5 fantastic examples of voice

Photo by Anna Gutermuth

Photo by Anna Gutermuth

Following last week’s post on how to find your voice, here are the first 100-ish words from five books with unique and strong voices; a mix of first and third person, and of new and classic authors.

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge Signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.

Unnecessary words like “of my own knowledge,” “myself,” and “emphatically.” Beginning sentences with articles and ending them with prepositions! And of course his completely pointless rabbit trail about the door nail. Yet none of it is truly pointless. By breaking these rules in the way he did, Mr. Dickens makes the story conversational. We’re not simply reading a story; we’re hearing it told by a charming, if slightly wordy, English gentleman.

First the colors.

Then the humans.

That’s usually how I see things.

Or at least, how I try.

***Here is a small fact***

You are going to die.

I am in all truthfulness attempting to be cheerful about this whole topic, though most people find themselves hindered in believing me, no matter my protestations. Please, trust me. I most definitely can be cheerful. I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that’s only the A’s. Just don’t ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me.

***Reaction to the aforementioned fact***

Does this worry you? I urge you—don’t be afraid. I’m nothing if not fair.

You can tell at a glance that Mr. Zusak is different. His bold interruptions to his own prose are a fascinating quirk all by themselves. Add the narrator’s somewhat depressed sense of humor and subtle conveyance of authority, and you become hooked. Notice the things he says and doesn’t say. He doesn’t say who or what he is, but we can infer from what he does say (“Then the humans.”) that he is not human and (“I’m nothing if not fair.”) that he has some control over whether we live or die.

 

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has—or rather had—a problem. Which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

Note the intentional wordiness, the amusing use of adverbs, how quickly he zeroes in from the hugeness of the universe to the ordinariness of digital watches. Mr. Adams has a unique way of looking at life, the universe, and everything—it is all absurd to him, and he enjoys the simple pleasure of sharing that absurdity with the rest of us.

You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunty Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas, is all told about in that book—which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

Breaking rules left and right here. Note the atrocious grammar and the way he interrupts and repeats himself. Mr. Twain puts us right in the room with Huck Finn. Simply the way it is worded helps us to both hear the accent and see the boy—before ever being told what he sounds or looks like.

 

All my life I’ve wanted to go to Earth. Not to live, of course—just to see it. As everybody knows, Terra is a wonderful place to visit but not to live. Not truly suited to human habitation.

Personally, I’m not convinced that the human race originated on Earth. I mean to say, how much reliance should you place on the evidence of a few pounds of old bones plus the opinions of anthropologists who usually contradict each other anyhow when what you are being asked to swallow so obviously flies in the face of all common sense?

Look at how long that last sentence is, with only one comma, and how it makes you read straight through it without breathing—and how subtly it conveys the talkative teenage girl. Mr. Heinlein achieves the ultimate victory in turning himself into an underage female.

 

Which of your favorite books have unique voices? Post an excerpt in the comments, or on your blog and link it back here!

WANT HELP FINDING YOUR VOICE? Join us for Voice Week 2014, September 22-26

 

Backpacks across the galaxy: how to personalize the epic

Epic-ness is all well and good, but without a personal touch, it can fall flat. We wouldn’t care whether or not Middle Earth fell to Sauron if we didn’t get to know Frodo and Sam along the way. It’s the little, everyday details that make us care; that show us the relevance of the big picture by connecting it to a close-up of the character(s).

This concept really threw me the first time I read Out of the Silent Planet. A man is on a walking tour in England, when he loses his backpack and is kidnapped by two men who take him to an alien planet. He escapes, and spends the next several chapters living among the locals, learning their language and discovering fascinating things about the universe. Then, on page 96, he gets a chance to look through a telescope at a planet the locals call Thulcandra:

He wondered for a moment if it was Mars he was looking at; then, as his eyes took in the markings better, he recognized what they were—Northern Europe and a piece of North America. They were upside down with the North Pole at the bottom of the picture and this somehow shocked him. But it was Earth he was seeing—even, perhaps, England, though the picture shook a little and his eyes were quickly getting tired, and he could not be certain that he was not imagining it. It was all there in that little disk—London, Athens, Jerusalem, Shakespeare. There everyone had lived and everything had happened; and there, presumably, his pack was still lying in the porch of an empty house near Sterk.

This last sentence is so amazing it makes me dizzy. From the alienness of another planet, the hugeness of the universe, the awe of seeing Earth from space, the vastness of human history—to the ordinariness of a backpack left on a porch. This is why C.S. Lewis is my favorite writer; he turns my brain inside out.

Douglas Adams does something similar (but much more humorous) in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, when Arthur Dent is falling to his death and suddenly remembers he has a bottle of olive oil in his knapsack—possibly the last piece of the Earth left in the entire universe (this realization enabled him to learn how to fly…but that’s another post).

And I experienced something similar when I was driving home from visiting my grandparents last Christmas. We stopped at a Denny’s, and I happened to notice that the walls at this Denny’s had the exact same texture as the walls at home. And although I hadn’t been gone long enough to miss home, I suddenly got a lump in my stomach and felt homesick.

Moral of the post: the details make it meaningful. The next time you are writing a “big picture” scene, consider making your character notice or remember something that gives you a “close up.”