Dissecting Voice
By Dave King | January 21, 2025 |
Consider this snippet of dialogue:
“What’s her name?”
“Janet.”
“I don’t feel comfortable calling anyone by their first name, especially a woman. Do you know her last name?”
“No, I don’t. You’ll just have to call her Janet, I guess.
Perfectly good, serviceable stuff, right? Clear, fairly concise, smooth. Now look at how Rex Stout actually did it in the short story “The Cop Killer:”
“What’s her name?”
“Janet.”
“I call few men, and no women, by their first names. What’s her name?”
“That’s all I know, Janet. It won’t bite you.”
The same information, but you can hear Nero and Archie in the second version. That difference is voice.
I’ve written before about how elusive voice can be. I’ve suggested possible places to look for it and covered some of the hallmarks of good dialogue. Today, let’s take a deeper dive into how it can be done.
In the example above, notice how the word choice – and the unspoken assumptions behind the word choice — fit the two characters. Nero’s love of precise language is there in the concision and precision of the parallel “few men and no women.” The exact repetition of the question, “What’s her name,” amounts to an imperious rejection of Archie’s use of the first name. And Archie’s self-possession is there in his breezy dismissal of Wolf’s rejection. Essentially, their characters and their relationship are all there in those two lines of dialogue.
Or, take another example.
Every Christmas for the last few years, I have been sharing car-related passages from some of my favorite authors on a site for old car geeks. This year’s passage, from John Jerome’s 1979 book Truck, is also one of the best examples of distinctive character voice I’ve seen. The background: in 1970, Jerome bought, for various philosophical reasons, a 1950 Dodge pickup and spent a year getting it running again. Through a combination of ignorance and mild stupidity, he destroyed a relatively obscure part – the timing chain cover — and wrote to various junkyards trying to track down a replacement. This introduced him – and us – to Armad T. Winship, a junkyard owner in Fontana, California.
You can read the entire passage here, but here are some highlights of Mr. Winship’s letter. Spelling and punctuation are as in the original.
You might not believe it but space is and always has been the problem even before Fontana got the “middle-age spread” and passed ordinances in restraint of our trade. Ten acres is all we have left, guess how may cars that will hold and Ill send you free a dimmer switch for your truck, no rust, out of the packing box, if you come with 20 of the correct number. We have a special technique for getting the most cars on the smallest lot, no its not on their sides.
*******
I . . . drove crosscountry in a 36 Plymouth in 1940 just before the War, a sweet running little car if you didn’t try to push it in the desert. Everyone had those canvas waterbags on their bumpers so the evaporation would keep it cool. We didn’t and like to died, it felt like. I asked a man in a filling station for a little taste from his canvas bag, and it was cool for a fact.
*********
I will turn 75 next May 1, May Day but I always say Im no Communist, it was my birthday before it was theirs. Mrs. Winship is even older but she does not like me saying it.
*********
Some of our parts are mint, some we call perfect used, but we don’t let anything go out we would not put on our own pride and joy. It is a 1940 BUICK with fender-mounted spare. Franklin Roosevelt used to ride in one, a real classic and I keep it running like a watch. And not an Ingersoll, either. No offense to the Ingersoll people, they try hard.
So what makes this voice so distinctive? It helps that this was a letter, which gave Mr. Winship’s voice room to roll on without interruption. Beneath that, there is the apparent disorganization of his thoughts, the stream of consciousness flow that leads to a lot of doubling back to qualify what he’s just said. (My favorite is the comment on the Ingersoll people — makers of the Mickey Mouse Watch, by the way.) But even deeper than that is the exuberance and enthusiasm for what he’s doing. That’s what drives the words to gush out so fast that he can hardly keep up with them. Just on the basis of this one letter, I feel like Mr. Winship is someone I would like to know.
Incidentally, he did send Jerome a timing chain cover. And, in a personal note, Jerome’s book inspired me, when I was 19, in 1979, to pull a derelict 1939 Buick out of a backyard where it had been parked since 1961. Over breaks from college for the next few years, I got it running and roadworthy again and drove it for several years after college.
So, how do you do this for your own characters? Well, that’s the elusive part.
Ideally, your viewpoint character’s voice will emerge naturally. But even when the words are flowing, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether or not they have a distinctive voice. So try an exercise I’ve recommended in the past. Take all the dialogue spoken by one of your characters, put it into a single file, and read it through, all at once. Then do the same for another character, and another. Can you tell the difference between the characters just on the basis of their dialogue? Remember how easy it was to distinguish Nero and Archie were in just two lines.
If you can’t tell the difference between your character’s voices, one of several things might be going wrong. You may not know your characters well enough. If so, I’ve written before on how you can meet them at a deeper level.
It may be that you’re so taken by how the story is unfolding, how the dialogue is moving things forward, that you’ve simply forgotten about character voice. If so, it can help to imagine yourself into your viewpoint character’s head before writing a scene. I’m talking about a step-by-step, deliberate act of imagination – picturing what their hands look like, what they’re wearing, where they sitting or standing. Filling in details from their immediate past – what happened to them just before the scene, how they feel abut the other characters or the situation they’re walking into. Enough practice with these acts of imagination, and you may find your voice flowing more easily.
Mark Twain once said that analyzing a joke is like dissecting a frog. You can learn a lot, but the frog tends to die in the process. And much the same is true of voice – it’s harder to enjoy something when you’ve trained yourself to see the gears and levers at work. But this may be one way to develop the skills you need to give your readers as much delight in your characters as I took in Mr. Armand T. Winship of Fontana, California.
How have you found voice in your own characters? Did it come easily, or was it a struggle? And what are your favorite examples of voice? (Dorothy Sayers’ Dowager Duchess is another favorite for me.)
Dave King has been editing for nearly 40 years now. He is co-author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, a former contributing editor to Writer’s Digest, and has contributed more than 100 articles over the last 12 years to Writer Unboxed. He lives on 25 acres in rural Massachusetts with his business partner and wife, Ruth Julian, who also edits his work. His other day job, at least on Sundays, is as the organist at a Lutheran church in Greenfield, Mass.
[coffee]
Wonderful post, Dave. And boy, do I need “wonderful” today. To your excellent points: I am finding, the more I write, that “voice” is something I allow rather than invent. If I let myself feel the character, trust her (rather than trying to manipulate her), her voice will come …
That’s not the same as imagining that I am a naturally brilliant writer who needs no special knowledge other than her own innate genius! :-) This particular kind of trust seems to come only after I’ve exhausted all the contrivances and turned, instead, to something whose origin is deeply human, rather than technical. It’s taken four books to get there …
Hey, Barbara,
You’re right about a lot of tings. Voice is best when it arises because you’re feeling the character. That’s why I included the link to the article I wrote a few years ago about meeting your characters.
You’re especially right that your ability to create voice develops the more you write. In Self-Editing, Renni and I contrast the opening of Omoo, an early novel by Herman Melville, with the opening of Moby Dick. The Melville who wrote Omoo could never have written “Call me Ishmael.”
And, finally, you’re right that we could use some wonderful at the moment. But I’m sure the listmoms really want to avoid politics as much as humanly possible.
Oh, Dave, I think I’m half smitten with Mr. Armand T. Winship of Fontana, California.
I just started in on a partial draft I wrote a couple of years ago, knowing it needed a new first act. I had revision notes and knew it needed a stronger voice as well as different action, and I looked at my partial outline, but I didn’t go back and reread the text until after I finished Ch 1, writing basically from scratch. What a surprise to discover not only had I unconsciously switched from close 3d to 1st, but I’d given my young reporter a whole different voice and attitude. What a difference a few years makes.
See, this is the advantage of letting a manuscript sit for a while. Those changes, particularly the new voice for the reporter, may reflect how much you’ve learned in the meantime.
Follow your inspiration, and best of luck.
Wonderful post, Dave. Mr. Winship is a great pleasure to read. I’m inspired.
Oh, I’d urge you to follow the link to the WU facebook page and read the entire passage. It’s just all sorts of fun.
Dave, I had trouble coming up with a distinctive voice in a character while writing the sequel. Until I realized the famous musician character was a balance of tell it like it is (did not mince words) in giving support to the main character. Maybe I got that right. The other characters were looked at for their distinctive roles in the story. I tried to get into their heads. I’m also consulting with a friend writing a screenplay. I keep telling her certain characters would never say that. And change the dialogue for her. It works. The characters in your post have distinctive voice and I can actually visualize what they look like! And your love of old cars was interesting. What a great hobby. And a learning experience for you at a young age. Thanks for making me think about character’s voice.
