What is Voice?

It’s more than the way we speak

“What is voice?” my husband asked. He’s a reader but not a writer.

“It’s, that — no one says a thing the way I say it,” I replied. “Another writer might have the same idea, but that writer will say it another way. It’s not the idea that’s different. It’s the voice.”

The answer came straight out, a real jumble. But it wasn’t wrong.

I’d been editing a book manuscript, thatching it out, reordering, making syntactic suggestions. I’d been trying to preserve the writer’s voice, but the writer had reversed a few lines because they didn’t sound right to him. “I write like I talk,” he said, almost as confession.

He doesn’t, though. Not really. No writer does.

Talking is one kind of voice. It’s literal voice, but it’s not literary voice.

Speech is messy, loose, improvisational. This is blazingly obvious when you read a raw transcript of a conversation you’ve had. The conversation was perfectly understandable at the time, but the transcript feels convoluted and scattershot. That’s because in live speech we rely on tone, inflection, body language, pauses for effect, animations using our face, eyes, hands. Live speech is dynamic, playful, expressive beyond words, beyond mere words.

Writing things down makes new demands. The living gestures and sounds of speech are absent from the printed page. All a reader has is the text, and text is (largely) silent.

So how can a writer inject tone and body language and inflection and expression and pauses onto the page and into the reader’s mind? Through voice.

A writer’s voice varies somewhat according to content, readership, genre, length, and many more factors. Voice is principally, and formally, modulated by grammatical person: first person (I, we), second person (you), third person (he, she, it, they). But voice also transcends these factors, inheres in all of a writer’s production. It’s the rhythm that animates the text no matter the subject or context. The signal is loud in memoir, quiet in breaking news, but it’s always in the background, humming.

My own writerly voice leans on word choice, word order, pacing, texture: syntax as style. I have a few more rules, largely about concision, powerful verbs, tension and release, white space. These rules aren’t fixed (not written down; ha). They’re evident only when I reverse engineer the sounds my texts make.

Voice is intuitive.

When I’m working as an editor, I train my focus on the writer’s ideas, their parent material, and listen attentively to their voice. First, I read a piece from top to bottom without making changes. I may flag passages or sections for later review, but I don’t make specific adjustments until I’ve seen the whole of it. I have to understand where it’s going, what it’s trying to do, and how the writer’s telling the tale. This first read reveals the writer’s rhythms and tone.

When I begin to edit, when I start to remove extraneous verbiage, tighten expressions, suggest changes to flow and sequence, adjust grammatical hiccups, I try to preserve the writer’s sound if not their specific syntax.

Even so, editing can feel, to a writer, like erasure. Especially if the writer has lived with a piece for a while, the most minute adjustments can feel jarring. New phrasing can even seem like it’s introducing new thoughts. A writer should receive an editor’s suggestions in the spirit of genuine collaboration. Because a good editor is also listening to the rhythm, the song, of the reader.

Here’s what I might have replied to my husband instead of the verbiage I blurted: Voice is the writing’s music. If grammar and vocabulary are the notes and raw sounds, voice is what turns it into song. Musicality comes naturally, and, like all natural talents, takes practice.

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Image: Counterpoint ©2022 Meg Maker