What is Voice?
In this 3-part revision series, we’ll debunk several mysteries behind the magical element within every great work of writing: Voice. It’s my hope that you’ll see Voice not as an elusive and unattainable ingredient, but rather, as a series of deliberate, layered choices made throughout the revision process, and as accessible to all who practice the craft–within every genre and for any purpose. May you walk away each week inspired to “Re-Vision” your writing with techniques that work!
Please, Sweat the Small Stuff:
Shaping Voice with Sound and Syntax
The skilled storyteller relies on sound and syntax to sculpt the voice, or personality, of a story. She calculates the use of these fundamental elements in every line of every scene so that the tone, or shades of speech and narration, reflects a character’s spirit from the first page to the final word. Sound (the articulation of letters, syllables, and words carrying within them distinct intonations) and syntax (the arrangement of words and punctuation to create rhythms and accentuation) are the micro-elements of a writer’s toolbox, as essential to the construction of voice as the macro-elements of fiction writing: plot, setting, point of view, structure, imagery, and dialogue. All writers revise with these micro-elements in mind.
To craft tones that resonate with the reader, decisions about technique and style within sound and syntax must be as deliberate as the nails in a house. Writer, editor, and educator David Jauss describes the result of this decision-making process as the flow. “If we want to write fiction that flows, we need to explore the syntax [and sound] of our prose on all levels, from the micro level of the sentence to the macro level of the complete work,” he explains. Layered in purposeful patterns throughout each scene of a novel, these fundamental elements produce meaning, cadence, and mood that evoke an emotional response from readers.
When fiction flows, it speaks to the reader. Yet, when a scene or character is not fully realized, it is often because the writer has failed to wield the many stylistic effects of syntax and sound. Like an architect constructing a house from a shaky foundation and flimsy walls, the story falls flat. A writer who deliberately sculpts each sentence’s sound, length, punctuation, and arrangement is more fully in control of a character’s tone line by line, scene by scene.
Sound Bites: Why a House is Not a Home
Apart from definitions and the unique personal history we bring to each word, why does the word house sound less intimate than the word home? The answer lies within the unspoken layers of meaning contained within individual sounds of the vowels and consonants. 
House has an energetic ou vowel; the o in home is long and comforting. House ends with a sharp semivowel consonant, s; home ends with a liquid m that reverberates in the mouth, warm and inviting as a homemade brownie. Together, the musculature of the word house connotes distance and structure, while that of home evokes affection and fond memories. There are a variety of terms to describe the texture of vowel and consonant sounds: liquids, aspirates, vocals, and mutes, for example. The alphabet is the most essential source for the manipulation of sound.
Unlike poetry, not every sound in every word on a line of prose serves to convey tone. Many words are simply connectors between the most important sound patterns in a scene. Working together, the occasional use of connectors and repeated sounds illuminates prose.
For example, in these lines of Jack Gantos’ Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key, the reader senses the “wired” tone of the story through a series of long i sounds highlighted here:
“Grandma was born wired, and my dad, Carter Pigza, was born wired, and I followed right behind them. It’s as if our family tree looks like a set of high-voltage wires.”
Listen to the lazy tone of this summer scene in Meg Rosoff’s novel, How I Live Now. It comes from the zzz sounds,short vowel sounds, and the long o in low, and closed:
“I just closed my eyes and watched the petals fall and listened to the heavy low buzz of fat pollen-drunk bees and tried to imagine melting into the earth so I could spend eternity under this tree.”
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Readers can assume that, on some level, both Gantos and Rosoff were aware of how the sound of their sentences affected the tone of their passages. Deliberate patterns of sound convey their characters’ temperaments, creating tempo for the scenes and planting seeds of subtext within the spaces between words.
The Flesh and the Underbelly
The flesh of a story is the words and symbols on the page, the details that drive a novel and fill the story with rich, interconnected ideas. The underbelly is what is left off the page, the silence within the tiny pockets between letters and the white space surrounding words that is ripe with its own implicit significance. Both flesh (sound, syntax) and underbelly (silence) are essential to story. Author Ursula Le Guin describes these two concepts as crowding and leaping. Although crowding keeps the story full and moving with explicit thoughts, Le Guin states, “what you leave out is infinitely more than what you leave in. There’s got to be white space around the word, silence around the voice.” We will return to the underbelly of story, but first, let’s examine successful use of sound on the page.
