Finding your Writing Voice Part Three

In the previous two  blogposts in this short series, we looked at how you could start the process of finding your own unique writing voice. We established that your writing ‘voice’ is as valid as anyone’s, so long it has sufficient flow to hold a reader’s attention. You were offered some exercises to practise gaining a hold on your voice, and beginning to have confidence in it. You can find this blogpost here. 

We then looked at writing in a character's voice, and how this might be different...and the same...as your own unique writing voice. 

Hopefully, you're gaining that confidence as you write––whatever you write––because ‘voice’ matters whether you're engaged in poetry, fiction, nonfiction or whatever form or genre you write.You can find this blogpost here.

It might be said that the essence of a poet’s work is involved in voice. The prose writer’s decision on how the narrative voice should sound is also an essential one. Although more subtly understood, it’s important for the script writer to understand how they can employ voice in their work. Here is David Mamet (Great American Plays): The dramatic poetry (the text) must possess all the fluidity, rhythmic forces and tonal beauty of which the author is capable. This is to say it would be good if the playwright could actually write… 

In Writing for TV and Radio, Teddern and Warbutten, suggest ‘voice’ is about: direct address – talking to the audience The technique of direct address is frequent in radio plays, and was employed to great effect in the US version of the TV drama House of Cards. Here is Frank Underwood, in the opening scene of the first series.

He’s bending over a dog injured by a car. After sending the only other witness to fetch help, he turns directly to the camera and says: 

There are two kinds of pain. The sort of pain that makes you strong, or useless pain, the sort of pain that's only suffering. I have no patience for useless things. Moments like this require someone who will act, who will do the unpleasant thing, the necessary thing… And, looking down at the dog…There. No more pain… The voice, and what it shows us about Underwood, who has just broken the animal’s neck off screen, has our early attention.

We established that voice is closely related to pouring your thoughts into your writing, and you’ll find that your voice will be at its most confident when you write about the things you know best. ‘Write what you know’ is one of the oldest pieces of advice offered to writers, but confusion arises about this because the advice seems contradictory. Many writers create vivid pieces after researching a subject from scratch. Writers of fiction invent new worlds, or set stories in historic periods they can’t experience. How does this fit with the notion of writing only what you know?

Writing what you know means drawing on your experience, memories, knowledge and your passions. Struggling with subjects that have no interest for you will result in work that is flat and stilted. The very act of researching new ideas will be made easier if you have a sincere interest.

Style and Tone

The terms style and tone are often spoken about, especially in connection to whether a reader enjoyed a book and is talking about the voice of the author. But what are they, and how do they differ from the writer's voice? Are they something you should think about when you are writing or do they just happen? And aren’t they essentially the same thing?

Both are ways to express yourself, and serve an important purpose, while being quite different from each other.  

The words, sentence structure, and grammar—the nuts and bolts of language––create your style and form the way you tell your story. One writer's style might be long, flowing sentences, other writers love sparse, short sentences.  and simple, easy-to-understand words.Think about some of the authors or different genres you’ve read. Typically, each genre will have some style similarities, but each author will put his or her own touch on it. 

Start by asking if your writing style fits the genre you’re writing. For instance, a crime press release should not read like a crime thriller. After all, the reader will have expectations, and veering too far off the established path can cause them to lose interest or simply be too puzzled by the disparity between theme and style to keep reading. So your first step, then, is to find the appropriate style for the genre you are writing, and make it your own.

Tone

can be described as your ‘attitude’ when writing a piece; the feelings about the subject and content. Here is Donna Tart's protagonist: They were deep in their own world; for all the attention they were paying to me I might as well have been in Idaho but that was fine with me; I knew this story. My dad who’d been drama star in college, had for a brief while earned his living as an actor: voice-overs in commercials, a few minor parts (a murdered playboy, the spoiled son of a mob boss) in television and the movies. Then – after he’d married my mother – it had all fizzled out. (The Goldfinch). The tone Theodore takes as he describes his parents explains and illuminates his attitude to them.

When done well, the skilled writer can use the tone of their voice to entice the reader right into the mood – the way the writing makes you feel – of the narrator or other characters.

