Tag: narrative voice

Changing Voices

Guest post
by Melissa Bowersock

I’m a novelist by trade; the current count stands at nine. That count ranges over the various genres of action, romance, fantasy, western, spiritual and satire. As you can see, I like variety and I will tell any kind of story that grabs me by the throat, drags me to my chair and insists on being written down.

I’ve also learned that every story will demand a different voice. The romance novels will often have a more flowery style to them while the action stories are more clipped and direct. My spiritual novel, Goddess Rising, demanded an almost archaic voice, while my satire of romance novels, The Pits of Passion, bounced irreverently between gushing descriptions and off-the-cuff puns. The voices seem to arise naturally out of the story and require very little effort on my part.

So when I was inspired to write the true story of my aunt, an Army nurse and a prisoner-of-war during World War II, I thought, “No big deal.” I’m an author; I should be able to “auth” any kind of story there is, right? Continue reading “Changing Voices”

Narrative Voice: Breaking the Rules

Guest post
by Mark Hamner

As I worked to complete my third book, Cinder’s Reach, I encountered a situation which led me to think about narrative voice rules and if it’s ever okay to break them. I believe that most of the time the answer is no, but there may be some situations in which it’s not as cut-and-dried.

For those perhaps new to writing, narrative voice can be thought of as the general perspective of the story. The narrative voice goes hand-in-hand with the narrative point of view. Some common narrative voices are first-person character voice (“I wonder what Jennifer is thinking”), third-person limited voice (“Mike had no idea what Jennifer was thinking”), and third-person omniscient voice (“Mike was confused; Jennifer was furious.”)

My Echo Chronicles series is written in third-person omniscient voice. As you know, that means I follow the characters in a “He said,” “He went,” “He thought,” manner, and I give my readers insight into the thoughts and feeling of more than one character. My story does, of course, have a protagonist, and his is the main point of view and narrative voice, but I do drop into others as well. I have four main characters, and all four have lent their voices to the story at various times. This worked well for me through my first two books, but I hit a snag in the third. Continue reading “Narrative Voice: Breaking the Rules”

A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS

Author Lin Robinson

As I mentioned last time, I have found useful writing tips to be few and far between. This is, to me, one of the most powerful things you can use in creating fiction, but it’s subtle and has no real nuts/bolts application. But just being aware of it helps you when nothing else does. The term is “narrative voice”.

I first heard it in school from Jack Cady, a very talented short story writer who taught writing and science fiction in the Engineering department. Oddly, two weeks later I was sitting in a bar just off campus with Ken Kesey, and he said exactly the same thing. So I took it to heart.

It’s a vague and slippery concept as writing tips go, closer to psychology or spirituality than to medicine or exercise. But you should be aware of it: just keep that awareness a little unfocused. Narrative voice is, in Cady’s words, the way your story wants to tell itself. It’s way more than a point of view or style or dialect or mode or any of that, though all of those are elements in it. You pick up a children’s book about a kid looking for a lost friend and read it, it’s telling itself in a certain way that fits the story. Then you pick up a noir detective story about a guy looking for a lost friend and it tells itself in a very different way. Continue reading “A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS”