinburgh-international-book-festival-2014

Liosse de Velishaf · Sep 5, 2014

My methods and experiences are nothing like those described. I suppose I shall ever be a mediocre writer.

NRoach · Sep 5, 2014

Liosse de Velishaf said:
My methods and experiences are nothing like those described. I suppose I shall ever be a mediocre writer.

Mine are pretty dissimilar, too.
The weird distinction between protagonists and secondary characters is the biggest difference from the "norm". For me, they're pretty much equally realised, and the only difference between them is that the protagonist is the person about whom I'm writing.
Also, the sense that they're looking out through their protagonist's eyes. I generally know them like I know my good friends; I simply know what they're going to do.

slashedkaze · Sep 5, 2014

It's spot on for me in so far that I do look through my protagonist's eyes while I don't usually do that with secondary characters. The only voice I hear is my own though. (Or what it would sound like in my character's head.)
I don't really visualize either. It's more snapshots of emotions than pictures for me.

Jamesaritchie · Sep 5, 2014

Hearing how my characters sound has nothing whatsoever to do with my voice as a writer. That doesn't even make sense. I hear teh way my characters sound the same way I hear how anyone else I meet sounds because my characters are not mythical beast, they;re all just real people put down in print. This is all any character is. We meet people, we get to know people, and we remember how people sound. I can't think on anything simpler.

My voice as a writer is what I have to say in my stories, and teh kind of story I tell to say it. My style is the words, sentences, rhythm, flow, etc. that I use to tell this story.

LadyDae · Sep 5, 2014

Jamesaritchie said:
Hearing how my characters sound has nothing whatsoever to do with my voice as a writer. That doesn't even make sense. I hear teh way my characters sound the same way I hear how anyone else I meet sounds because my characters are not mythical beast, they;re all just real people put down in print. This is all any character is. We meet people, we get to know people, and we remember how people sound. I can't think on anything simpler.

My voice as a writer is what I have to say in my stories, and teh kind of story I tell to say it. My style is the words, sentences, rhythm, flow, etc. that I use to tell this story.

This.

Exactly my opinion, but in better wording.

Michael Davis · Sep 6, 2014

Takes time to evolve your writers voice. When I read my earlier works, I notice a distinctive difference in how I characterize, construct and flow my scenes today after 20 stories, and I like the growth. Like any profession, if you listen to your mentors (editors) you mature over time, and that's a got thing.

VeryFairy · Sep 6, 2014

Oh, now I'm a little happier, whenever someone reads my book they say they can see the face of my characters, but I can't. I see nothing, just a vague body, if even that. I'm glad I'm not the only one, I thought that was a very bad thing.

RedWombat · Sep 6, 2014

How do writers find their voices?

First the aspiring writer must spend ten days in meditation and fasting, while writing their outline on uncured goatskin. Then the writer must wrap themself in the goatskin, word side inward, and trudge up the mountainside to the sacred waterfall of reflection. Under the waterfall (which is fed by fresh snowmelt) the writer bathes, reflecting on the proper use of dialog tags, until they can no longer feel their toes.

Wrapped again in the goatskin, shivering, the writer is led by their beta readers to the cave behind the waterfall, where there will be a fire waiting. The writer must go over the outline again, until they realize how hopelessly out of date it is, because obviously the characters won't do THAT. Suddenly enlightened, the writer flings the outline into the fire and rushes out of the cave, hopefully to be met by joyous beta readers with tambourines, or failing that, the Significant Other saying "You were doing that thing with the goatskin again, weren't you? The house stinks like burnt livestock."

Thus are the voices revealed to the author.

Liosse de Velishaf · Sep 6, 2014

RedWombat said:
How do writers find their voices?

First the aspiring writer must spend ten days in meditation and fasting, while writing their outline on uncured goatskin. Then the writer must wrap themself in the goatskin, word side inward, and trudge up the mountainside to the sacred waterfall of reflection. Under the waterfall (which is fed by fresh snowmelt) the writer bathes, reflecting on the proper use of dialog tags, until they can no longer feel their toes.

Wrapped again in the goatskin, shivering, the writer is led by their beta readers to the cave behind the waterfall, where there will be a fire waiting. The writer must go over the outline again, until they realize how hopelessly out of date it is, because obviously the characters won't do THAT. Suddenly enlightened, the writer flings the outline into the fire and rushes out of the cave, hopefully to be met by joyous beta readers with tambourines, or failing that, the Significant Other saying "You were doing that thing with the goatskin again, weren't you? The house stinks like burnt livestock."

Thus are the voices revealed to the author.

