I just read two books with exceptionally strong voices and oddly both books have the word orchard in it. The Orchard, Theresa Weir, and Orchard by Larry Watson. The voices are different but both are very commanding. Then I started the new Charles Frazier book, and his style, so descriptive, completely threw me off. Dialogue is rarer than a mold-free autumn in Michigan.
Does this happen to you in your writing? To you find yourself taken over by another writer's voice?
19 comments:
I used to sometimes. Not anymore. Although I may find a turn of phrase or a peculiarity of prose creeping in on occasion if I'm reading something really powerful.
All the time... It's very annoying.
It helps to be aware of it though. Before writing a first draft, I sort of clear my head of extra voices.
Those voices can be stronger than mine if the story is sketchy!
It doesn't bother me much. Sometimes during the first draft I used to find myself slipping, but now I read and touch up yesterday's work before moving on, and that sets the voice I want back in my head.
I've also found that doing several drafts over the course of a year pretty much wipes out the influence of any one competing voice.
Agree with Dana. Repeated drafts ensure it is me talking there, in my own voice.
Early on in my journalistic career I used to consciously and unconsciously imitate the writing and reporting styles of THE ECONOMIST and THE NEW YORKER, and even TIME magazine.
Patti - Interesting question as ever! I do sometimes find myself influenced by others' strong narrative voices. But oddly enough, only if they're at least a little like mine to begin with. If someone's voice is extremely different from mine, then even if the voice is stunning, I don't seem to absorb it.
I have 2 decades of unpublished and unfinished work. If I look at my notebooks I can pretty much tell who I was reading at the time I wrote anything.
Now that I'm finishing and publishing more over the last couple years it's less of a problem and I think it turns more into me in the rewriting process. Then again I have two small kids at home and I have less time to read and so I have less work to influence me.
Maybe I should've had kids earlier.
I'd be very happy to have my writing style improved by great writers! Writers who have mastered the skill of telling a story convincingly in the First Person always impress me.
That's a tough one. How to get information in that the first person was not privy to.
Yes, they do have to be a bit like me. Or one of the stories that was me at one time.
Great, Dan. Glad to see you bursting loose.
Sounds to me like you have allergies.
A criticism I still remember from a college writing class is that what I wrote sounded too much like a well-known writer at the time.
I worked to change that and lost my voice. I finally had to decide to write the way I write and not worry about it. --Joe Barone
Don't I ever. I am dizzy with them.
Good topic. Something to mull over. Yes, sometimes I "hear voices" when writing, literary voices. But even if I wanted to, it's doubtful I'd be able to channel or translate them very well!
I think my voice is pretty much mine (not in the sense that it's totally unique, but in that it's consistent). Although I can vary it for different styles, if needed. I've been told that my academic writing also has a certain voice. A colleague turned up in my office once and showed me a book and asked me what I thought of a couple of pages. I said that they seemed fine to me, to which the response was, 'Well, I hope so, you wrote them.' Four full pages of plagiarism. The person had partially recognised the material, but knew it was mine due to the style - how I construct paragraphs and link sentences.
Patti, would you pick up accents quickly as well? I still have the accent of where I grew up, but I've picked up colloquialisms from protracted exposure.
Rob-at a play in Canada over the weekend, I sat next to a woman and asked her if she'd come over from Glasgow. She said, yes, fifty years ago. Ha. I think she probably lived in a Scots-Irish enclave and not due to my good ear although we have very close friends from Glasgow.
And despite living in Michigan for forty years, people continually ask me if I am from the mid-Atlantic states.
Maybe what I really mean is style rather than voice.
I think I soak up other writers voices as I read. That FF I wrote for you last week came out in the present tense, and when I was done I thought, cripe, Raymond Carver again.
I don't dare read him. His voice is way to distinctive.
I think voice is my greatest strength. I don't need anyone else's.
I don't need them but they seem to show up.
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