The mental image you have of artistic genius as flowing from an individual wellspring of inspiration is false, or at least incomplete. Something I knew about vaguely but hadn’t thought much about until recently […] was how artists in different creative mediums – writers, painters, sculptors, photographers – mixed socially and activated each other creatively in the art scene in Paris in the 20’s and 30’s. And then I went way down the rabbit hole reading about it. Paul Eluard, Man Ray, Picasso, Hemingway, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, and on and on. Eluard writes poems to his second wife Nusch, and Man Ray photographs her and they publish a book that’s the result of the three of them activating the artistry in each other.
[…] in the social media age [this is] actually painfully hard to find. It shouldn’t be. You can find it across creative mediums, not just with artists in your chosen creative medium. And artists are starving for it.
There isn’t a point he makes that I can’t see some real value in, and I urge you to check it out.
So yesterday’s post got picked up on Reddit, where a great conversation started up (say what you will about Reddit, it’s excellent for that). In that thread, someone asked:
For someone self-publishing, is there a contact or an organization that would be a good entry point for getting books into libraries? I’d much rather gift my book to any library that wanted it, than hope for the few with the budget to spare would allocate some to a new, independent author.
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to share dinner with a guy from Amazon’s KDP and CreateSpace services (e-publishing to Kindle and Amazon-enabled print-on-demand, respectively). Also there: a couple other authors with published work out on the market. The conversation turned to ebooks and publishing and things like Digital Rights Management and all that sort of stuff; it was sort of inevitable.
I ended up arguing with one of the other authors a bit, because we had (and probably still have) fairly different views on these topics.
“I hate DRM,” I said. “I hate anything that says ‘since criminals theoretically exist, we need to put something in place that treats everyone like criminals, in order to deal with a few theoretically bad people.’ Even more, I hate something that artificially limits one story medium – e-books – so that it’s as equally crippled as some other medium – books.” (This was in regards to big publishers putting a usage cap on any ebooks purchased by libraries, which we’d already been talking about, and which I’ve previously opined is just a publishing company trying to charge rent on products the purchaser should entirely own.)
“Books do wear out,” said the other author.
“Sure,” I replied. “But e-books don’t, and there’s no reasonable excuse to force them to do so. Making e-books ‘expire’ because a paper book would wear out is like engineering cars to fail after thirty thousand miles because a horse would die if you rode it that far. Don’t confuse the actual story with the bucket being used to carry it.”
“You’d give up the sales you’d make from libraries needing to repurchase your e-book?”
“Absolutely!” People at another table glanced our way and I lowered my voice. “Look, I get paid… what? A buck per e-book sale? Maybe a buck and a half? Do you think I’d give up a buck and a half if it meant twenty five more people would read the story at the library? If I could be sure that would happen, I would happily give away a hundred or a thousand times that, because it would create readers who’d seek out my next story, out of hundreds or thousands of people who don’t currently know me and don’t care. There is absolutely no margin in restricting e-books in that fashion: in forcing a librarian to ask ‘Do I have the budget to re-order a new copy of this story?’ when the competition for their dwindling budget is always growing.”
The other author got that look on their face that says they don’t have any kind of counterargument, and aren’t happy about it. “That doesn’t have anything to do with normal DRM, though,” they muttered.
“Let me tell you about DRM,” I said. “When my book came out, one of my buddies – jokingly – said he wasn’t going to buy it, he was just going to wait until the e-book showed up on piratebay and download it. I told him when he found it on there, to tell me where, so I could post the location on my website and point people there if they liked.”
“Sure.”
“And when he does, I will do that, and here’s why: most people — hear me out — most people are not grabbing the e-book off a pirate site because they hate the idea of paying the author: they are doing it because either (a) they want to do with an e-book what they can’t do on Amazon and what they CAN do with a paper book in a store: read the first couple chapters to see if they’ll like it or (b) they already bought the story in some other format and feel they’ve bought the story and deserve that story in other formats — which is a stance I happen to agree with, because I care about whether they bought the story, not whether they paid for a particular format.”
