khiemtran | More on Voice...

(me) I'm increasingly convinced now that 90 % of the game is voice.

llygoden Interesting you should say that... I had reached a similar conclusion. Yet it's something the How To books never seem to tackle. I don't think it's something we've ever talked about on rasfc either.

I think "voice" is one of those things that, if you ain't got it, you won't know you're missing it. By "voice", I mean the voice the author uses to speak to the reader. It includes vocabulary and grammar, but it also includes a things like how much the narrator keeps to the themselves and whether or not the reader can see other their shoulder. I like to think of it in terms of someone telling the story to someone else, whether the first someone is the author or a fictional narrator or a character, and the other someone is the reader, or a fictional reader or another character in the story. (Edit: actually, now that I put it like that, it starts to sound an awful lot like

papersky's mode.)

If there's a problem with voice, you might put your finger on viewpoint or background errors or description, and all of these things are a part of it, but none of them add up to explain it. It's something that some people can do intuitivity and so they probably never think of it, and which other people can only learn by pounding out the million words.

It's funny, because most of us start off with mastery of at least one voice. This sort of explains why you see things like a beginning writer who can tell an anecdote fluently in their own voice and at the same time produces incredibly stilted prose or else gets stuck with writer's block. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you can use your own voice for the story you want to tell. Other times, you will need to find a new voice.

Voice is also important when it comes to worldbuilding and suspension of disbelief. I think a convincing, authentic voice will go a lot further than a tonne of worldbuilding detail. It's interesting to compare Alexander McCall Smith's Botswana and Scotland based novels. With the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, people gushed over the setting and the sense of transportation. With the Scotland based books, it turned out that it didn't have to be Botswana after all.