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11 Intermediate Nv Narrative Voice Point of View & Voice

Narrative Voice

The personality of the telling itself.

What it is

Narrative voice is the personality of the telling: how it sounds to be told this story by this particular teller. Who tells the story, and what that teller is allowed to know, belong to point of view. Voice is what you hear once those decisions are made. Picture two novels, both in close third person (narration that stays tight inside one character's head), both in past tense, both opening on a woman walking into a police station. In the first book the sentences run long and link into one another, and the narration notices the light on the linoleum. In the second the sentences are short, flat jabs, and the narration notices nothing but the queue. Same viewpoint, same tense, same situation, and the two books sound like two different people. The gap between them is voice. A reader in a store decides which of the two to buy on that difference, and decides inside one paragraph.

Readers judge voice before they judge anything else, usually on page one of the sample. Plot is spent after one reading. Voice is a pleasure the reader can buy again from any other book by the same author, which is why people say "I'll read anything she writes." They mean they enjoy the teller's company whatever the plotting turns out to be.

Voice is also the element writers most want to acquire and cannot. There is no technique for it. Voice is what is left over from a thousand small choices about word, rhythm, detail and joke. Those choices can be described, and the rest of this page describes them, but nobody can install them in you. So do not wait for a gift. Voice is the pattern your sentence habits form, and readers come back because they liked the company of the person those habits add up to.

In the abstract, voice seems mysterious. At sentence level it comes down to a short list of things you can see and measure, and a single paragraph shows every one of them: how long the sentences are and how much that varies, where each sentence puts its weight, whether the words are short and blunt or long and Latin-based, and what the narration bothers to notice. Take the components one at a time.

Start with sentence length and how much it varies. Of all the components this is the loudest and the least managed. A page of sentences that all run twelve to eighteen words reads as competent and dead. Three long sentences followed by a four-word one hit the reader in the body. Here is one moment written twice, with the same facts, the same viewpoint and the same tense.

She opened the door and went in, and the smell met her before her eyes had adjusted, old fat and bleach and under them something sweeter that she was not going to put a name to — the way a memory arrives before you have decided whether you want it — and she stood where she was and waited to be told what to do.

She opened the door. Went in. Old fat. Bleach. Something sweeter, and she was not going to name it. She stood still and waited to be told.

Version one holds a thought all the way through, sets an aside off with a pair of dashes, and compares the smell to the way a memory arrives. Version two refuses to do any of that and gives each smell its own fragment. Nothing in the facts changed. Yet these are two different tellers, and you would never confuse them.

Syntax is next: where the weight of a sentence falls. English lets you put the punch at the end or bury it in the middle, and a narrator who habitually does one or the other is building an identity. Compare He was, by every measure that mattered to the people who mattered, finished with He was finished, and everyone who counted knew it. Two narrators. Fragments count as syntax. So do comma splices (two sentences joined by nothing but a comma), sentences that open with And or But, long chains of tacked-on clauses, and a one-syllable final word. Every one of those is a choice, and every choice is voice.

Then vocabulary and register. Register is the level of language the narration occupies, from plain to formal, and it matters more than "big words versus small words." A narrator built from short, blunt Anglo-Saxon words (dirt, cold, wanted, hit) is one person. A narrator built from long, abstract Latinate words, meaning words derived from Latin (consideration, inevitability, arrangement), is another. A deliberate mix of the two is a third, and comedy often lives in that mix. A narrator who calls a knife fight an unfortunate disagreement has told you a great deal about himself, and the joke is on him as much as on the fight.

What the narration notices is rarely thought of as part of voice, and it may be the strongest part. Two narrators walk into the same kitchen. One reports the brand of the kettle, the crumbs on the counter and the unopened mail. The other reports that the woman at the table has not looked up. The room is identical. Selection is personality: what you pay attention to tells people who you are, and voice is the pattern of those selections across three hundred pages. The sensory detail page covers how to choose details. The point here is that the choosing itself has a sound.

What the narration refuses is the negative space, the outline of the voice. Typical refusals: emotions are never named, thoughts are off limits, adverbs are barred, weather does not appear, metaphor is forbidden. A rule kept is as audible as a habit indulged. Consistent refusals are what make a plain style a style instead of an absence.

Humor and irony come next: whether the narration finds things funny and admits it. Irony is the distance between what the narration says and what the reader is meant to understand. A dry voice does the job of subtext in the telling itself rather than in the scene.

Attitude is whether the narration judges. He wore the tie his wife had chosen is neutral. He wore the tie his wife had chosen, as he always did has an opinion. Attitude is concrete. A sentence either appraises its subject or leaves it alone, and a narrator who never judges is as distinctive as one who cannot stop.

