Voice is one of those elements that can make or break a manuscript. If you get it right, the novel will live in the reader’s mind long after they put the book down. Without it, the story won’t quite achieve what you’ve intended even if all the structural elements are in place.
So… how do you find your narrator’s voice?
What Doesn’t Work
Here’s one thing that doesn’t work: verbal tics. How many times can you have your character repeat certain phrases before it starts to get, well, annoying? Not very many.
Here’s another: sarcasm.
Sarcasm is an easy voice to capture, so it seems to be the one many authors lean toward to make their narrator sound different. Cross it off the list. No one is consistently sarcastic, or angry, or melodramatic. When you make your narrator into a type like this, they come across as one-dimensional and unrealistic.
Who Is This Person?
The idea of voice only being a mood or a way of talking misses the bigger picture. Voice is a way of being in the world. For that reason, I would recommend approaching it from another direction: by exploring who this person is that you’re trying to bring to life.
While I don’t think character questionnaires are the way to nail voice, they can be a good steppingstone in getting to know your character—because I don’t think you can capture a character’s voice until you fully know who they are.
Look at how the answers to a few key questions can change the type of person you’re dealing with.
What does your character do for a living?
A baker will have a different way of viewing the world than a plumber or a doctor. They’ll notice different things, use their own analogies, have unique priorities, behave differently in various situations. You’ll know they’re a baker not because the author has placed them in a kitchen wearing oven mitts but because they see ideas for new pastries in the shapes of flowers. They’ll think like a baker.
If you were to read a story in which all you got was oven mitts and cookie trays, you’d feel like you were reading something generic—because the author would not have captured a baker’s way of navigating the world.
How old is your character? What is their marital status?
A twenty-something single woman will have a different way of dealing with people than a fifty-something woman who’s just left a long, dull marriage. Or maybe the marriage was abusive: that would give her another voice. Or maybe she’s never been married, but her sister is in a happy marriage: different voice again. She’ll have to manage Valentine’s Day; she might get upset by seeing couples at candlelit tables for two in a restaurant.
Voice is all about the lens through which your character views the world. One of the most significant things that clarifies this lens is their goal: what do they want in the story? If someone wants respect, they’re going to act in certain ways and say certain things that will be very different from someone who’s out for revenge.
Where do they come from? What kind of family do they have? Wealthy or poor, loving or abusive? Are they the first-born of a large family, or are they the baby? Are they an only child?
Every answer creates a type of person who will act and react in diverse ways. Many of these actions and reactions won’t be conscious, but they’ll be there, and they’ll cement in place patterns of behavior that will (hopefully) cause that character all sorts of problems.
But answering those questions is only step one.
What Next?
Now, you have to put your characters into action: slip on their shoes and see the world through their eyes. Usually that means writing your way into the story in one form or another: by journaling in their voice, answering interview questions in their voice, or (my preference) simply throwing yourself into the story world and getting them moving.
This is why it’s so important to differentiate the narrative voice from the author’s voice. Unless the author is the narrator, they have no business speaking up. Your reader will have picked up a particular book to experience the world from the point of view of a female scientist in the 1960s (Lessons in Chemistry) or a college student in the classics who becomes enthralled with an eclectic group of students with whom he doesn’t quite fit in (The Secret History). The extent to which the author can deliver on that promise also turns out to be the extent to which they’ve captured the narrator’s way of seeing the world, which is… voice.
Why Voice Is So Important
Voice is not the only thing in a novel. But if you don’t nail it, you won’t have used point of view to its fullest potential, nor will you truly know your story—because you won’t know the main actors who are driving it forward. It won’t feel authentic, and your readers won’t feel the same emotional draw that they’ll experience when a character comes to life on the page and says, Let me show you what the world looks like through my eyes.
Isn’t that why we come to fiction in the first place?
Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and editor who lives in Vancouver, BC. Her newest book, coauthored with David Griffin Brown, is Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her novel My Long List of Impossible Things, came out in 2020 with Annick Press. The House of One Thousand Eyes was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and won numerous awards including the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in literary reviews world-wide.
Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and is a senior editor at The Darling Axe. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Michelle below. Michelle’s books
Two questions that authors tend not to consider are “Who is the narrator talking to?” “Why is this story being told?”
Neither of them have to be explicitly answered, but they are helpful for the author. If your narrator is a police officer, for example, the tone is going to depend on whether the officer is telling the story to a superior officer, another beat cop, a member of the public, or a reporter.
Having a clear idea of the story’s hypothetical “listener” (not the same as the reader) helps the author know how much to explain and how much to take for granted. A lot of modern fiction suffers from wandering expositions that slow down the story. If you begin with a clear idea that the narrator is talking to someone who is familiar with the setting and characters, this temptation is lessened.
A doctor who is talking to another doctor will take for granted that the listener knows the basics of how hospitals operate, how on-call schedules operate, how patients are moved from one floor to another, and so on. A construction worker won’t feel the need to define what “rebar” is to another construction worker.
Why the story is being told will also clarify the narrator’s voice. Is it to amuse the listener? To justify their actions to a superior officer? To explain a suspicious death to a grieving family member? Is this an official explanation, or off the record? Starting a story with the narrator’s intent in mind will make it easier to decide what events to describe in detail and what to gloss over.
This is a great point and definitely something to take into account when you’re writing. Thank you for taking the time to share it.
I agree. I think that I have successfully achieved “voice” in some of my novels whilst failing to find it in others. Lol- or I did but they were just not as good novels as the others (who knows). I just wished to bring up one more thing as it is dear to my heart and that is the creation of a voice where you have no reference whatsoever. I often mention Iain M Banks “Bascule” where the narrator doesn’t even truly understand your language or thoughts.
“Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Ergates thi ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u 1/2 a holiday? & I agreed & that woz how we decided we otter go 2 c Mr Zoliparia in thi I-ball ov thi gargoyle Rosbrith.”
“Well I no that, thilly, tho u r a very feerth old hok, & gettin less blind ol thi time. I woth jutht kiddin. O luke anuthi thee-gull. Or ith it? Lookth moar like a albino cro, akchooly. Well, i cant thtand awound hea ol day chattin with u; i 1/2 2 fly, Dartlin sez, & hops down off thi perch. Ith ther anythin i can get u, Mr Bathcule?”
The creation of such as Bascule or the “Gang of Eight” Eight minds in a single brain (Peter Watts) and you do not know who is speaking or EriK Axel Sunds “Crow Girl” all fascinate me for the pure inventiveness of the “voice” lol- or indeed Moorcocks Colonel Pyat who narrates the books but is a liar trying to turn the narrative to his own ends.
Thank you for this. I have definitely missed the mark on voice with some of the novels I’ve written (no coincidence that they’re also all unpublished, haha). I appreciate creativity when it comes to voice, but I also think it’s risky. Sometimes I can get into the rhythm of an unusual voice; other times, my brain rebels. But I think experimentation is always worth a try. Anything can be done if it’s done well.
Thanks for another incredibly helpful post on voice, Michelle. It’s one of the hardest things to teach writers to master–and you’ve given so many ways to strengthen it…and showed us what to avoid.
Thanks, Mindy. I agree, this is a tough one to get right. I’ve struggled with it myself for years.
Great advice, and good point about sarcasm and other leanings like a negative worldview, boas, etc. Unless this is supported through information about the character that shows WHY they are sarcastic, pessimistic, etc. it will feel like character stage dressing. Much better to think about who they are and what they have experienced to date and how a voice is naturally shaped from that because then it all lines up. Who they are, the decisions they make, their reflections and judgements…these all match and support one another. 🙂
Character stage dressing! What a great phrase.
Yes, this is exactly right. Voice is really about bringing the character to life. I think that’s why when it’s not working, no matter how great your plot and structure are, the novel is dead in the water.