“Actually,” the amazon guy said “we’ve just started doing that with music. If you’ve bought a CD on amazon – like, ever – you can now download the MP3s of those albums. You bought the song, not the format.”
“Totally different thing,” I said. “You bought the story. You did not buy the right to hear Morgan Freeman read it to you. That, you should pay for separately, and as a general rule people do because — as a general rule — people aren’t criminals and shouldn’t be treated as though they are.”
“But what about piracy?”
“Prove to me piracy exists as a sales-damaging activity — I don’t believe it does; the biggest file downloaders are statistically those spending the most on the stuff they’re supposedly stealing — and I’ll spend time trying to fix it.” I thought for a second. “Actually, I know how to stop piracy. Entirely.”
The author across from me crossed her arms, but the Amazon guy leaned in. I pointed at him. “Amazon needs to get make it so that everything you can do with piracy is easier with Amazon. Hell, not even easier. Just “as easy”, or even “almost as easy, but guaranteed safe with no viruses.” I smiled, thinking of my wife, whom I missed more and more every day of this trip. “I’m not much of an optimist, but I’ll say this: people are generally good — give them an option where they can do the right thing, not be treated like a criminal, and actually OWN the thing they paid for, and they’ll pay for it, even if a shady-but-free option exists.” I looked at the author. “Some won’t, but they were never going to become a long-time reader anyway — they’re already a lost cause. You didn’t lose anything with them.”
None of this conversation was new thinking for me. I’ve said much it before, more or less, but it was new to them, and maybe it will be new for whomever is reading this, so that makes it worth repeating.
The Amazon guy, at any rate, thanked me, and thanked me again the next day, and in an email a week later, so maybe some good will come of it.
A few days ago, I muddled around, talking about a writer’s voice, exploring the idea that it’s not something that can be taught — not in the way that grammar or world building or plotting can be taught.
In fact, it’s possible that I made fun of the different (and contradictory) advice out there on “finding your voice” — it certainly sounds like something I’d do.
Obviously, the logical follow-up to that post should be my own advice on how to find your voice.
See, while I don’t think voice can be taught, I do think it can be trained in the same way a singer’s voice can be trained: with exercises, drills, and most of all lots and lots of writing. However, while training is good, you really have to have a pretty clear picture of what kind of voice you have before you get started — it’s not much good to simply decide “I’m a soprano” and proceed to train yourself accordingly.
Who’d have guessed the princess was a bass?
So… yeah, you have to find your voice.
But how’s that going to work? All joking aside, I’m pretty sure those bits of advice I mentioned in the last post are pretty useless, but neither am I satisfied with “just keep writing and it’ll sort itself out.”
Luckily, my granddad provides a solution.
Your Dominant Eye
There are certain qualities each of us possess. To sum it up in highly technical terms, it’s just how we’re wired. Fear of heights. A fascination with the structure of feathers. Maybe you don’t like pickles, or the consistency of cooked fruit. Ticklish feet. Whatever.
One of the most obvious of these qualities is left- or right-handedness, but for some people it’s equally important to know your dominant eye; it’s the sort of thing that matters when using firearms, shooting pool, or taking pictures. Also, you can’t assume your dominant eye is going to be on the same side of your body as your dominant hand — mine isn’t.
Luckily, it’s pretty simple to figure out which eye is the dominant one. My grandfather (who taught firearms safety courses for several decades) led me through the exercise when I was fairly young — maybe five or six — and spent the next five years or so arguing with my dad about it. (Dad was pretty sure my granddad had tricked me into thinking I was left-eye dominant just out of sheer orneriness. To be fair, that is exactly the sort of thing the men in my family would think is funny.)
One of the things I’ve always loved about this test is that it’s automatic — the subject doesn’t have to think, they just have to do, and the results present themselves without bias. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some kind of dominant eye test for finding your voice?
But wait!
I don’t know if this is exactly the same thing as a dominant eye test for a writer’s voice, but it’s still pretty good. Stefon Mears hit us with a neat little “Status Check” writing exercise a few weeks ago — as a general rule, I don’t like writing prompts in any format, but I liked what I got out of this one, and asked his permission to share it. Goes like this:
First, a writing prompt: someone was killed in this room on New Year’s Eve. Write about that for five minutes. Go!
Do not read further until you’ve finished writing.
Spoilers…
All done?
Seriously: Do the writing thing first, because reading the next part will permanently ruin the exercise for you. You get one shot at this. Don’t be lazy.
Really all done?
Okay.
Look over what you’ve written, not in terms of what story the exercise might produce but in terms of the writing choices you made:
Did you write about the killing itself, events leading up to it, or the aftermath?
Did you devote more focus to character or plot?
What kind of conflict did you choose? Did you include more than one?
Did you write more dialog or narrative?
Point of View – is it 1st person? 3rd? Close or distant? Omniscient, limited omniscient, subjective, objective? Does the viewpoint stay with one character or shift to others?
Those are only a few examples. You can examine the work in terms of any craft tool or story choice you want. The key is to notice those choices, and realize which were conscious and which were automatic.
Emphasis (and some paraphrasing) mine.
As I said in the first post, voice isn’t point of view choices, or tense, or a preferences toward dialogue over narrative — not exactly. But it might contain those things, because “Voice” is a terrible, sloppy, catch-all, nest-stealing bluejay kind of term that encompasses whatever we need it to encompass at that moment, and looking at the stuff we do when we’re writing instinctively can be helpful when we’re trying to figure out what our voice actually sounds like.
It’s not perfect and simple, the way that dominant eye test is, but it helps.
Spontaneous writing under time pressure can give us a snapshot of where we are as writers, not in terms of development, but in terms of choices. Every writer develops habits, and while many habits may play to our strengths, they limit the scope of our options. As writers, we owe it to ourselves to discover our habits and choose which we keep.
Good stuff, and I want to thank Stefon again for letting me use the exercise to illustrate the idea of a “voice test”.
There is one problem, though.
It’s possible I’ve oversimplified.
The thing is, the dominant eye test and others things like it work better (especially with younger kids) if the subject doesn’t know why they’re doing it. Foreknowledge can lead to skewed results. This is quintuply true for any writing exercise like the one above: now that you know what you’re going to be looking for after you’re done, you’ve tainted the results; the whole point is to do it without thinking about the choices we’re making. (River warned us about spoilers.)
But this is not a complete loss.
Go back and pull out a bunch of different first drafts and look them over, asking the same questions as the exercise above, and you can start to see the recurring patterns.
Once you see those patterns, decide what bits you like and get better at them — work on it in your writing, pursue it in your reading, whatever.
Decide what bits you don’t like and… you know… stop doing that.
You can’t teach voice, I said, and I believe it. But you can find it, and you can train it, and I think maybe that’s how.
One of the courses I attended at the residency last week was on the Craft of Fiction. This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like — a lot of directed reading and discussion on the major aspects of writing — stuff like plot, grammar, world building, character development, and something called “voice”.
Voice was actually the thing we talked about first, and as I briefly mentioned in my post last week, I took a fairly divisive stance on the topic. To be fair, it’s what I’d been taught to do: in the first post-grad class I took (long ago), I was dinged repeatedly on my papers, until the instructor wrote a note in the margin that said “Perfect presentation, zero content. Have an opinion!”
So I wrote my next paper on my proof that Lord Byron desperately wanted someone to come along and turn him into a vampire while he was still young and pretty. I got an A.
The Proto Emo-Goth.
Fast forward to the Craft of Fiction class, where I wrote:
Voice may be one of the most examined and least understood aspects of the craft of writing, because at its root it is not a matter of craft at all.
It’s fair to say I was being deliberately provocative, though that doesn’t mean I was doing it to be troll — 90% of the value in anything like that residency comes out of the discussion, not the syllabus. Putting something like that out there was meant to get discussion started, and that’s exactly what it did, with about half of us on one side of the fence, half on the other, and half on the other-other. (Writers are a bit odd when it comes to picking sides. Also math.)
Aside from that, I honestly believe what I said.
… but I don’t know if I’m right, so I figured I’d talk it over some more.
So what’s this “Voice” thing really?