Exercise: Immersing in Style and Tone

Take a book by an author you admire and love to read (not necessarily contemporary). Read enough to immerse yourself in the writing style and the writer’s voice as well as the themes and forms that are characteristic of this author

Now think how you can use those skills without sounding like that writer. In other words when writing with your unique voice. 

Start by being intentional – Do some research, and figure out what styles and tones can work effectively for your genre. How do you want your work to come across to the reader? Choose your style and tone before you even begin. Remember, you want to find the appropriate style and tone and then make them your own.

Also be consistent – Make sure your writing stays true to those choices or make a full change if needed, but don’t flip flop. This involves reading your work closely after you have finished, to ensure your style and tone stays consistent throughout. Inconsistencies in style and tone can leave the reader confused or annoyed.

Verbal Inventiveness

Alongside the use of sound devices such as assonance, consonance, alliteration and euphony, writers of all disciplines have the opportunity to use phono semantics, employing sounds that create a meaning in the reader’s mind. Children’s writers often take advantage of onomatopoeia, which young readers enjoy. Phonetic symbolism – the emotional use of sounds – can work for adults, but needs to be subtle. Take for instance the use of certain longer sounds, such as EE OO and SS. These are often used in the genres of horror, sci-fi and ghost stories, while GL is visual – glittering, glowing and gleaming. S can sound underhand and slippery, while STR feels strong – strong enough for words used in connection with punishment, such as strapping, striking and even strangling. To find and use sounds in this way, without the reader consciously noting your use, keep an ear open yourself, as you read.

Eimear McBride uses audaciously radical and challenging language  in her book  A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing: 

Feel the roast of it. Like sunburn. Like a hot sunstroke. Like globs dropping in. Through my hair. Spat skin with it. Blank my eyes the dazzle. Huge shatter. Me who is just new. Fallen out of the sky

 McBride’s subject matter is harrowing and she wanted her novel to be a physical experience – a disjointing, sickening and often frightening experience. It was described as being written in…not so much a stream of consciousness, as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense… McBride wanted it to be seen as a clear attempt to push literary boundaries and break new ground in how language was used. Read the interview she gave for The White Review describing how she was trying to give us the thoughts in the first person of a young girl before those thoughts become words. http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-eimear-mcbride/.

Exercise Thinking about Language

• Advertising is a particular area where language is pulled apart and re-invented to help in the selling of goods and services.  So copy-writers come up with new words like melty, dependability, manscaping and ‘Stoptober’, for the NHS October campaign to help smokers quit smoking.
• Choose any advertisement from any medium which attracts you because of its use of language (rather, say, than it imagery).
• Write a poem, a prose freewrite, or a very short scripted scene, using any lingual inspiration or influences you can take from the advert.
• Reflect on your use of language – whether this exercise made you think about the language you use, or if you want to experiment further with these elements – in your writing diary.

HOW TO WIN THE BOOKER: EVERETT AND WOOD.

Although the  Booker shortlist is revered, and always anticipated, it has, in the past, been sometimes a bit of a let-down, often featuring books that are filled with 21st century angst, that are just too long or obscure or unnecessarily dense. Quite often they offer nothing but a bleakness that surely we can do without. This year, though, I've loved them all and can't wait to tell you what each book is about.  So far, in three posts, I've looked at the winner, which has  greener-than-green credentials...Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the deepest and most poetic, Held by Anne Michaels, and the raunchiest, The Safekeep byYael Van Der Wouden. In this post I'm going to look at two more before I finally turn my attention to the only 'quite long' novel on the list. 

James, by the long-acclaimed American author Percival Everett, who is back on the Booker shortlist after being there two years ago with The Trees, has written what I think is the funniest and most powerful novel on this list. 

Stone Yard Devotional, by Australian writer Charlotte Wood, is also a book that made me smile. Maybe Wood didn't want her book to be thought of as  'comic' but  it features, quite heavily, an infestation of mice in an isolated community of nuns, which decidedly raises more than one chuckle.