Last, punctuation and paragraphing. Semicolons or dashes. One-line paragraphs or thick blocks. Parentheses are a confiding gesture; dashes are self-interruption. Punctuation is rhythm on the page, which is why reading aloud exposes voice faults that stay invisible to a silent reader.

The word "voice" gets used for three different things, and confusing them wastes revision time. Editor Tiffany Yates Martin splits it into three layers: author voice, narrative voice and character voice.

Author voice is constant across everything you write. A reader who knows your work, handed a page with the cover hidden, will know it is yours within two pages. Author voice is a fingerprint rather than a costume, and the Cuckoo's Calling case below is the proof of how stubborn it is.

Narrative voice is the voice of this book. It sits inside the author voice and is shaped for the job. One writer's bleak thriller and the same writer's light caper share a fingerprint and sound nothing alike. Of the three layers, narrative voice is the one you actually decide.

Character voice is how each person in the book speaks and thinks. It overlaps with narrative voice in close third and in first person, where the narration takes on the tint of the viewpoint character and the two partly merge. In omniscient narration (an all-knowing narrator) there is no blending at all, so the omniscient narrator has to carry a personality of its own or it registers as no one. Character voice has its own page, with its own separate purpose.

One more distinction. Tone is the story's attitude toward its material and its reader, the emotional weather, and it is free to shift from chapter to chapter. Voice is the teller's identity, and it stays constant by design. One voice can carry a tone shift from funny to bleak without becoming someone else.

Why it matters

Plot is consumed once; voice can be enjoyed again and again. When readers finish your book they know the plot. To get fresh pleasure from a new plot they have to take a chance on your next premise, which they may not like. Your voice, though, is available at once from anything else you have written. Loyalty to an author is therefore more reliable than loyalty to a series, and "I'll read anything she writes" is a sentence readers really say. They mean they enjoy your company whatever the plotting.

For a self-publisher, voice shows up in three concrete places. The sample, the back catalog, and speed. Each deserves its own look.

The sample sells the voice. In any store, the final decision happens on the first page or two. The blurb sells the premise. The hook sells the situation. The sample sells the voice, and voice is the only one of those a browser can judge in ninety seconds. A strong voice with a modest setup in the first chapter outsells a clever setup narrated by nobody.

A recognized voice sells the back catalog. Readers who recognize a voice turn one finished book into five more purchases. Loyalty within a series is a mix of plot and series arc. Loyalty across series, from your fantasy trilogy to your contemporary mysteries, is almost entirely voice.

A settled voice makes you faster. A voice that is settled removes decisions. No adverbs with said. No weather for its own sake. Hands noticed before faces. Rules like those mean several hundred small choices per chapter are already made before you sit down. Writers who produce several books a year do not choose faster; they have fewer choices to make. A voice written down on paper serves a first draft as well as an outline does.

Writing a lot brings two problems of its own: drift across a long series, and keeping pen-name voices apart. Take drift first. The author of book nine is not the author of book one. They are older, more skilled, and wearier of their own habits. Drift is normal, and it hides from the author because consecutive books differ only a little. Readers who take the books one after another see it plainly and say the series has "lost something." They forgive growth. They do not forgive a narrator whose personality changed: a wry lead gone earnest, lean prose gone flabby, the jokes gone. The remedy is simple. Keep a page or two of actual prose from book one and read it again before you start each new book.

Each pen name promises a voice. A name promises a reading experience, so the voice is the product. If your cozy-mystery name and your grimdark name (grimdark is very dark, violent fantasy) sound alike, one of those audiences has been misled, and the reviews register it as disappointment rather than as a craft note. Separating two voices on purpose is harder than it looks, because the fingerprint shows through the disguise, as Robert Galbraith found out below. What you can reliably change is the surface: sentence length, register, how much joking, how much noticing, and which refusals. Write those choices down for each name, on a voice card, and file it in the continuity bible or wherever that name's rules live. Before a chapter goes to the editor, audit it against the card. James Scott Bell's VOICE, listed below, is a short book for genre novelists on shifting voice between genres and between pen names.

Real-world examples

Elmore Leonard's ten rules (2001): a voice built from refusals

On July 16, 2001, the New York Times ran an essay by the crime novelist Elmore Leonard in its "Writers on Writing" series. The title was "Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle." It gave ten rules, and Leonard framed them as his way of staying invisible while he wrote. William Morrow collected the rules as a book, Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, in 2007, with illustrations by Joe Ciardiello.