Sound–Fleshing Out the Story
Language is a system of communication governed by rules. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are the four word classes whose main objective is to carry content and meaning. Nouns describe people, places, and things. Verbs describe action. Adjectives and adverbs modify nouns and verbs. If syntax and sound comprise the house in which a story is built, then nouns and verbs form the foundation and framing while adjectives and adverbs supply the ornamentation.
Choosing the best words from these classes of speech requires the writer to explore their variety of sounds. As we’ve just seen, one word can carry many layers of meaning and sound that affect tone. Precision is key when choosing what sounds will best flesh out a story. The meanings and melodies of words should play off one another to produce a distinct cadence. Listen to Rosoff’s passage again:
“I just closed my eyes and watched the petals fall and listened to the heavy low buzz of fat pollen-drunk bees and tried to imagine melting into the earth so I could spend eternity under this tree.”
Imagine if the nouns were altered so that it read:
“I just closed my eyelids and watched the leaves fall and listened to the heavy low murmur of fat pollen-drunk bugs and tried to picture melting into the ground so I could stay forever under this branch.” Not quite the same, dreamy tone.
Verbs function on an energy gradient, from the dynamic and animated to the static or banal. At best, they invigorate the language and structure of a sentence, injecting the tone of a scene with a particular level of activity. When used in conjunction with the appropriately “shaded” adjectives and adverbs, a prose passage can deliver a sensual reading experience.
Kevin Henkes’ middle grade novel, Olive’s Ocean, is a coming-of-age story about twelve-year old Martha’s reflections on death, family relationships, and feelings for boys. In the climactic two-page scene, Henkes’ carefully crafted pattern of actions and vivid details gives the reader a sense-driven experience that directs the tone, tension, and pacing. When Martha accidentally slips into the ocean to avoid her crush, Jimmy Manning, we see her actions build toward tension and finally release, a pattern of transformation captured in a small moment in time. (Some nouns have been bolded to emphasize this pattern of change):
She had only meant to wait it out, wait unnoticed until he had passed, taking baby steps, wanting to disappear, but then she actually did disappear, dropping into the water that was everywhere–no sides no top no bottom–and taken so by surprise that it didn’t matter that she was close to shore or that she was a goodswimmer because she panicked and in her panic she swallowed water and scratched her cheek and somehow clawed her hair loose from its ponytail and her hair spread out from her head like a multitude of tentacles thin as filaments like a sea creature jerking about wildly and then for a second she felt numb and blue and liquid herself and resigned to the fact that the water would overcome her and in that second she began sliding away from the present and she stopped thrashing about and relaxed and felt like a bird caught in a draft of air rather than a girl pushed and pulled by the ocean and gave up. I’m drowning, she thought, and it was the very thought that made her kick and stroke and kick and stroke until she broke through the surface of the water and made her way back to shore oh so happy to be alive and coughing and coughing and coughing.
Henkes could have chosen any number of other words to flesh out this passage, but he chose the ones he did for the particular shades of sound and meaning they carry. As a result, the words accurately channel the tone of transformation in this scene. Sound is critical to the success of each sentence. Well-chosen words separate the authorial Twains from the tongue-tied.
Silence, The Underbelly of Sound
When we admire a story, we are impressed with both its powerful sense of sound (the flesh) and its equally potent absence of sound (the 
underbelly). Silence is the breath between descriptions. It is a signal of movement in story, and the shape of that movement across a page, scene, or complete body of work.
“Some of the greatest writing mankind has ever produced comes in the caesura; the pause between words,” says author Madeleine L’Engle.
There is an audible power in silence. Real and perceived absence of words on a page sharpens readers’ senses in a near mystical way. Perceived absence of thought is considered subtext. Real absence of thought is the extreme form of subtext; what is said when absolutely nothing is present, a story stripped to its barest essentials. Readers must imagine these invisible atoms of fiction, let them fill them up as words do and build bridges of meaning from what is and is not present on the page. Silence can be extracted from a word, its placement, punctuation, figurative language, even dialogue. Ultimately, the silent treatment, like a tree in harvest, bears rich fruits long enjoyed by the reader.
“Lean dialogue,” writes Robert McKee, “in relief against what’s primarily visual, has salience and power.”
Through sparse dialogue, readers construct meaning from silence. In An Na’s young adult novel, A Step From Heaven, four-year old Young Ju emigrates from Korea to California, struggling alongside her insular family to acculturate to their new American life and hide their often-nightmarish domestic situation. An’s prose are painful and exquisite, quiet, precise, and masterfully told.
In one exchange at the novel’s end, Young Ju tells her mother, “I wish I could erase these scars for you,” as she looks at her callused hands. Uhmma pulls her hands away and stares at the calluses for a moment, then says in response, “These are my hands, Young Ju.”