Percival Everett

Before I began James, I did wonder if the world needed yet another retelling of Huckleberry Finn. But James is a hilariously dark, beautifully compassionate yet deeply corrective, perfect for the 21st Century reader. The titular James, as he'd rather be called, is nothing like the 'Yessum' Jim of the original. In fact, he, and his fellow Mississipi slaves only use such language when the white masters are around. In their heads, in the narrative of this book, and when they talk together, their English is perfectly received. This device allows Everett to present James as  a fully-rounded character, enabling his voice to be heard properly  and giving him the agency to direct his own life, even under threat of the whip.

 

Here's James teaching his children how to speak to slave owners. 

    "Let's try some situational translations. You're walking down the street and you see Mrs Holiday's kitchen is on fire. She's standing in her yard, her back to the house, unaware. How do you tell her?"   

     "Fire, Fire," January said.

    "Direct. And that's almost correct," I say.

    "The youngest of them, lean and tall five-year-old Rachel, said, "Lawdy, missum. Looky dere."

    "Perfect," I said. "Why is that correct?"

    Lizzie raised her hand, "Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble." 

The reviewer Anna Bonet also loved this book; “Powerful” is an overused adjective when it comes to describing books, but it feels right here. In fact, James is more than that. At times, it is brutal to read – necessarily so, given that slavery is one of its primary subject matters – but it also manages to be light and funny and completely gripping. I could barely put it down.

When he realises he is going to be sold away from his beloved wife and children, he runs, falling in with Huck in much the same way as in the original Mark Twain, but in this story, he's the one who cares for the lad, leads their escape and engineers the happy ending. 

Charlotte Wood

Stone Yard Devotional has an unnamed narrator, who constantly surprises us. At the start of the novel she has abandoned her job and husband and, although not religious, decides to spend a short time in a rural Australian nunnery. The convent's routine of bells and service turns out to be just what she needs and she stays; a decision she never fully explains. As she moves through each day as a secular member of a convent, she reveals that she has uncomfortable memories of a girl in her class at school. This woman is now a famous nun, and is about to visit, bringing with her a corps the nuns wish to bury in their grounds. 

The story quickly becomes surreal, almost oppressive, as we watch, fascinated, a dance of manners between  the narrator, the charismatic Helen and the society of nuns. it takes a long time to get permission to give the corps a Christian burial, but meanwhile we witness the infestations of millions of mice being unceremoniously dumped into a deep hole in the ground. 

Orlando Bird, in the Telegraph, says this of the book;  Our narrator’s world is one of “dormant” truths waiting to be “released into the open at last”. Yet Stone Yard Devotional is all the more accomplished for resisting neat conclusions – “I don’t know why” is a familiar refrain – and recognising that even the examined life sits only “on the edge of comprehension”. Wood may not be the first artist to embrace uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, but at its best her novel does it beautifully.

It's a good read, but of the two, I will never forget James' journey up and down the Mississippi. 

Writing about the Climate Crisis–– A Workshop for Writers

photo: Nina Milton

Habitat loss, marine pollution and climate change issues are blighting the natural world. They are also changing the lives of communities across the globe. There are many writers who wish to write this complex subject, but are often at a loss about where to begin and in which direction to head. 

This WRITERS' WORKSHOP is being held on Friday 24th JANUARY 2025 

online, and available to all writers, whatever your situation. 

Co-ordinated by Nina Milton, this 2 hour workshop is suitable for prose writers interesting in pursuing these subjects.  It won’t pretend to find the all answers, but it will allow us to become a little more aware of the issues around the subject and challenge our responses as writers. 

You may be thinking of writing about the changes or threats to the diversity of the natural world, about the communities effected by changing environments, or about the routes to more sustainable living. You may even be imagining a different future world.

We will discuss  some of the ways this sort of writing has been tackled by both fiction and nonfiction writers, at new and different ways of approaching these issues, and look how this writing will present in the future. 

With discussion and writing exercises with feedback on writing achieved and the chance to peer review each other's work, it is hoped that by the end of the workshop, attendees will feel more confident about approaching this vast subject, and have some new skills to enable this. 

Once you have signed up, you can access the information. on this workshop with links and reading recommendations.

Contact Nina Milton at kitchentablewriters@live.com to find out more details of the workshop.

Costs; £10 PER WRITER: Bursaries are available to help with costs. 

