Lift Every Voice
On Growing Your Narrative Voice
Good morning to everyone reading. I hope you are warm. We have crossed the halfway point of November now and since I last wrote I had to open the storage container of winter tops and break out the long-sleeved sweaters. My dog also put on a sweater, even though she was already wearing a natural fur coat. Her sweater does not have long sleeves, though. Anyway I am all bundled up and thinking about what I will be thankful for in next Thursday’s essay.
In the mean time I am trying to give myself a break by writing on easier topics for a bit. This is like when you are a long distance runner and you’re mid-run and you want to take a break; you don’t have to stop to rest, you can just slow down from your regular pace to get a rest and then pick up the pace again. An ex of mine liked running and told me that. I think that sounds completely insane; you will never catch me running, not for any reason. If there were a zombie apocalypse I would have to simply give up and be devoured. I will not survive any type of apocalyptic event that requires running.
If there is some sort of apocalypse scenario and running is not required, sign me up. I know how to make clothing, and I can sew using a treadle-operated (non-electric) machine. I would be a great asset to someone’s Mad Max–style encampment.
Today’s Shelf Life is about narrative voice—voices—and how to develop them. By “voice” I mean “narrative voice” and by “lift” I mean “steal.” I want to start by clarifying that when I say “voice” I don’t just mean the sound quality that comes out of your facehole when you speak or sing (volume, timbre, tone, pitch, et cetera) but also the elements of the way you speak, like diction (the clarity with which words are spoken), syntax (the order someone puts words in), accent, any sort of speech impairment or articulation disorder (like a stutter or a lisp), pace, rhythm, pronunciation, and the words and grammar you use. Each person’s individual use of language, as I described in this paragraph, is their idiolect.
Many, if not most of us, have the ability to speak with more than one voice. By “us” I don’t mean writers; I just mean “people who speak.” While I know this isn’t true for everyone, many of us learn early on that we need to cultivate more than one voice to get through life. We might have more than one idiolect that we can switch between; or perhaps it is that our idiolect contains more than one aspect and when choose when to use which.
In linguistics, the process of switching back and forth between two languages during one conversation (or even within one sentence) is called code-switching. For instance, a person who speaks both Spanish and English may speak to another bilingual Spanish-and-English speaker using a mix of words in Spanish and English.
Code-switching can also refer to changing the manner of your speech, or the version of the language you’re using. For instance, a person may speak casually with their friend group or family members but adjust their natural language pattern to a more-formal variation when they are at work. In a less-linguistic sense, code-switching can also refer to adjusting your behavior or appearance to more closely match the dominant culture around you. Examples of this type of code-switching can include suppressing an accent, wearing clothes or hairstyles that “fit in” with others around you, and “toning down” your natural personality.
Code-switching in this sense typically refers to members of underrepresented groups adjusting to align themselves more closely to the majority norms around them. As a member of the dominant culture in the US (anglo white people), I wouldn’t use “code-switching” to describe switching between, for example, my work demeanor and my demeanor with friends—but those are very different personalities. And I use different voices in those places.
I feel like pretty much everyone I have ever heard speak on the phone to a stranger has a different “phone” personality that they bring out just for that purpose. Like the voice we dust off to talk to someone in customer service or the receptionist at the dentist’s office.
This is all to say that most of us probably already have the skill in our repertoire of using different voices for different situations. How to craft a voice just for the task of writing may or may not already be in your bag of tricks.
No two people speak the same way. No two narrators should speak with the same voice. I feel really great about the narrative voice I use when I write Shelf Life but it sounds just like how I speak. That has been a whole thing in itself, believe me, to not sound more stilted and formal than I do when I talk. But everything I write can’t sound like this. This (Shelf Life) and maybe a memoir, but for anything else I need to go get some new voices.
That’s fine, because I can just go on down to the voice shop any time and get a new voice any time I want. The voice shop is the television. It’s also other people I know and interact with on a regular basis—often enough to be familiar with the idiosyncrasies of their voice. It’s also voices I hear on YouTube or NPR or anywhere else I hear people talking.
I have an unfair advantage in that I was gifted with what I like to call my phonographic memory. I have a really great memory for everything I hear. I think this is because I am completely hopeless for remembering visuals (this is a side effect of aphantasia). I think I have a lot of free space in my brain from not storing any visual imagery so I have extra space to save sound files with very high fidelity.