It sounds like you’re finding your way to voice — it truly does not come easy. To get into characters’ heads, you might try writing the same scene from various viewpoints, so you can get into each head and see how they play together. You might also write key scenes from your viewpoint character’s life — scenes that aren’t part of the story. It gives you the background for where they are at the moment.
And, yes, those cars were a learning experience. When I got the Buick, it was being used as a shed. The motor and brakes were both seized, there was gas in the tank that had been there since the Kennedy administration, and mice had been living in the back seat for years. But I got it going. And it rolled along nicely. Buick’s were well-engineered powerful cars, and it would cruise along happily at 65MPH for hours.
Dave, I usually cannot write a piece of fiction until the character begins to speak to me. And if I have trouble hearing their voices, I have them write letters to each other :) One of my favorite voices was Shiva’s from Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, esp. when Shiva was a child. His enthusiasm is so infectious. I copied one of my favorite passages (because I like numbers as well as words). Marion, Shiva’s twin brother, narrates.
“One of you scored a perfect one hundred. But he or she didn’t write a name on the paper. The rest of you were miserable. Sixty-six percent of you failed,” he exclaimed. “What do you think of that number? Sixty-six!”
For Shiva, rhetorical questions were a trap. He never asked a question to which he knew the answer. Shiva raised his hand. I cringed in my seat. Mr. Bailey’s eyebrow went up, as if a chair in the corner which he’d managed to ignore for a few months had suddenly developed delusions that it was alive.
“You have something to say?”
“Sixty-six is my second-favorite number,” Shiva said.
“Pray, why is it your second favorite?” said Bailey.
“Because if you take the numbers you can divide into sixty-six, including sixty-six, and add them up, what you have is a square.”
Mr. Bailey couldn’t resist. He wrote down 1, 2, 3, 6, 11, 22, 33, and 66–all the numbers that went into 66–and then he totaled. What he got was 144, at which point both he and Shiva said, “Twelve squared!”
“That’s what makes sixty-six special,” Shiva said. “It’s also true of three, twenty-two, sixty-six, seventy–their divisors add up to a square.”
“Pray, tell us what’s your favorite number,” Bailey said, no sarcasm in his voice anymore, “since sixty-six is your second favorite?”
Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote: 10,213,223.
Bailey studied this for a long while, turning a bit red. Then he threw up his hands in a gesture that struck me as very ladylike. “And pray, why would this number interest us?”
“The first four numbers are your license plate.” From Mr. Bailey’s expression, I didn’t think he was aware of this. “That’s a coincidence,” Shiva went on. “This number,” Shiva said, tapping on the board with the chalk, getting as excited as Shiva allowed himself to get, “is the only number that describes itself when you read it. ‘One zero, two ones, three twos, and two threes!” Then my brother laughed in delight, a sound so rare that our class was stunned. He brushed chalk off his hands, sat down, and he was done.
It was the only bit of mathematics that stayed with me from that year. As for the student who scored one hundred percent?–whoever it was had drawn a picture of Veronica on the test paper in lieu of a name.
Hey, Vigaya,
That is a lovely passage. And you’re right about how the enthusiasm comes through.
And the moment when your characters start to speak to you is a wonderful moment. It’s one of the reasons to write.
A day late and far more than a dollar short, Dave, but thank you for taking on what is arguably the most unpindownable craft topic for writers. You say this:
“So, how do you do this for your own characters? Well, that’s the elusive part.”
For me, the answer has a lot to do with the voice we ourselves develop on the way to maturity. I won’t presume to explain it, but we all end up having a distinctive voice. If we hear it in ourselves, we have a touchstone or point of departure for imagining contrasting voices, voices distinctly different from our own. Writers who rely too heavily on their own voice will probably find it harder to develop fresh ones for their stories.
Thanks again for another very useful post.
A very nice point, Barry. Thank you.
Good dialogue gives the writer space to bring characters to the page. Your post today is very helpful. I also believe that over time, a character begins to live on the page…especially with dialogue. On a good writing day, the voice comes to the page easily. And if you then lose that voice, it helps to reread pages from days before, to pick up the rhythm and cadence of that voice. Thanks for your post.
An excellent suggestion. And it seems to be the consensus of the meeting that voice happens when your characters come to life.