Voice

A Writer's Voice

The Three Tenors

'Voice' is the word many writers and theorists use when they try to explain the more traditional idea of 'style' used in writing fiction. According to a dictionary definition it is "a combination of a writer's use of syntax, diction, punctuation, character development, dialogue, etc., within a given body of text or across several works." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_voice). Voice can also be considered as a metaphor for the different tonal qualities or timbre reflected in different writers' works. Some writers' voices are 'dark' while others are 'light-filled' or humorous.

I have recently taken over the presidency of The Bondi Writers Group, which is affiliated with the Fellowship of Australian Writers. We hold a Literary Event each year during the Waverley Festival to which the local public is invited. The next one is to be held on 17th October this year. During this event actors read aloud excerpts, poetry or short stories written by our members. We feel that it is valuable for a writer  to hear their narrative voice interpreted by a professional actor.  Last year my piece "The Angel of Islington" was read out by an English-born actor, Jonathon, who really brought the words on the page  to life for me, and made me realise that it actually works as a short memoir.

Finding your voice as a writer has sometimes been considered as almost akin to a spiritual experience of enlightenment in writerly terms. Although I would not go quite that far, without a voice as a writer, you have nothing. A writer's voice is as unique as a set of fingerprints.  It gives the work a certain tone or timbre, which is as pleasing to our senses as we read as a favourite orator's voice, or a singer's,  is pleasing to our ear.  That is not to say that an individual writer may not vary or change the voice according to the work at hand.

Like many, I am sure, I carry forever within me Martin Luther King jnr's recorded voice in his "I Have a Dream" speech.  In the same way, certain novels remain with us for a lifetime, because of the way in which they speak to us. The writer's voice compels us to keep reading. We become absorbed in the voice, almost bewitched by it at times. And we may return to read the same work many times in our life.

Martin Luther King jnr

The right voice will be that which expresses the perspective of the novel and the narrator's point of view best. 


Harper Lee in 'To Kill la Mockingbird" achieved success by relating events through the eyes of a child narrator, an  eight-year-old girl called Scout, who 'gets' what most of the other adult characters don't: the irrationality and injustice of the Southern whites' value system during the nineteen twenties and thirties in America.  Even though the times have changed since the novel was written, the novel still speaks to us of human frailties, such as racism and ignorance, as seen through the eyes of the innocent yet enlightened child. Harper Lee managed to find the right voice to tell her tale. 

A Portrait of Harper Lee

The Novel

Steinbeck: A Distinctive Voice

Hemingway: A Voice to Return To

When I read a novel that I like, I like to read other works by that novelist. I realise more and nore that it is the voice that appeals to me, and I am disappointed if the second work does not live up to my expectations from having red the first one. 


One of the strategies I have employed in order to find the right voice is to read aloud and record myself reading my own work. I also use the voice mode on my computer to read my written work aloud for me. This has helped me learn to recognise my own voice as a writer and to try to modulate it in accordance with the work at hand.