Finding Your Voice
By Bill Baldwin
It was an honor and joy to welcome Jordan Rosenfeld back to South Bay Writers—we’ve known her a long time! Not only did we hear her wise writing advice on a sunny Saturday, we each received a copy of her book The Sound of Story: Developing Voice and Tone in Writing.
Before lunch Jordan talked about “Voice.” The “Voice” of a piece of fiction emerges from the characters, including the narrator (if you use one): expressing their personalities, the deep-down Who They Are.
You develop Voice via Lexicon and Syntax. How does a character express themselves? Voice evolves from a character’s personality. What is their social and family background? What sort of life have they had growing up? What kind of social environment do they live in now? A Gen X California woman will express herself differently (and behave differently) than a Boomer Dude from the Bronx!
How do your characters speak? Do they use unique words and expressions? Do they hold strong opinions that set them off from one another?
Such questions apply to Point of View as well. Does your narrator participate in the action or watch it from a distance? Is your narrator omniscient? If not, what is their own background and perspective? This all affects their Voice.
After the lunch break, Jordan dealt with “Tone”—how a reader reacts to your writing.
“Tone” is how readers react to your characters and story. Consider the emotions your story may evoke. Your thoughts may evolve through multiple drafts.
“Tone” is also a product of your writing style, which you must carefully consider! How can you manipulate grammar and word choices? Consider the choices you make constructing a sentence! Do you use action verbs? Do you exploit specificity with your choice of nouns? Do you select particular adjectives as you write?
What can you (or a character) interject into the narrative to startle the reader through humor, irony, or juxtaposition?
This all affects how your readers react. You can exploit alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, and other devices to keep your reader involved. Consider sentence length: you can deploy long, complex sentences or short, blunt ones. You can move between one and the other to keep your reader reading (expressing a character’s Character as well)! Consider all this as you write!
Consider how long you spend presenting your story. Can you shorten the manuscript? Shorter may be more griping, more riveting, more “to the point.”
To dive deeper into these topics, I recommend Jordan’s book! It plunges much further, with much more detail, into how to develop your characters and story.
The Sound of Story: Developing Voice and Tone in Writing provides a wealth of information to liven up and deepen your narrative. Find a copy and dive in!