The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: voice

  • Voices

    Government and scientific writing is usually done in this really bizarre institutional voice. You know the one I mean; you’ve read it and struggled with it, even if you’ve never deliberately tried to write it. It’s a weird, hyper-formalized, passive-verbed, long-winded writing style that you discovered had invaded your own writing when you were just starting out. You were probably praised for it, too— told it was “good English.”

    Actually, it’s terrible English. Institutional Voice, aka Bureaucratese, avoids sentence subjects. All verbs are rendered in the passive. “It was discovered that…” “The decision was made that…” “The result was…” “The Department’s investigation demonstrated…” “The data show…”

    Removing the subject was supposed to discourage egotistical self-aggrandizement; the text would be the authority, not any particular author. What really happened is that removing the human subject removed any sense of humanity, that yes, there is a caring, feeling person behind the keyboard. Or, as sometimes happens, that there is a person behind the keyboard who doesn’t care, or in fact glories in your misery. Institutional voice functions to put distance between author and reader. The reader cannot judge the author’s intentions or morals, and the author can say the most horrible things without once considering his audience. [0]

    Part of our journey as writers is discovering our own authentic voices. Like glitter, Institutional Voice is pervasive, and as soon as you think you’ve removed the last of it from your writing, you’ll find it cropping up in the most bizarre and unexpected places. We spent our lives learning, “This is the Voice of Authority, this is the Voice of Somebody Who Knows What They’re Talking About,” and we’ll slip into it in order to disguise our own uncertainties about our prose.

    It sounds easy to stay away from Institutional Voice. “Just write the same way you speak!” they’ll tell you [1]. There’s two problems with that approach. First, have you ever read the transcript of a live interview? People speak in sentence fragments and run-ons and run-on sentence fragments all the time. And second, once you’ve been writing this crap for so long, you’ll start speaking that way, too.

    [0] “The contents of Boxcar 113 will be disposed of according to the standard procedures.” To be spoken in a funny German accent, because, hey, we’re all about stereotyping and the glory of Godwin in this blog.
    [1] “They” lie.

  • New Year, New You? (Week of 6 January 2013)

    Winter is a time when things reset, readying themselves to be born anew when the weather warms up, and for assessing what needs to be done. And 2013 has a great deal of promise for us here at the Cafe. Several regulars have been published and are continuing to be published in the months ahead.

    But we wanted to take another look back over the past year and see if anything’s changed for us. Are we still writing in the genre of our choice? Why? Has our writing changed? If it has – why? On close inspection (or just off the top of your head) do you think you’ve changed as a writer? Grown? Gotten more or less confident?

    Why?

    Our awareness as writers has shifted, certainly, and it’s time to take that deeper look and see if we’re still the same as we were last Winter. Can some cycles be broken or should they be embraced?

    Pull up a chair, wrap your hands around that warm mug of tea, coffee, or cocoa, and let us regale you with our thoughts. We promise it’ll be informative.

  • How to Waste Twenty Years on One Story

    The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip

    When I first started writing, I mean really writing, I was in love with a book called The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip. It was high fantasy, poetic, and beautiful. I still have my original dog-eared copy, bent and torn with pages falling out.

    In youthful admiration of that story, I began to create a character, then a cast of characters, problems for them to overcome, a world for them to inhabit, and yes, even a ragged, poorly drawn map of the land.

    And I wrote. I wrote in poetic, archaic language tinged with magic and pomposity. It was self-important, overly wordy, and bogged down in descriptions of every tiny weed and pebble.

    It was catastrophically bad. But I persevered. Over the course of some fifteen or more years, that story continued to haunt me. It changed, it grew, and I scrapped it and started over countless times.

    Somewhere in my mid-twenties, something shifted. My main character started speaking differently, a little less archaic, a little more sarcastic, a lot more interesting. I realized I was on to something.

    I never finished that book past perhaps four chapters or so. But the day my character started bitching that her ass hurt from riding a horse so many days on the road, that was the day I realized I had to let Patricia McKillip go so I could find my own voice.

    That was also the day I let go of the idea that I could write epic fantasy. I believe writing that sort of story requires at least a pinch of the poet inside the writer. I am not a poet. I write mostly urban fantasy because, while I love magic and monsters and enchanted creatures, I write in a straightforward, less descriptive style. I can get away with that style placing my story on the streets of Sausalito or a nondescript winter forest. A magical world, far removed from ours, requires more finesse – finesse I don’t possess.

    I write the way I talk, mostly. My descriptions aren’t very wordy, and they tend to focus on the things I would notice, not the things that describe a room or other setting. My main character is not going to note the colors of the lone maple leaf quivering on a branch in late fall. My characters are far more likely to focus on a single nose hair growing out of the antagonist’s left nostril, all the while wondering if it’s an anomaly or if he recently trimmed up there and missed one.

    And yeah, she’ll probably miss his evil monologue while she’s meditating on this.

    Honest answer, then. Since the day Princess Amberlyn decided to inform her audience of her saddle sores and described the road grit wedged inside her laced-up bodice, I started writing in my own voice. For better or worse, I’m stuck with it.

  • Listening to the sound of my voice

    PaperbacksWhen I first started writing, I never intentionally tried to mirror a favorite writer. The problem was that I hadn’t found my own voice yet. So when I started creating stories, it surprised me when I discovered the stories were not my own.

    One of my early attempts was to write a science fiction epic that would have a galactic scale to it. I stopped after a few thousand words when I realized I was retelling Issac Asimov’s Foundation series. As time went on, I discovered an interest in writing stories about a populated Mars, not unlike Ray Bradbury. When I graduated college, it was Stephen King and his epic The Stand that I was mimicking in style — if not in apocalyptic subject matter.

    Through all these phases in my writing, I was equally concerned and confounded by the advice I received to “find your own voice.”

    I don’t have a voice, I wanted to argue. I only know how to write like the books I have read.

    After a decade or so of writing, I’ve discovered my voice has been with me all along. It was my own voice I was drowning out by listening to my favorite authors whispering in my ear.

    What I didn’t understand, what many new writers fail to grasp, is that our favorite writers aren’t doing anything special in their writing. They aren’t adopting a “writer’s voice” when they put pen to page. Do you want to know their secret? Lean in close and I’ll whisper it to you: They talk to you.

    Writing can still be difficult. I get off track, I overwrite scenes, and I have a habit of putting on my editor hat when I should be writing. But when I get things right, it’s because I have stopped trying to write. Instead, I talk and let my fingers transcribe what I’m saying in my head.

    That’s the voice I needed to find, and it was inside me all along.