This is basically how I see it, too. As it happens, my author spirit guide was the future son of clones of a genetically modified female Charles Stross and Guy Gavriel Kay.

Filigree · Sep 6, 2014

I discovered my voice sometime in the early summer of 2009, after coming out of a high fever during a bout of H1N1 that really should have put me in the hospital. I had been writing for over 20 years. My author spirit guide was a weird ensemble cast of Tanith Lee, Patricia McKillip, Terry Pratchett, and Month Python's Flying Circus, in 1960s Gospel choir robes, and all chanting plainsong warnings about Golden Word Syndrome and not copying other people's styles. Of course, that could have been the cough syrup the night before.

Okay, the fever part is true. It left some interesting hallucinations. But how I write now is nothing like how I thought I *should* write, in 1987.

Mr Flibble · Sep 6, 2014

I found my voice down the back of the sofa, playing poker with the biros and loose change.

I'm not 100% in what the article means by voice tbh, Character voice or authorial voice? These are different animals. And sometimes they eat each other.

William Haskins · Sep 6, 2014

it refers repeatedly to character voices from the first paragraph on and makes an explicit distinction about halfway down.

ishtar'sgate · Sep 6, 2014

I didn't even know I had a voice until several editors described my voice as poetic. So, okay, I have one. As far as character voices, I never hear them but look out at their world through their eyes and hopefully experience it with their thoughts and emotions, not my own.

William Haskins · Sep 6, 2014

from "Hilary Mantel and Virginia Woolf on the sounds in writers' minds"

Mrs Dalloway (1925) is the only one of Woolf's novels that explores how inner voices might engulf the self so that the mind tips into pathological breakdown. She described it as her most autobiographical and yet her most social novel – "I want to explore the social system," she said, "set sanity and insanity side by side". In writing it, she produced a postwar satirical anatomy that ventriloquised brilliantly the voices of a class-ridden, militaristic and patriarchal culture – the "violators of the soul" – voices so deeply internalised that only the sensitive and the marginal might hear them gather into a furious roar.
Many writers, like Woolf, hear voices and see images so intensely they take on the presence of the real. Many have incorporated such intense "hearsights" (Hilary Mantel's term), with similarly tragic or melancholic or traumatic intensity, and used them as vehicles for addressing experiences such as shellshock, sexual abuse, slavery, torture and human violation, as well as madness and the sources of creativity in inner experience (think of the echolalic voices of Heart of Darkness, The Waste Land or Beloved). But we forget how often writers have used the resources of comedy, too, in order to examine the nature and meanings of their voices. As Mantel suggests in the tile of her novel, Beyond Black (2005) : it needn't all be black. From Charles Dickens, Samuel Beckett, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark to Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Coe and Don DeLillo, the comic novel is a rich source for depictions of and reflections on the experience of hearing voices.

In her essay Ink in the Blood, on the relation between illness, voices and writing, Hilary Mantel acknowledges affinities with Woolf in terms that indicate her greater affinity with the corporeal and the modes of the grotesque and the comic. But where Woolf is the modernist writer of melancholia, Mantel is the contemporary who, in Beyond Black, takes the comic novel to places it has never been. A black comedy-cum-ghost story state-of-the-nation-satirical-fantastical novel proposing ways in which we might expand our notions of selfhood and the real, it is her most audacious book. Alison, a woman battling with the demons of an abusive childhood, comes to recognise that her attunement to pain and suffering, her ability to externalise her inner voices and her hyper-vigilant awareness of the mental lives of others, is a kind of a gift as well as an affliction. With all the panache of her own creator, she reinvents herself as a colourful neo-Victorian medium, one who effects a performance of herself in order to minister to the haunted, the demented, the bereaved, the spiritually rudderless, as well as the good citizens of a contemporary spiritual wasteland.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/21/hilary-mantel-virginia-woolf-inner-voices

Mr Flibble · Sep 6, 2014

William Haskins said:
it refers repeatedly to character voices from the first paragraph on and makes an explicit distinction about halfway down.

One -- not everyone clicks through on links (who knows what may turn up? I've been caught here once before. Who knew there was Scooby Doo porn? Damn you Seun, damn you!)

Two -- not everyone agrees on what makes character voice v authorial voice.
Three -- it also mentions the writers own "inner voice". Which is their authorial voice? ??? It then goes on to describe the inner voice of the author v the inner voice of the character but doesn't come to a concrete conclusion (unless I missed it. I may have. The article bored me tbf. Interesting subject, presented too dryly.)

Your point? We read the article differently? And this is a problem because.....?

