Last week we looked at the definitions of voice, tone, and point of view; this week let’s dissect some voice-driven narratives.
And a note here. I always recommend to my students/clients that they find mentor texts - books in a similar POV, tense, tone, and voice to the book they want to write. Studying other writers’ actual techniques like this can refine the voice you bring to your work.
Examples of Voice
From A Horse Named Sky by Rosanne Parry. This is a middle grade novel leaning toward the younger middle grade audience.
My first memory is the sound of water. The warmth of the sun. The smell of my mother. The touch of her tongue on my skin, and the horizon a great circle around me. My second memory is the urge to run. It comes in one breath before I even have the strength to stand. I shake the wet off my mane. Mother licks me from ears to hooves. The wind carries smells sharp and fresh and sweet: pinon trees, sagebrush, and water.
The story is told in first person point of view (from a horse’s POV), in present tense. The tone is quiet and observant. The voice, with its simple, short, deliberate sentence structure, is fitting for both the young animal character and the young middle grade reader.
From The Girl From Earth’s End by Tara Dairman. A middle grade novel.
Henna spotted it first: something bobbing in the water several yards away. Maybe, she thought, it was a dolphin; sometimes they came inside the reefs that ringed Earth’s End. But as her fishing dinghy drifted closer, she saw that the thing had leaves.
Told from the third person POV, but with a little objective distance, in past tense. This tone is formal, fitting the light fantasy. The voice is serious and just sophisticated enough to be intriguing to the middle grade reader.
From The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson. A YA novel.
It started in detention. No surprise there, right?
Detention was invented by the same idiots who dreamed up the time-out corner. Does being forced to sit in time-out ever make little kids stop putting cats in the dishwasher or drawing on white walls with purple marker? Of course not. It teaches them to be sneaky and guarantees that when they get to high school they’ll love detention because it’s a great place to sleep.
I was too angry for a detention nap.
Told from the first person POV in past tense. The tone is contemporary, using youthful direct address (“right?”). The voice is snarky, dark, and angry (cats in the dishwasher?!)
From All the Truth That’s in Me by Julie Berry. A YA novel.
You didn’t come.
I waited all evening in the willow tree, with gnats buzzing in my face and sap sticking in my hair, watching for you to return from town.
I know you went to town tonight. I heard you ask Mr. Johnson after church if you could pay a call on him this evening. You must want to borrow his ox team.
This is interesting because Berry chose to write in second person, a difficult trick. The tone is old-fashioned, possibly because of the second person. The voice is formal – yet intimate, observant, and melancholy.
How To Manage Voice
Creating a strong narrative voice comes from understanding your main character and their point of view and going deeply into their psyche and blending that understanding with your own author voice.
To take it a step further:
The next time you begin reading a book, identify the tone, narrative voice, and POV/tense from the first page. Make a note and see how it feels to you.
Then, see if you can identify the author voice, which may take a bit of reading before the inflections particular to that author become clear.
Read the first pages of several genre books, especially noir, mystery, high fantasy, dystopian, western, romance. Identify the tone/voice in each.
Write the opening pages to your own story using different combinations of voice, tone, and POV in each. Note: you may uncover a better way to tell your story. This has happened to me more than once.
And Speaking of Examples and Exercises…
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Keep writing!
Some really intriguing examples!