Nearly every rule is a prohibition. Never open with the weather. Carry dialogue with said and nothing else. Never attach an adverb to said. No detailed description of characters or places. The rule that sums up the rest: anything that reads like writing gets rewritten.

The list is the best worked demonstration of voice on record, for two reasons. The first is that a list of things a narrator will not do makes as strong a voice as any list of flourishes. Leonard aimed at invisibility and produced one of the most recognizable voices in American crime fiction. There is no contradiction in that. Consistent refusals are easy to hear. A narrator who will not tell you how a line was delivered is making a statement on every page: about dialogue, about how smart the reader is, and about itself.

The second reason is Leonard's own account of where his voice came from. Interviewed by Keith Phipps for The Onion's A.V. Club on March 6, 2002, Leonard described studying Hemingway closely and credited Hemingway as the writer who taught him to write. He parted ways with Hemingway over humor. He could find none in him, so he looked elsewhere. His method, as he described it, was wide reading plus deliberate copying of many authors, for a while, until a voice of his own came through.

That account is the most useful thing a working novelist has said about acquiring a voice, and it contradicts the advice beginners usually get. You do not find a voice by looking inward. You imitate widely and deliberately until imitation stops being the point. Imitation does not trap you, because what happened to Leonard with Hemingway happens to everyone: the copied writer's attitude eventually stops matching yours. Drop what you do not believe. What remains is your voice. Ben Yagoda's The Sound on the Page, listed below, has over forty professional writers describing how each arrived at a voice, and no two paths match.

One for the Money (1994): what readers come back for thirty times

Janet Evanovich's One for the Money came out from St. Martin's Press on August 26, 1994. Stephanie Plum, a smart-mouthed bounty hunter in Trenton, narrates in first person, mocking herself as she goes, and the book is funny from page one. At the time of writing the series is past thirty novels and still going.

Plot is not why anyone reads thirty comic crime novels. The cases are serviceable and mostly interchangeable, and the series' readers admit as much. The draw is the sound: a fast, wisecracking narrator who can report an exploding car and her grandmother's opinion of it in one breath. Voice is the product and plot is the delivery vehicle. Readers come back for the voice, and the pleasure they are repeating has nothing to do with curiosity about what happens.

The series also says something about pen names, because Evanovich did not start here. In the late 1980s she wrote category romance (the shorter romances published in publishers' branded lines). Her first novel, Hero at Large, appeared in 1987 under the name Steffie Hall. The comic crime voice came later. The voice a writer becomes known for is often a later one, and often in a later genre.

For series writers the lesson is as much warning as comfort. If voice is what your readers buy, you cannot skimp on it at book nineteen because you are tired. A plot-driven series gets forgiven a flat entry. In a voice-driven series a flat entry is where readers leave.

Naked in Death (1995): Nora Roberts becomes J.D. Robb on purpose

In 1995 Nora Roberts, already a hugely prolific romance novelist, began publishing as J.D. Robb. Naked in Death, a Berkley paperback from July 1995, opened the In Death series: futuristic suspense about Eve Dallas, a police lieutenant in New York in the middle of the twenty-first century. At the time of writing the series runs beyond fifty titles.

The official J.D. Robb biography records two things. Her agent's reasoning was that a pen name is one more flavor of the same soft-drink brand, a route to a different readership. And the publisher did not fully reveal that Robb was Roberts until the twelfth novel, Betrayal in Death, in 2001.

The six years from 1995 to 2001 are the instructive part. The Robb books were built slowly, with as little connection to the Roberts name as possible, so the Robb voice had to stand on its own in front of readers who had no reason to be generous. The two voices really do differ on the page. Robb is cooler, harder, procedural (built around police work), set in the near future, and violent. Roberts is warmer and more domestic. The gap was never total, and a good many readers guessed. But the two were different enough: a distinct promise, aimed at a distinct audience.

For a writer running more than one name, the lesson is that the split does not have to be total. It has to be consistent. In Death readers recognize that series' sound, and the recognition is the asset. A pen-name voice that wobbles promises nothing. A second name no one can tell from the first is a marketing expense with no product behind it. The business side of running several names is covered under pen name.

The Cuckoo's Calling (2013): the fingerprint that would not come off

The Cuckoo's Calling, a crime novel, was published in April 2013 under the name Robert Galbraith. The jacket bio called him a former military policeman. Sales were modest. In July 2013 the Sunday Times named J.K. Rowling as the author.

