Voice
What I’ve done . . . is to read your stories for the FIRE anthology. . . . Of course I read the “Hellhound” story first, and how could I help but love that, with horses and hellhounds both. So I was surprised to find that I loved “First Flight” even more. I think you’ve developed a whole new voice recently – not that you’ve lost the old one, because I’d say CHALICE is written in the voice I associate with you traditionally. I don’t have the critical language for this, but it’s as if with DRAGONHAVEN you experimented with a more colloquial voice, and you’ve refined that with “First Flight.” Do you think there’s any truth to that? I expect it’s the way the character’s voice comes to you, not anything you’re “experimenting” with, so that’s a wrong way to express it. Anyway, it’s a terrific story. Also that’s an adorable new picture of the hellhounds on your website, on their leashes looking back at you.
[Yes, it is adorable, isn't it? Aren't they. Beam.]
This is one of the editors I work with, although she’s not publishing FIRE. She and I–and Merrilee–go back together to the beginning. We’re the Three Crones. Beware us. If we don’t like you we’ll slug you with our canes. Well, no. Only I would slug you with my cane. Merrilee and Lily are way too nice. I’m not sure Lily even has a Rude Switch.* But when the three of us are sitting on the porch of the old folks’ home together, I’m the one you want to stay more than cane’s-length away from.**
But I digress.
I’m delighted that someone wants to talk about voice, because I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot lately: yes, Jake is the ‘colloquial’ voice and CHALICE is back to Traditional Modern Sub-Forsoothly–as is PEGASUS, although ALBION will be colloquial again, which is to say first person, which appears to be the dividing line for me, which is perhaps a tale for another time.
I was going to say that it all started with SUNSHINE, that colloquial voice, but really it began with BEAUTY. I’ve told you this both here and in the FAQ, I think: I wrote BEAUTY by accident.*** It was a writing exercise of sorts, to get me away from Damar, which was threatening to bury me. Beauty’s story just began ‘I was the youngest of three daughters.’ Lily’s right, it’s the way the character’s voice comes to me, I wasn’t sitting there thinking ‘okay, to make this writing exercise as useful as possible, do I want first person, third, or omniscient?’ One of the ways I know, or anyway guess, that a story is ready for me to start writing it down is that I see the first sentence on a page in my mind’s eye, or possibly hear it in my mind’s ear–or both. BEAUTY was the first time this had happened to me so strongly, however, and at the time I thought it was part of my fury at the bungled TV special ‘Beauty and the Beast’, which was how I came to be pursuing this ‘writing exercise’ at all.
But as I think about it, trying to write it down for you here, I can tell you there’s more individuality in that first sentence’s presentation than mere words on a page: there’s a, well, a tone of voice. Beauty of BEAUTY would say ‘Good night, Beast’ in a completely different voice than Beauty of ROSE DAUGHTER would. I ‘know’ before I start what the voice of a story is because that is the voice the story comes in. Not ‘with’. ‘In’.
Having said that, when I was first thinking about DRAGONHAVEN†, when I was in the early stage of realizing there was a story there but not being sure what it was, what I did know was that it was about a teenage boy raising an orphaned baby dragon. That the protagonist was a boy was a given from the beginning. From before the beginning: it was part of the beginning. And I was beginning to hear Jake’s voice in my head, but I thought I was hearing it in dialogue. I started out assuming that I was going to be telling this story in third/omniscient, because that’s mostly what I’ve done before–except for BEAUTY, and SUNSHINE. And it wasn’t till I made the shift to telling Jake’s story as ‘I’–or letting Jake tell his story through me, which is always how it feels, or anyway always how it feels when it feels right–that I began to get comfortable with it, to hear it properly, to hear it well enough to write it down.
When you write your first novel you don’t really know what you’re doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first ‘Once upon a time’.†† I’m not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults†††, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them. The individuality of Beauty’s voice was my biggest break about writing BEAUTY as a clueless baby author, but part of that individuality was that the story arrived in first person. First person comes with a built-in framework: if you’re telling a story in first person, you can only tell the bits that person knows.‡ This is hugely useful when you’re young and stupid and floundering.
Part of what was interesting to me about writing DRAGONHAVEN‡‡ was writing a male protagonist–the only time I’d done this previously was in The Twelve Dancing Princesses in THE DOOR IN THE HEDGE, and while it’s a long short story, it’s still a short story, and it’s in Slightly Retro Traditional Forsoothly, which provides you with a useful structural distance from your characters, as for example when your hero’s a bloke, and you’re a girl with a serious fixation on Girls Who Do Things because when you were growing up and reading stories there weren’t any. I really liked my old soldier but he didn’t feel like an alter ego, the way most of my heroines do.‡‡‡
I couldn’t write Jake’s story when I was still thinking about it in third person. My error of course–I’m busy looking in the wrong direction while it’s jumping up and down waving at me frantically from another direction entirely–but I wouldn’t have been able to write it in third person. If it had come in third person, the Story Council would have had to give it to someone else. Jake didn’t start to make sense to me till I was writing ‘I’. Once I was inside his skin and going ‘oh yes I know’ about his generally rather wired approach to life I knew where I was. I was telling a story about a, well, about a friend.
To Be Continued. . . .
* * *
* Mine has been jammed ‘on’ since birth.
** I think you can rely on my being in a bad mood, if I’m sitting on a porch of an old folks’ home.
*** Yes, I do this a lot.
† Back when it was still a short story
†† Or equivalent
††† *(&^?<#^=**+}%$£”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
‡ Generally speaking as a reader I dislike books that swap from first person to third to omniscient chapter by chapter or whatever. Choose your horse and stick to it and stop playing hopscotch midstream. I admit that there are some very good books that have been written in various voices–and I’ve even liked some of them. But the voice shift never makes me happy.
‡‡ Stories don’t necessarily care if you’re interested or not, as long as you’re getting the words down right. They figure you can be interested later. At the moment, you’re busy.
‡‡‡ OUTLAWS is a bit different. It doesn’t stay in Robin’s voice for long, there’s Marian and . . . er^ . . . and also I grew up with Robin Hood. I never really thought about his being a bloke till I got older, and started thinking about Girls Who Do Things, and getting angry on my younger self’s behalf for the way Robin dies–in the version I knew best–by a woman’s treachery, for no reason other than that she’s a vicious cow.
^. There are probably blog readers who haven’t read it, and I don’t want to spoil the joke
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