William Haskins · Sep 6, 2014

Mr Flibble said:
One -- not everyone clicks through on links (who knows what may turn up? I've been caught here once before. Who knew there was Scooby Doo porn? Damn you Seun, damn you!)

Two -- not everyone agrees on what makes character voice v authorial voice.
Three -- it also mentions the writers own "inner voice". Which is their authorial voice? ??? It then goes on to describe the inner voice of the author v the inner voice of the character but doesn't come to a concrete conclusion (unless I missed it. I may have)

Your point? We read the article differently?

you said you "werent 100% sure" which the article was talking about. i gave you the information you were unsure about.

Mr Flibble · Sep 6, 2014

From your POV perhaps?

It still doesn't seem to offer anything concrete, or illuminating, to me. *shrug*

William Haskins · Sep 6, 2014

Mr Flibble said:
From your POV perhaps?

or anyone who reads the article...

Survey of Edinburgh books festival authors reveals that 'hearing a character' means different things over course of a writing career

second line of subhead.

The idea that writers can somehow "hear" the voice of their characters is a familiar one, as is the notion that characters seem to write themselves: that the author is merely a kind of conduit for voices that seem to have lives all of their own.

However, describing where that voice comes from, what it sounds like and how it feels to experience a character so intimately is a much more difficult – and more fascinating – matter, as a team of Durham University researchers have been discovering at the Edinburgh international book festival.

first two paragraphs.

More than 100 authors have now completed our questionnaire about how they experience their characters' voices, and we're currently conducting a series of in-depth interviews further exploring how they imagine, hear, listen to and converse with the voices of their characters or subjects.

4th paragraph.

shall i go on?

Mr Flibble · Sep 6, 2014

Why? I've already said I found it not illuminating, not concrete and I'll add...boring and maybe a tad pretentious to boot. *yawn*

I disagree with you

Do you have a problem with that? I don't -- I disagree with some of my friends in many ways, though we keep it civil. But do you?

ETA from your posts, I think you do. But I would love you to prove me wrong. Then we could actually have a bloody discussion.

William Haskins · Sep 6, 2014

i haven't been uncivil in the slightest.

you said you were unsure about what is actually the central subject of the article. i provided clarification.

you then seemed to simultaneously imply that you hadn't read it, due to a fear of cartoon porn, or that you had but read it differently.

i then showed you multiple examples of the central point of the article, free of fred and daphne doggin', and you then accused me of being uncivil.

since i haven't offered a stance on the subject of character voices, then all that's left to disagree about is whether or not the article is about what it is about.

and that's not really up for debate as it's objectively self-evident what the article is about.

so you're kinda coming off as someone panicking a little bit at the futility of trying to backpedal and dig in your heels at the same time.

Filigree · Sep 6, 2014

Upon a re-read of the article, the subject does appear to be the character 'voices'. I wouldn't know how to answer that, as I interact with mine in different ways. Some, I can hear clearly, and they're obviously different voices than my own internal author voice. Others, it's more like I can hear myself reading transcripts from them. The dueling dialog chain-thoughts are always entertaining.

I sometimes shrug at new writers who gush on about the moment their characters start speaking to them. Mine haven't shut up since I was four; writing is just a handy way to craft something positive out of mild psychosis.

Mr Flibble · Sep 6, 2014

William Haskins said:
i haven't been uncivil in the slightest.

In this thread? Not yet, But you always seem to take the opportunity...

As for the rest -- it is merely that I see things differently from you, I read the article differently from you because, newsflash, I am not you.I have opinions of my own. I know, *gasp*

Is this going to be a problem?

Filigree · Sep 6, 2014

Now, now. I will agree that the basic tone of the article verges on academic pretension. But it has sparked a useful discussion here. At least I found it useful.

(Wanders off to consume a chili dog and beer, and commune with my inner redneck.)

William Haskins · Sep 6, 2014

Mr Flibble said:
In this thread? Not yet, But you always seem to take the opportunity...

i don't always.

Mr Flibble said:
As for the rest -- it is merely that I see things differently from you, I read the article differently from you because, newsflash, I am not you.I have opinions of my own. I know, *gasp*

no, i get that. unique perspectives are the spice of life. but if you argued the shining doesn't take place in a hotel, that's not opinion. you either didn't read it or you didn't comprehend it.

so this isn't really a matter of a difference of opinion. the article is about character voices.

Mr Flibble said:
Is this going to be a problem?

it depends on what you mean by problem. if you mean a flame-war, no. if you mean it as some vague threat, um... heh.

if you mean it in terms of you being able to intelligently discuss the central subject of the article, then definitely so.

"How do writers find their voices?"

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