All about voice at Dragon Con.
Longtime fiction critique-mate and aspiring horror writer Darrell, by a stroke of good luck, found himself at Dragon*Con last weekend, the massive, mega-cool, mega-sci-fi-fantasy festival that takes Atlanta over--like zombies--and overruns four or five hotels for four days this time every year. And, smart cookie that he is, he took full advantage of being one of those 30,000 fest attendees and didn't only enjoy the fun, but sought out panels that focused on writing.
His email about it to the seven of us in our fiction focus group was a pretty interesting report on his experience and a follow-up/confirmation of a previous discussion we'd all been having about "voice." I thought that it might be of interest and give newbie writers some much needed information, and so with his permission, I'm posting Darrell's observances here.
I hope you all had a terrific Friday and are going into the weekend primed and ready.
'Til the morrow, then!
*****
Subject: Dragon Con and the question of voice, 9/6/11
Hi Guys!
I hope you guys had a great Labor Day Weekend. I certainly did. I wasn't planning on it, but thanks to the generosity of some great friends, I ended up going to Dragon Con!
While the comic vendors, the parades, the costumes were all as wild and as fun as anything you could expect, I ended up spending most of my time visiting the discussions/panels focusing on writing. I was surprised to find sci-fi/fantasy writers like Terry Brooks, Kevin J. Anderson, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Jade Lee, Jonathan Mayberry and Charlaine Harris taking time out of their busy schedules to talk to us wannabes. And when I say busy, I mean busy. Most of the above have more than a dozen books in print, and all of the above have been on the NYT Bestseller list.
I won't go into all of the discussions, but there was one panel that I thought I'd share with you because we just discussed it at our last meeting. It was a panel on voice, a subject we spent a pretty good amount of time on. Surprisingly (or maybe not), each panel member seemed to have a different idea of what constitutes Voice. After much discussion, here is what I came away with:
Voice is an aspect of style, and there are three voices. There is the voice of the author, which is basically the view of the world filtered through the author's unique experiences. Jade Lee, who is half-Chinese, half-Hoosier (her words), writes romantic fantasy (among other things). She discovered that when she was among her mother's relatives (the Chinese half) she behaved in a certain way, and her words, her tone, her demeanor, her voice, all reflected that aspect of her upbringing. And when she wrote a book based on Chinese culture, this was the voice that she accessed, as opposed to her contemporary sci-fi/fantasy, which she writes in her Hoosier-mode.
Author's Voice is reflected in the choice of words, patterns of speech, rhythm, etc., and it's how you know that you're reading Stephen King versus Dean Koontz versus John Grisham versus Tom Clancy.
Second, is the character's Voice, and is based on what you as the author know about that character. It's like the author's voice, but it's based on that character's experiences, which may have nothing to do with the author's experiences. It's how, if you eliminate the pronouns in dialogue, you know which character is speaking or thinking.
Third, is the Voice of the book/series. A large part of that has to do with setting/events. The Voice of a Victorian novel/series is going to be different from a pulp-noir detective novel/series, which will be different from a post-apocalyptic/dystopian/retro-futuristic/steampunk/dark urban fantasy/yaddah, yaddah, you get my drift. Long, poetic descriptions versus, short, gritty observations, something in-between, it's all designed to help your mind's eye create an image.
(My favorite quote came from an author on that panel. He said that fiction writing is a form of telepathy. Your job is to try to get the voices in your friggin' head into someone else's friggin head.)
I think, and several of the authors agreed, that it's possible to over-think things. At the end of the day, if you're serious about honing your craft, about knowing your subject and characters, a lot of these things will take care of themselves. And for the rest, well, that's what rewrites are for! Hope some of this helps! It did for me. Happy writing!
Darrell
His email about it to the seven of us in our fiction focus group was a pretty interesting report on his experience and a follow-up/confirmation of a previous discussion we'd all been having about "voice." I thought that it might be of interest and give newbie writers some much needed information, and so with his permission, I'm posting Darrell's observances here.
I hope you all had a terrific Friday and are going into the weekend primed and ready.
'Til the morrow, then!
*****
Subject: Dragon Con and the question of voice, 9/6/11
Hi Guys!
I hope you guys had a great Labor Day Weekend. I certainly did. I wasn't planning on it, but thanks to the generosity of some great friends, I ended up going to Dragon Con!
While the comic vendors, the parades, the costumes were all as wild and as fun as anything you could expect, I ended up spending most of my time visiting the discussions/panels focusing on writing. I was surprised to find sci-fi/fantasy writers like Terry Brooks, Kevin J. Anderson, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Jade Lee, Jonathan Mayberry and Charlaine Harris taking time out of their busy schedules to talk to us wannabes. And when I say busy, I mean busy. Most of the above have more than a dozen books in print, and all of the above have been on the NYT Bestseller list.
I won't go into all of the discussions, but there was one panel that I thought I'd share with you because we just discussed it at our last meeting. It was a panel on voice, a subject we spent a pretty good amount of time on. Surprisingly (or maybe not), each panel member seemed to have a different idea of what constitutes Voice. After much discussion, here is what I came away with:
Voice is an aspect of style, and there are three voices. There is the voice of the author, which is basically the view of the world filtered through the author's unique experiences. Jade Lee, who is half-Chinese, half-Hoosier (her words), writes romantic fantasy (among other things). She discovered that when she was among her mother's relatives (the Chinese half) she behaved in a certain way, and her words, her tone, her demeanor, her voice, all reflected that aspect of her upbringing. And when she wrote a book based on Chinese culture, this was the voice that she accessed, as opposed to her contemporary sci-fi/fantasy, which she writes in her Hoosier-mode.
Author's Voice is reflected in the choice of words, patterns of speech, rhythm, etc., and it's how you know that you're reading Stephen King versus Dean Koontz versus John Grisham versus Tom Clancy.
Second, is the character's Voice, and is based on what you as the author know about that character. It's like the author's voice, but it's based on that character's experiences, which may have nothing to do with the author's experiences. It's how, if you eliminate the pronouns in dialogue, you know which character is speaking or thinking.
Third, is the Voice of the book/series. A large part of that has to do with setting/events. The Voice of a Victorian novel/series is going to be different from a pulp-noir detective novel/series, which will be different from a post-apocalyptic/dystopian/retro-futuristic/steampunk/dark urban fantasy/yaddah, yaddah, you get my drift. Long, poetic descriptions versus, short, gritty observations, something in-between, it's all designed to help your mind's eye create an image.
(My favorite quote came from an author on that panel. He said that fiction writing is a form of telepathy. Your job is to try to get the voices in your friggin' head into someone else's friggin head.)
I think, and several of the authors agreed, that it's possible to over-think things. At the end of the day, if you're serious about honing your craft, about knowing your subject and characters, a lot of these things will take care of themselves. And for the rest, well, that's what rewrites are for! Hope some of this helps! It did for me. Happy writing!
Darrell