Young Ju does not respond. Nothing of their past, their regrets, or desires is explicitly exchanged in this lean dialogue, yet readers are hyper aware of these textual undercurrents. The reader’s tree of thought bears fruits of hope, one of the prevailing tones of the story, from Uhmma’s response, understanding all she has sacrificed for her daughter’s wellbeing.
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Rita Williams-Garcia also writes sparse, poignant dialogue. In Every Time A Rainbow Dies, sixteen-year old Thulani witnesses the rape of Ysa in a Brooklyn alley. He falls for the headstrong, colorful girl and both in time discover how love heals the heart.
Perhaps the most telling line in Williams-Garcia’s entire novel is a dialogue compressed into three words. “‘I am Ysa.’”
The greatest gift Thulani can ever receive, the most precious and personal thing the young rape victim has left to share, is her name. In three quiet, one-syllable words, Ysa opens up the entire novel with her confession. The reader senses more clearly here than anywhere else that the two teenagers will enter into a trusting and healing relationship. Williams-Garcia’s line of dialogue is the ultimate example of silence on the page. Her writing is so pristine that her restraint never once confuses the reader; rather, it sharpens her senses and understanding of the characters in a near mystical way.
Silence is a masterful translator of subtext and tone. Whether through omission of words or packed within the words themselves, silence sharpens the reader’s moment-to-moment sense impressions; it converts every inch of the page into priceless real estate. A story stripped to its barest essentials requires a deep journey of the mind and heart, within the author and between the author and the reader. Silence is the tree of thought that an author plants within the reader. It requires the reader to listen, wait, and see the truth behind the quiet, often absent words on a page, for these truths are the magical fruits of labor and restraint. These are the truths that leave the reader breathless, that endure long beyond the final page.
What is Syntax and How Does It Regulate Sound?
Syntax, the arrangement of words and punctuation that create rhythms and accentuation on the page, enables words to connect in a sequence, so that the whole of the sentence and its individual parts convey meaning, cadence, and tone. Writer and professor Virginia Tufte adds that successful syntax, “is a matter of controlled rhythm through spacing, grammatical pacing, endings, beginnings, widening, and narrowing of sentences.” Syntax is a tool of both functionality and style. Skilled writers calculate the syntax of every line because they understand that the rhythm of those lines must build to produce a tone reflective of their character’s spirit at that given moment. This is where sound comes in to the picture.
© Copyright Vanessa Ziff Lasdon, 2011
Syntax choreographs rhythm, and rhythm is a pattern of sound that affects tone and mood. Hence, syntax regulates sound on the page. It choreographs “the noise words make and the rhythm of their relationships,” states Ursula Le Guin.
It also touches the reader’s emotions by shading meaning in the voice of the characters or the narration on the page, much in the same way a gesture, expression, or fluctuation in voice changes the shades of a conversation. There are three functional and stylistic components to syntax that work together with sound to shape tone through every line on a page: length, punctuation, and arrangement. We will cover these topics in next month’s W.O.R.D. of the Week REVISION post, Part 2, on Voice!
For the Love of Words!
(Related Articles on Sound and Syntax)
- Maximalist or Minimalism? Which more precisely embodies life at its fullest expression? While preference is in the ear of the beholder, Ben Masters shows us how both literary excess and want must be at once earned and justified.
- Constance Hale celebrates our innate ability to play with sound and sense in a single sentence. She reminds us that language can be an adventure!
- What makes the difference between a moment of quiet, a dead beat, and the crackle of energy in a sentence? The verb.
WORKS CITED IN THIS BLOG POST
- An, Na. A Step From Heaven. Asheville, North Carolina: Front Street Books, 2001.
- Gantos, Jack. Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key. New York: HarperTrophy, 2000.
- Henkes, Kevin. Olive’s Ocean. New York: Greenwillow Books-Harper Collins, 2003.
- Le Guin, Ursula K. Steering the Craft. Portland, The Eighth Mountain Press, 1998.
- L’Engle, Madeleine. A Circle of Quiet. New York: Farrar, Strous, and Giroux, 1972.
- McKee, Robert. Story. New York: Regan Books-Harper Collins, 1997.
- Rosoff, Meg. How I Live Now. New York: Wendy Lamb Books-Random House, 2004.
- Tufte, Virginia. Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, LLC., 2006.
- Williams-Garcia, Rita. Every Time A Rainbow Dies. New York: Harper Collins, Inc., 2001.
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