So anyway, I collect voices in my brain but you don’t have to do that. You can just collect them in a notebook or something. If a real person or a fictional character portrayed by an actor has an idiolect that you like, you can steal that. Just make a note in your notebook like “A character who talks like Ilsa in Casablanca.” You can go back and watch Casablanca, or clips from Casablanca, as much as you want to absorb all the nuances of that voice. That doesn’t mean you lift the character of Ilsa wholesale; just take the voice. Get the other aspects from some other repository of borrows ideas.
Look, there are no brand new, totally original ideas. Everything new is just novel combination of old parts. Like if you had an Optimus Prime built out of Legos and you busted Optimus Prime down into his component Legos and built some other Transformer with those same Legos—I don’t know, Bumblebee? Voltron? Is Voltron a Transformer?—you have still created something new and cool even though you used the same Legos.
Anyway that’s where you can get voices. The trickier part is faithfully transcribing the voice you’ve crafted in your head. Most words lose something in translation from the brain to the page. So: I’m going to give you the goods on how you can evaluate how well you’ve captured narrative voice.
When you read any voice not written by you, your brain supplies the elements that aren’t specifically included on the page. A skillful writer includes enough elements that ten different readers would get the same impression of the narrative voice, but without overcrowding the page with descriptors and extra information. It’s hard to walk right on that line: Putting in enough detail to convey exactly what you want without overdoing it. You have to have a lot of writerly confidence to leave some things unsaid.
However, when you read any voice written by yourself, your brain is going to supply everything you left out automatically. You know what your intent was when you started writing. You know what that character sounds like. So when you read your own work, it’s very difficult to know whether you’ve effectively captured the voice correctly or not. If you mischaracterized something, or left something out, your brain will fill it in for you.
The trick is to listen to what you’ve written out loud but read by someone (or something) other than yourself. This could mean you have a friend read your work aloud, or you can have your web browser read the text to you. A friend who is new to the text (don’t explain it all to them first! Let them go in unprepared!) or, better yet, a computer with no thoughts or feelings about the text one way or the other, won’t add a bunch of flavor to the text like your own brain will. If you left out something important because your brain showed it to you so clearly that you didn’t spell it out, a new reader’s verbal rendition will reveal the omission.
I’ve noticed this can happen with writers who work very visually: Sometimes they see things so clearly in their mind that they don’t include enough detail in the text for an outsider to get all the important information. This can happen with voice, too, if you hear it super clearly in your mind’s ear. An impartial third party, in my experience, is a surefire way to identify when you have done this. They’ll either be confused and request clarification, or they’ll make inferences and come to conclusions that are way off from what you intended.
I find it helps to ask beta readers open-ended questions and let them talk to me about the story they read. They sometimes tell me surprising things that weren’t what I meant to convey at all. Never hurts to get a little help from your friends. Even if your friend is just a web browser with text-to-speech functionality. In the event of a robot apocalypse, you’ll be glad you befriended Microsoft Edge.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.
It's great how you've opened with phoning it in and taking a break from the deep issues, so you can talk about throwaway topics like code switching and stuff the rest of us plebs can engage in thoughtful conversation on.
But to start, just want to point out that we're all doing wonderfully on this breathing marathon so far. Breathing is one of the most important elements of running, and we've all been killing it nonstop lately and that should be a source of pride and strength.
I've been struggling with my term paper since it has something of an identity crisis. It started off as a girls-in-tech paper since we had to prepare to host some middle and high school girls with IGNITE Worldwide (that's "inspiring girls now in technology evolution", we don't come up with the bacronyms). However the research generally agrees that the steps you can take to reframe technology to make it more appealing to girls also works with underrepresented minorities and other groups and I've been grappling with some theories on whether it's a woman thing or a more general minority thing, but the code-switching thing is an interesting clue. One of the theories centered around "state authenticity", which shows that people tend to perform much better when they feel safe to be their true selves, but people also need to change who they are depending on their environment, and if their environment doesn't match their role they get into all sorts of psychological trouble which usually involves them rejecting part of their environment or themselves. Those in the majority of course were in a position to create the environment that matched their personality / cultural backgrounds, so their environments at school, work, the supermarket, etc. tend to match, so they're never really put in a position where they need to deal with conflict and have to do things like code-switching to fit in. So looks like code switching might be an important skill that is brought into a team when it has sufficient diversity that makes a measurable performance impact. The difficulty for my term paper is that it originally started with a much narrower focus and now I have to realign everything and everyone is confused because there are findings that go beyond the research question I originally set out to investigate.