How to Win the Booker Prize: HELD by Anne Michaels

 

Anne Michaels

Michaels must be one of the few writers today who can pull off writing in fragments, for fugitive pieces could as easily serve as the title of this new book, Held, a novel similarly made up of scraps of storytelling and essayistic fragments, and the themes of memory, war, and personal ghosts, revisit her preoccupations. But this book not about the Holocaust, but of many wars and war zones, and the relationship of the characters to these. 

I first read the Canadian novelist and poet Anne Michaels when her  1996 first novel, the multi-award-winning Fugitive Pieces, after it won the Orange Prize for Fiction.The story is divided into two sections––Jakob Beer is a Polish Holocaust survivor––while Ben is the son of two Holocaust survivors. 

The themes relate to the Holocaust––trauma, grief, loss and memory which are explored thought nature metaphors. The story has a poetic style, which has caused some critics to feel that it re-imagines the 'story' of the Holocaust, partly through nature.

The Booker Prize judges said some very nice things about this book;

‘There are very few books that can achieve a pitch of poetic intensity sustained across a whole novel. Through broken stanza-like paragraphs and chapters that move between different members of the family across a century, Held achieves the feat of being deeply moving and asks the question ‘Who can say what happens when we are remembered?’ with tenderness.'

‘We loved the quietness of this book: we surrendered to it. The large themes are of the instability of the past and memory, but it works on a cellular level due to the astonishing beauty of the details. Whether it is the mistakes that are knitted into a sweater so that a drowned sailor can be identified, or the rituals of making homecoming pancakes, or what it feels like to be scrutinised as you are painted, the novel makes us pause.’

We are carried back and forth in time. Each section introduces new characters, different settings.here are quite a lot of characters within the book and one thing I tried to do was tie them all together; it seems that most of them are related to the others, but often it's quite hard to find that relationships through the generations as we move from the First World War to out own times, and the wars most recently remembered. Anyway, here goes; perhaps this will help you pin down the elusive butterfly that is this absorbing read:

John is a soldier who returns to his wife after being injured during the First World War. As he attempts to come to terms with the psychological trauma of his experiences, he finds works as a photographer.

Helena is John’s wife, a talented artist who constantly doubts her own talent and supports John as he struggles with the vivid memories of his experiences during the war.

Anna is John and Helena’s daughter; her work as a doctor means she frequently leaves her family to work in war zones.

Maria inherited the same caring nature as her mother, Anna, and also becomes a doctor, and is similarly drawn to working in war-torn areas. 

Working through the characters and the dates, I began to pick up echoes and piece together the tenuous personal links which hold together the disparate stories, first understanding that Aimo, who meets another Anna in Finland in 2025 must be the child whose musician parents we saw being expelled from Estonia for thought crimes in 1980, and then deciding that when we meet a Frenchwoman, out collecting firewood in1902, falls briefly for a photographer, their baby will become John. But there are also links which work though the themes, and it felt to me that these are meant to be even stronger becoming the point of the story, so that the characters are the carriers of theme and idea, posing profound questions about the human state, all expressed in Michael's arresting prose.

This makes her writing sometimes very difficult, but also so absorbing to read. What I loved most (even better than trying to piece it all together) are the little snapshots which are often hugely affecting, suffused with an awful, aching yearning for what is lost. It demands  thought and concentration from its readers but more than repays them. Here, Mara, back from being a medic at the front of a war, remembers some experiences:

She told them about her friend, a nurse who had more experience and compassion in her hands than Mara felt she would ever have…this same nurse had ridden through a bicycle through the dark, no light to give her away, packets of medicine taped to her skin under her waistband, who plummeted into an abyss that had not been there only hours before. The father who kept a scrap of cloth tied with string around her neck, fill with teeth, proof his sone had existed, though Mara knew he would never be sure they were his son's. 

However, I must admit there are critics of this kind of writing; this style of novel. Bikerbuddy,  online, said; 'I’ve never read Anne Michaels before. Polarising books can be interesting and I was interested in why this book had such a range of reactions with the public. Some loved the language and sentiments of the novel, others thought it pretentious, opaque, overwritten and/or confused. For my own part, I enjoyed aspects of the broad story,I felt as I read, it is a novel about an idea, as many are. But unlike many great novels which allow the reader space to ponder and reflect, Held felt like an act of proselytising. It’s a thesis dressed up in people’s clothing, walking and talking, with a determined purpose. This is an aspect of the book I disliked, yet I have found that others have been drawn to it. Held was different for me. It felt like a manipulative book. It felt dishonest.

