Finding Your Narrative Voice

Narrative voice is the sound of the person telling the story: not the author, and not simply the character, but the teller the reader is listening to. It is the first thing a reader responds to and the hardest thing to describe, which is why it is usually best studied by rewriting rather than by defining. Voice is assembled from a few visible choices. The distance between the teller and the events - is this happening now, or being remembered years later? The diction - which words would this teller actually use? The attitude - what does the teller find funny, shameful or worth explaining? And the address - is the teller speaking to us, to themselves, or to someone specific? Trust the teller. Once a voice has been established in the first page, it does not need to be re-established every paragraph. Repetition of the same verbal mannerism is what makes prose feel written rather than told. Write a paragraph in the voice before writing the story. Two or three sentences of a person talking about their day, in the register you want, will usually decide the point of view for you. Keep your own voice. If you are writing in a dialect, a rhythm or an idiom that belongs to you, keep it on the page and let the story carry it. Readers follow a genuine voice faster than they follow a neutral one. Try this Write the same 150-word scene three times: once as a first-person account written years later, once in the present tense by a close third person, and once as a short letter from one character to another. Do not change the events. Read all three aloud and keep the one whose sound you would want to hear for a whole book.