The first problem with talking about Voice in fiction is figuring out or just agreeing what it is you’re actually talking about, because there are at least two common uses for the term.
(Incidentally, the simple fact that you have to spend time just figuring out what you’re talking about when you talk about Voice was the first red flag for me: how can we teach something we can’t even point at with any kind of authority? No one sits around trying to figure out whether something is or is not grammar, for example, but that happens all the time with Voice.)
SO, first off, let’s say voice refers to the way in which a writer “speaks” on paper. By that, I mean their word choice, syntax, sentence structure, and even cadence. (Yes, I know that some of this sounds more like grammar — like I said, voice is a shifty, unreliable term that likes to piggyback on other things — it’s the bluejay of writing.) Now, all of that can be altered by the style/genre of the story you’re writing and any particular tone you adopt to achieve a given affect (the same way you’d sing Empty Tables differently than If I Had $1,000,000), but at the core of any written work there is an essence that remains uniquely that of a particular writer — their voice — and that’s what I’m talking about here. In other words, if you take six books by an author, even if they’re in wildly different settings/genres/whatever, I believe you can ‘solve’ those stories for some lowest common denominator that comprises the author’s unavoidable voice. Maybe that’s not always true — maybe there’s someone out there whose writing is so chameleon-like that there is no commonality from one story to the next — but I’ve never encountered that, and I don’t personally think that’s a bad thing, any more than it’s bad that we can recognize a singer from one song to the next.
Voice also gets used as a shorthand term for the gestalt presentation of a character in the story, since a great deal of that presentation relies on the character’s vocabulary, word choice, or disposition, especially when any of that stuff is different from the author’s defaults. This is one of those bluejay uses of the term, though: it’s really part of character development, and it’s just sloppy to use the term for two different things, so forget this one.
In fact, if you can think of any other uses for the term “voice” that aren’t the way in the writer “speaks” on paper, just forget them for now — they aren’t what I’m talking about.
So now, we have this term — voice — that’s part of writing.
How do we teach it to someone? People ask that a lot.
Well, no: what writers ask is “how do I find my voice?” which sounds a lot like “how do I find myself?” and is just about as easy to teach.
Which doesn’t mean people don’t try. A quick google search digs up all kinds of advice on finding your voice.
Pretend that you’re speaking. Or,
Write as if you’re just talking to a friend.
Which I personally think is ridiculous. Have you ever tried to actually write exactly the way we talk to each other? It’s unreadable.
Really “get into it” and “do” all the voices.
First: direct contradiction to the first two suggestions. Second, if you’re trying to find your voice, don’t do it by copying someone else, even a fictional someone. Third, this is probably really meant to be advice for ‘character voice’.
Write honestly.
This contradicts the previous point (again), and is more about what you’re writing than how.
Don’t try to write in a certain style, or use “fancy” words and phrases…
… unless you really talk that way.
Oh… yeah. That’s… really helpful.
The list goes on, but out of all of it, the only suggestion that seems to ring somewhat true to me is:
Keep writing.
That, right there, is good advice. You can certainly teach grammar, or the key checklists of world- or character-building, or tricks of plotting, or the things that make a story a story instead of a pointless anecdote — but voice? Voice you improve by writing, the same way (and for the same reason) as singing: because it makes your voice stronger and clearer.
The problem with “keep writing” is that it sounds like “Just do the work, over and over, and eventually your voice will simply… happen.” Anyone who has gone through puberty and been told their body will eventually “sort itself out” will find this advice depressingly familiar.
But it’s true.
Plot, grammar, world building, character development — they’ve all got distinct do’s and don’ts, or detailed sets of rules — criteria by which an author can be objectively judged to have failed: ways they can be wrong. Those rules can be taught, then adopted, then maybe even screwed with as you gain mastery.
Voice, on the other hand, can be weak. Underused. Obscured by your attempt to imitate someone else.
But I don’t think it can’t be wrong.
Certainly, it can be trained, like a muscle, but taught? I don’t know. I suspect not. It’s not style. It’s not technique. It is not a decision to write in first or third person. It’s more primal than that, like your actual voice, or your face.