The Times Literary Supplement said; The lush, lyrical prose favoured by the likes of Anne Michaels…is a risky business. At best it brings intensity, inwardness, descriptive beauty and a relief from the thudding and-then-and-then of conventional storytelling; at worst it can result in vatic waffle. In either case the impulse is to suppress definite characterization, historic specificity and narrative momentum in favour of “poetic” evocation.

Anna Bonnet says; This Canadian novelist, who won the Women’s Prize in 1997 for her Holocaust novel, Fugitive Pieces, is also a poet and it shows: Held is told in tiny, poetic vignettes. For me, this was part of the problem. While there are some mesmerising lines in this book, it is all so fragmented that I struggled to follow the narrative thread, let alone care for the characters. 

But I'm going to stand up for these diffulties. If you don't like a novelist's style and voice, find another novel to read, because there are plenty out there. The Booker Prize shortlist is testament to this; six extremely unique and original novels, all with something to say, I believe. 

I'm looking at all the Booker Shortlisted Books 2024, to see how they can help the writer. Here I review Safekeep and Here I review the winner; Orbital 

How to Win the Booker: THE SAFEKEEP by Yael van Der Wouden

 

In her website Yael Van Der Wouden introduces herself as A great smalltalker... available as a +1 for your cousin's wedding. Woulden also keeps a blog, Dear David: An Advice Column, in which Sir David Attenborough speaks about the natural world in answer to writers' problems. It's funny and clever in a similar way that The Safekeep is funny and clever. And yet her 2018 essay, On (Not) Reading Anne Frank  suggests that The Safekeep is also a darkened polemic on the Dutch position after the 2nd WW.

In her Booker interview, she explains the moment that this book came into her mind, starting with… a fascination with how the Dutch narrativise national histories; my obsession with homes and the fantasy of owning a home; wanting to explore desire as the flipside of repulsion. The way it happened was like this: I was in the car on the way back from a funeral, looking out over flat Dutch fields, and somewhere between grief and a need to escape the idea bloomed, of a house, a woman and a stranger.

A house, a youngish woman, her two siblings and a stranger. 

It is Holland in the 60's and Isabel lives alone in the family home, weighed down with duty left by her dead parents, avoiding contact with humans, hating most of the people she knows: Louis, who will be gifted the house once he marries (and he’s in no hurry to stop moving through pretty girls like his latest, Eva):  and Hendrick, who lives with Sebastian, a person Isabel particularly turns her face from in shame

.

This book did not win the Booker Prize. So maybe you won’t want your book to be––suddenly and surprisingly-–this sexy, with intense emotion and fiery physicality… Isabel could see herself from the dresser mirror: face red, mouth like a violence. 

Wouden admits––erotica is about the knife’s edge of voyeurism and participation. As a reader, you want to feel like you are present, but if you are too present then I think the text tries to envelope you, tries to comfort, and I think good erotic writing makes you a little uncomfortable.

You might not want your novel to be in the 1st person perspective of a repressed, unlikeable woman such as Isabel, without being able to show that vulnerability that hides behind such a front. And, in 1st person, how can the story reveal what happened almost 20 years previously? Two-thirds of the way through, after the central explosion of love and lust, we reach The Diary. Diaries don’t often work in modern novels, but this one, stolen by Isabel after a caustic row with her lover, reveals the darkest sides of wartime Europe.

Think about taking an extended symbol throughout the book, as Wouden does. In the opening lines, Isobel finds  broken pottery in the garden. It's a shard from the china plates her mother loved, and which she now keeps locked away. She knows one has never broken, but if that is so, how could this shard be in the garden? The answer dogs her throughout the novel, and it is not until we read the diary that we know the shocking answer. 

You might like to be in Wouden's position,however, of having her debut novel snapped up by Penguin after a bidding war. 

What did the English reviewers say about this debut? The Observer says that the author weaves this story of historical reckoning (or its avoidance) with an account of Isabel's individual and sexual awakening,

The Guardian's reviewer said The book's powerful final act provides an already weighty emotional situation with an extra layer of historical heft.