How the paper got there matters, and the story is often told wrongly as a publicity stunt, which it was not. The Sunday Times had a tip, and it paid for an authorship analysis. Two academics, each with software built for the job, compared the novel against texts whose authors were known. Peter Millican of Oxford University ran his program Signature, a stylometric program, meaning software that measures writing style. Patrick Juola of Duquesne University ran JGAAP, a program he had built over years for authorship questions.

Juola ran four comparisons, setting The Cuckoo's Calling against Rowling's The Casual Vacancy and against novels by three other crime writers, P.D. James, Val McDermid and Ruth Rendell. Rowling placed first or second every time. Millican then brought in a second book from each author. For Rowling that was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, a wholly different kind of book from a crime novel, and it still ranked second, above every one of the six novels by the other authors. Neither analyst called the result proof. Both results pointed the same way: probably Rowling. Shown the results, Rowling confirmed it.

The leak had come from her own side. A partner at Russells, her solicitors, told a friend, and the friend passed it to a journalist on Twitter. The firm apologized publicly, covered Rowling's legal costs, and made a large gift to a services charity. The regulator rebuked and fined the solicitor for breaching a client's confidence. Rowling was angry and upset, and stung most by the suggestion that the exposure had been a stunt. Her own website gives her reasons for the pen name: she wanted to work free of hype and expectation, and she wanted a writing persona set as far from herself as possible. She kept writing as Galbraith after the exposure, and one reason she gives is the pleasure of a second persona.

For a writer, the useful part is the four measurements, because they are the most concrete list anywhere of what voice is physically made of. First, the spread of word lengths. Second, how often the most common words appear, the the and of end of the vocabulary. Third, character four-grams, meaning every run of four characters in the text, which catches spelling and word-ending habits. Fourth, word bigrams, meaning pairs of adjacent words. The word-pair test matched most strongly.

Look at what is missing from that list: subject matter, genre, and anything a writer changes on purpose when trying to sound like someone else. The exposure came from the machinery underneath: habitual word length, the small function words a writer prefers, the word pairings a writer falls into. Those habits are the fingerprint, and they mostly sit below conscious control.

Two practical pulls follow. Hiding completely behind a pen name is probably impossible, at least from software. But the worry that hits most writers a few books in, that they have no voice at all, is answered by the same evidence. The voice exists, and it is steady enough to measure. "Sounding like nobody" is usually a voice you never noticed, flattened by careful editing.

An everyday scenario: one moment, four voices

The quickest way to see your own voice is to write one moment several ways. Here is a made-up moment to practice on. Ruth reaches her sister's front door. Diane owes her something, and Ruth has come to collect it. Every version below keeps the same viewpoint character, close third, past tense and the same facts. Only the voice changes.

Version 1, long sentences, noticing everything, willing to judge:

Diane's house had been repainted since the summer, in a soft green that had plainly cost money, the kind of green with a name like Cloister or Hessian, and a new brass number sat on the door, and the whole effect announced, politely and at some length, that things had gone well here.

Version 2, short and flat, noticing almost nothing:

The house was green now. New number. Brass. Ruth rang and waited.

Version 3, comic, the narrator openly enjoying itself:

The house had gone a green that cost money. The number on the door was brass, since plastic would have understated Diane's journey. Ruth rang the bell and arranged her face.

Version 4, cold, formal, withholding:

The exterior had been repainted. A brass numeral was mounted at eye level. Ruth pressed the bell and noted the time.

Four narrators, and none is better than the others. Version 1 opens a novel about class and resentment. Version 2 opens a thriller. Version 3 opens a comedy. Version 4 opens something about to turn very unpleasant. None of that came from plot. It came from sentence length, register, which details got picked, and whether the narrator was allowed an opinion. Twenty minutes of this on a paragraph of your own teaches more than a month of reading about voice.

Try it yourself

Set aside an hour and a half, and use a chapter you have actually drafted rather than one you plan to write.

