First things first

As I am typing this on my macbook air, I’m being reminded that I’m overcoming the unkind training of my PC. You see, there’s a little thing called the command key, which is the Mac’s functional equivalent to the alt key. It wouldn’t be a problem except that the two keys are placed in completely different places on the two different setups; and there is no hope that my office can be convinced to switch over to the more costly apple devices anytime soon.  That I could come to hate such an unassuming keyboard key with such awkward loathing (in the same way a dog hates police sirens on account of no other reason than the fake threat they pose their existence), is such an anomaly. Or at least it would be for anyone else. I have declared my hatred for such a litany of things that I can no longer use the word with power: shoe laces, zinc-based sunscreen, flip-flop divider things.   So anytime I reference my hatred it should be taken with a million grains of salt.  And what were we talking about anyways…

Oh yes, I suppose I should return to the point of this post:

The voice

One of the most challenging parts of writing something well (anyone can write something poorly, a fact that I’m constantly reminded of), is keeping in voice. But the precursor to that is actually finding that voice. There are plenty of plain-vanilla cardboard-tasting ways to craft a voice. You can drape a bunch of plastic feelings in a southern twang, pry a tear or two out of stiff, wooden prose about losing your mother to cancer, or just type for the sake of typing. But if you want to grab your audience with an unforgiving screw ride to the end, you need to figure out an unusual voice. This is not to say that it has to be completely new. There are almost zero ways to be new in our age of infinite data. But it does have to be interesting.

For the latest thing I wrote, let’s call it Project X, I started with a base-line satirical voice, something very doubting like our friend Holden Caufield, but then I overlaid a sweetness and cleverness. I built impossible scenes, very susceptible to the main character’s doubting ways. That way she is constantly able to verbally roll her eyes at the happenings and we can sympathize. For a voice like that, the biggest challenge is finding the moments where she herself can sympathize with others. It would have been very easy to ride the skepticism from beginning to end, but I knew that doing so would compromise the texture of her character, and ultimately the texture of her world. The first rule of finding a voice is to find ways of breaking that voice.

One of my favorite voices has to be that of Raul Duke from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Raul’s voice was essentially indistinguishable from the author Hunter S. Thompson, which you wouldn’t think would be a great idea, unless your name happens to be Hunter S. Thompson. The thing that elevated Raul’s voice was that the narrator expressed great doubt about the events that he was in fact causing to happen. It was as though he was a spectator to his own shenanigans, watching himself do every drug known to man without judgment as he toured the underbelly of Circus Circus and asking workers at a taco stand about where to find the American dream. The incredulity and impartiality in the tone matched perfectly to the mental state of the character, showing the aloofness caused by the impossible high of doing every drug known to man. That this was likely the penultimate expression of a voice can hardly be denied.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the wonderful book I’m reading right now, Charles Stross’s Rule 34, which is a sci-fi novel completely written in an unforgivingly dense second person narrative. There’s nothing stylistically outlandish about the prose (unless you count Scottish Slang in this category), but the voices do a good job of showing the urgency of the actions taking place in the book with a minimalist approach. Sci-fi projects frequently find themselves overly explaining the nuances of their particular universe, but Stross manages to do this in a way that does not show the paint strokes, and the voices are a key part of that.

Though it seems trite to mention, Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn are two additional good examples of the right voice for the right setting.

Back when I was writing a book about a garbage man (which has since been horribly neglected), I created a very specific Californian voice that was almost southern in a carry-over way as can be the case when you deal with a recent transplant (as an aside I’ve heard that the Southern accent, like most accents in America, is falling by the way side, but I’m probably fine with that). Anyways, the voice of that garbage man was so thoroughly enmeshed in my consciousness that I began to speak a little bit like it for a time in early college.   I guess if there is any knowledge to be gained from all this nonsense, I’d have to boil it down to this horribly trite statement: Find a voice that grips you, a voice so powerful that you must bend the plot around it, and you will know that you are on the right track (or at the very least you are not writing another cookie cutter paperback).