Reviewer Anne Bonnet loved it; The Safekeep is simmering and sexy, but it is also a Trojan horse of a novel. Not much is, rightly, given away in the synopsis and it is only in the last third that you realise you have been reading a very different book…

Perhaps for me, the ending wasn’t quite perfect. But that might be because whatever way the final moments of such a twisted the story might go, I’ll have wanted it to go in the other direction. Happier? Darker? I’ll let you read it and make up your own minds.

How to Win the Booker Prize: ORBITAL by Samantha Harvey

photograph: epa

Orbital unfolds over a single day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station. Samantha Harvey allows us to marvel at Earth’s splendour through the thoughts, memories and work of the people on board. She allows them to pose the question: What is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?

Orbital is Samantha Harvey’s fifth novel. On the 12th of November 2014, she stood amongst applause to receive the Booker trophy. Her acceptance speech began with a joke; ‘I was told we weren’t allowed to swear in our speech, so there goes mine’. She dedicated her prize to everybody who ‘speaks for and not against the Earth…and the dignity of other humans, other life; and all the people who speak for and call for peace.

If you would like your novel to win the Booker, you could start by picking apart what makes a winner. Why did the judges almost unanimously decide on Orbital?

Firstly, it's original. it is the first Booker Prize-winning book set in space. It has a natty little chart that describes the voyage of the SSI over one Earth day at the front of the book. It has chapters that align with the rising of the sun every 90 minutes. 

But there are some specifics that are probably key components each time. The judges recognised this book's beauty and ambition, saying: 'It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share'.  They were 'determined to find a book that moved us, a book that had capaciousness and resonance, that we are compelled to share'. 

Surprisingly, it is very short. This is a novella. It is so much shorter than some winners, that you could fit four Orbitals into some of them.  The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton won in 2013, at 832 pages, compared to the 239 pages of Orbital. But judge Kit  De Waal said that Orbital is 'the right length of book for what it’s trying to achieve'.

I loved this book. Its descriptions of the Earth from the ISS are stunning, lyrical and memorable, and yet sparse; we can never quite get enough of them, which is the best way to write descriptions, after all. There are only six characters, plus the people they carry in their heads. We don't get to know them very well, but rather as they all get to know each other, in that intimate, yes sporadic way we get to know our work colleagues for instance, sometimes sharing something truly important about their lives and lots of minor, day-to-day things, while probably not knowing much, say, about their family or the layout of their homes. But what we do see is what they also witness; the marvellous beauty of the Earth as they witness a sunrise every 90 minutes and follow the progression and devastation of a super tornado of life-threatening proportions as it assaults and wrecks south-east Asia. They are passing on the information, but feel powerless to help.

The odd 'other' perspective is also allowed in, so that we can travel back to the 'Big Bang' or meet the laboratory mice who are learning to fly. And then there is  Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, which is with the crew as a postcard. They talk deeply about the unique illusion of reality created in this painting. “Welcome,” Shaun’s wife has written on the postcard, “to the labyrinth of mirrors that is human life.”

Having finished the book and laid it down with a satisfied sigh, I turned to the reviewers to see what they had thought. Most had read this book before it had been shortlisted, and most, like me, found it such an absorbing, educative read. 

Anne Bonner, in INEWS says...With the modern world being as it is, it is not a surprise that a story set in space is a strong Booker contender.  At times it feels a bit like you’re reading an essay meditating on human existence as opposed to a novel. You also have the sense of observing these characters as though they’re floating in a snow globe: as beautiful as it is, something is stopping you from connecting with them.

The Economist did find flaws, and I can to a degree sympathise with the line they took: A slim, slightly worthy novel in which everything and nothing happens Yes, it is a tiny bit worthy, and nothing does much happen in it. So one thing you might try,  if you follow Harvey's model of winning the Booker, is create an epic poem in prose form.  

But who knows? With another night's sleep, the judges might have made a different decision. There are always 6 shortlisted novels for the Booker Prize, and I will review each of the 2024 books in turn and continue to think about...HOW TO WIND THE BOOKER PRIZE. 

You can read more about Las Mininas here.