  1. Read a page aloud, standing up. Read it properly, out loud, with no muttering. Mark every spot where you run out of breath, stumble, or bore yourself. This one step finds more than any other, and it is the step writers skip.
  2. Measure the sentences. Take one page and write each sentence's word count in the margin: 14, 11, 16, 13, 15. Bunched numbers like those show you exactly where the page goes flat. The mechanical fix: revise until no three sentences in a row are within two words of each other in length. Then read the page aloud again.
  3. List what the narration notices. Write down every detail one scene reports. Read the list back as a portrait of the teller. Faces or hands? Money or weather? Clothing, or whatever the character is avoiding? If the list reads like a neutral inventory of the room, the narration is a camera, and a camera has no voice.
  4. Write the refusals. List three to six things your narrator will not do. Samples to steal and adapt: no adverbs on dialogue tags; never name an emotion outright; no simile longer than four words; no weather unless a character is complaining about it; no semicolons. Then check the chapter against the list. Having rules matters more than which rules you have.
  5. Run the four-voices drill. Take one paragraph and rewrite it four ways, as in the scenario above: long and judging, short and flat, comic, and cold and formal. Give it about twenty minutes. The version that felt like the least effort tells you something about you rather than about the paragraph.
  6. Imitate on purpose, then throw it away. Pick a writer you admire in your genre. Copy a page of theirs by hand. Then write a page of your own scene in their style. Then put both pages away and rewrite the scene with neither in sight. Leonard worked this way, and the third version keeps only what you actually believe in. Les Edgerton's Finding Your Voice, listed below, is a book of exercises like this one, written for writers whose prose is clean but anonymous.
  7. Make a voice card for each pen name. One index card or one page: typical sentence length, register, how much joking, what the narration notices, and the refusals. Add two or three sentences copied word for word from book one. Those are your tuning fork. Keep the card with the rest of that name's rules. The template at the end of this list is the card.
  8. Run the drift check before each new series book. Reread the card and the book-one sentences. Write the new book's first page. Compare. Five minutes catches the slow slide readers notice and you do not.

Narrative voice: [book or pen name] Typical sentence length and variation Register and vocabulary Notices Does not notice Refusals Humor: none / dry / broad, and who is allowed to be funny Does the narration judge? Tuning-fork sentences from book one

Common mistakes and misunderstandings

Mistaking decoration for voice. The most common wrong turn. A writer hears that the prose has no voice, so they pile on metaphor, adjectives and odd dialogue tags. The result is worse. The emptiness is unchanged and now wears jewelry. Voice lives in rhythm, selection and attitude, and plain prose can carry more voice than ornate prose.

Mistaking tone for voice. Tone is a passage's attitude to its material, and it may swing from scene to scene. Voice is the teller, and it should not swing. A "voice problem" that lives only in chapter four is usually a tone problem. A narrator who seems to have been swapped for someone else is a voice problem.

Believing voice needs first person. A strong voice is possible in any mode, and in omniscient narration it is compulsory, because a narrator with no personality is the flattest thing in fiction. First person guarantees nothing. A first-person narrator can have as little personality as a form.

Picking a voice from a menu. Writers ask which voice sells in their genre. There is no useful answer, because a voice cannot be chosen. A voice is what remains once you have written enough that your habits stop being accidents. What you can choose is the surface: distance, sentence length, how much joking. Tune those to the book. The rest stays yours.

Stopping at imitation. Imitation is the normal way in, and it is meant to be a passing stage. You stopped too early if readers can still hear the writer you copied. The remedy is to widen the set of models, preferring writers who are at odds with one another, until no single source can be traced.

Author intrusion in close third. A witty narrator who makes a joke the viewpoint character could not make in their present state breaks the scene. In close third and the other close modes the narrative voice passes through the character, so the wit has to be within the character's reach. If it is not, widen the distance between narrator and character first. The fault is a point of view boundary problem that happens to damage the voice.

Mistaking a tic for a voice. Every third paragraph opening with And. Dashes everywhere. One-word paragraphs for emphasis. Used once, each of those is a device. Used ninety times, it is a mannerism, and the reader starts counting instead of reading. A tic is a habit you have not noticed. A voice is a set of habits that fit together and agree with one another.

Sanding the voice off in revision. Line editing pushes toward correctness, and correct prose has no voice. Fragments get joined, repeated words get swapped out, odd choices get smoothed, and the chapter comes back cleaner and deader. Before the revision pass, mark which oddities are the voice rather than errors. Then tell your editor and your beta readers what is on the protected list.

Using voice as an excuse for confusion. If readers cannot tell who is speaking, what happened or where they are, you have a clarity problem, however distinctive you meant to be. Readers cannot tell the difference between a bold voice and a muddle. Clarity comes first. The freedoms are earned afterward.

Writing every pen name in one voice. If readers cannot tell your two names apart, the second name is doing no work. The remedy is voice cards kept distinct, plus an honest check that the distinction holds across a whole chapter and not just the opening page.

Assuming voice is fixed forever. Author voice matures across a career, and readers accept that. What they resist is a beloved series narrator turning into someone else midway through. Growth belongs between series. Constancy belongs inside one.

Waiting to find a voice before you write. Nobody finds it first. Voice comes from volume. The writers who have a voice are usually the ones who have finished the most books.

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