Going In Style, Part 1

Author: Karen H. Phillips

What Is Voice?

All of us respect and emulate writers like Rowling, Grisham, King, Picoult, Austen, Koontz, and Faulkner, to name a few. Their way of placing thoughts on the page gives their prose a unique signature. Labeled “voice,” individual style characterizes each author’s writing. The words you choose and how you arrange words and sentences, including grammatical decisions, make up style. Creating work in an accepted writing style, while maintaining your uniqueness, is essential to developing your own writer’s voice—one of those slippery concepts difficult to pin down.

Readings For Writers, a college text edited by Anthony Winkler, defines voice as vocabulary, syntax, and attitude. Together, these components create the tone of the work.

How Do The Masters Do It?

There was a flash of green light, a rushing sound, and Frank Bryce crumpled. He was dead before he hit the floor.
Two hundred miles away, the boy called Harry Potter woke with a start. – J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Some mothers might have encouraged the intimacy from motives of interest, for Edward Ferrars was the eldest son of a man who had died very rich; and some might have repressed it from motives of prudence, for, except a trifling sum, the whole of his fortune depended on the will of his mother. – Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

The inmates made jokes about the chair, the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can’t be gotten away from. They called it Old Sparky, or the Big Juicy. – Stephen King, The Green Mile

Components Of Style

Depending on what you are trying to accomplish in a particular piece, you can choose several variants to achieve your goals while allowing your essence to shine through:

Precision

Being precise in your writing is all about being specific. Use words that give exact details when reporting news, giving instructions, or in any other situation requiring a near-perfect description or statistical information. Compare these descriptions:

There she was, in a pretty blue dress.

There she was, in a dress like ice-water, made in a thousand pale-blue pieces, with icicles trickling at the throat. – F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Crazy Sunday”

Convention

Depending on your audience and your editor’s style, you will need to conform to their expectations for the type of material you present. Ask yourself, who will read this? Most academic, professional, and government settings require Standardized English. If you’re writing a story to enter in a Southern literary competition, you will choose the vernacular and tone of that region in your dialogue or even narrative.

Standardized English: Sometimes I think no one of us is crazy, no one clearly sane, until all the people around us convince us that we are. How a person behaves does not seem to matter as much as how most people view him when he acts. – my own interpretation of the following quote

Faulkner’s version: Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it. – William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying the character of Dash

Completion and Consistency

You make the work complete when you do not omit words as you would in dialogue. You can maintain a consistent tone even when you vary sentence structure. Note how the sentences differ in length, yet evoke the same mood, in the following example. No essential words are omitted, thus the meaning is clear.

I remember very well the impression I had of Hemingway that first afternoon. He was an extraordinarily good-looking young man, twenty-three years old. It was not long after that that everybody was twenty-six. It became the period of being twenty-six.– Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas