Friday Writing Experiment No. 23: Voice 2: Tone

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Continuing this series of exercises working with different aspects of voice, this week let’s work with tone in writing.

It’s easy to blur voice and tone, and as with many things in writing I think it’s good to establish your own working definitions as an ongoing exercise, perhaps with examples to illustrate the case.

Voice, for me, is the very vehicle of writing. It’s what carries the words. It’s something of a physical thing too (I always think of the stick man from my French class labelled with captions: le bras, la jambe, la voix). Voice starts somewhere inside then rises up through the lungs and the throat, carried on the breath; this idea can help make voice more concrete, embodied. Voice can also be a way of describing the particular prose style in a piece of writing.

Tone, on the other hand, is a particular quality or subset of voice. Tone can reveal the prevailing attitude of a speaker or narrator, and ultimately the writer, and it is one of the particular tools with which a writer can convey emotion.

In writing, tone can be expressed in a variety of ways: word choices; punctuation; sentence length; pacing; the level of description; the use of particular parts of speech; a particular mode of address.

It is also useful to consider the use of tone in other fields: music (high-pitched, harmonious), painting (dark, light), and anatomy (muscular, flabby). What tone is achieved by the play of sunlight on snow (plus the application of fancy filters) in that photograph above? Perhaps these analogies can affect how you think about your own writing: do you need to introduce more shades? Do you have too much fat?

To consider an example, how might you describe the tone in Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Girl’ (you can watch the author read it here, too)? I was thinking it’s hard to attribute a particular emotion to this speaker, but then I realise that is the point: this piece has a forbidding, almost cold tone. The tone here is controlling, domineering, and most definitely superior. The choice of the list as a form is in itself relevant: the speaker is handing out a largely uninterruptible list of orders and instructions that reinforces her authority.

This piece brings up something else. When using tone in a piece of writing, writers might have to decide if they are going to be literal or ironic: should the voice be taken at face value, or should the reader infer meaning from things beneath or around the text? What should the reader take away from the experience?

In ‘Girl’ we have a first-person speaker, but I don’t think we should identify Kincaid with that fierce mother. Instead, she is making a statement through a character and what she has to say, and through our experience of this character we come away with Kincaid’s observations on, among other things, the nature of power in that sort of relationship. It’s useful to consider another term here: persona. Kincaid has created a character with a particular persona, or mask, to convey the things she needs to say.

Another list piece with a different but very effective tone is ‘How To Write About Africa’ by Binyavanga Wainaina. Who said sarcasm is the lowest form of wit? (Though I have encountered college students whose responses suggested they read this in the most literal of ways.)

And while we’re here: I often direct students to Lorrie Moore’s How To Become A Writer, Or Have I Earned This Cliché? It has a delicious ironic tone.

In all of these examples, note how the writers use concrete and specific details to bring their worlds and their messages to life: salt-fish, sewing on a button, the slut; monkey-brain, a nightclub called Tropicana; majoring in child psychology, the Names For Baby encyclopedia.  Sarcasm and irony are strongest when they are pointed, and so is writing in most contexts.

The exercise
So, this week let’s use tone:

* Write a piece based on a list in which a speaker (perhaps embodied in a persona) directly addresses another person. Like Kincaid, instruct them in what to do, or perhaps like Wainaina or Moore show them how to do something specific. Alternatively, you could do a version of How To Become A Writer based on your own history.

* Give that list a particular emotional quality. (A list does not have to be a bossy form. It could be cheering, cajoling, sarcastic, angry, bitter. As with any form, work and play within its limits, and own whatever it is.)

* Be aware of your own use of language: word choices, punctuation, sentence lengths, pacing, description, and parts of speech. As ever, specific and concrete will probably win over abstract and vague.

* Above all, be passionate about what’s said. Know the things that you (as a writer) need to say, and then in service of that cause know how your voice (or persona) can say things to convey that message effectively, either directly or indirectly.

Friday Writing Experiment No. 22: Voice 1: Listening

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An updated version of this post can be found on Substack – January 2025.

Following up on some of the things I discussed at last Saturday’s workshop, I thought I’d devote the next four weeks to writing exercises that work in different ways with the idea of VOICE in writing. In particular, I’m keen to consider how we can use the natural speaking voice as a foundation for our writing.

Overheard dialogue
To start us off, this week let’s do some overheard dialogue exercises. The oldest and most trusty exercises are so often the best. So take yourself to a public place where you can listen to and record what people say to each other.

Where to record? Coffee shops are good. When I was at Naropa, we were told that hanging out in the psych department guaranteed some good gleanings (the freedom – and colour – of expression of Buddhist psychologists is probably rarely surpassed). Or you could try bookshop cafes, college refectories, or workplace cafeterias – places where you can not only hear people having interesting, banal, surprising, or strange conversations, but places where you can record what you hear without being obvious. You can pretend you’re tapping away at the keyboard typing up that report, when in fact you are copying down as fast as you can the account of someone else’s disastrous date last night.

How much to record? As much as you can, right now, including every um and er. It’s all raw material, for you to look at later. (Editing real dialogue can be a great supplementary exercise in listening as well as in shaping words.)

And how to record? My friend and teacher Bobbie Louise Hawkins used to tell us to buy those small audio recorders and actually to record what you hear on the sly, then type it up (her tip was to plug in earphones to pretend you were listening to a recording, rather than making one). A few years later, of course, we have mobile phones that work for that purpose. But there are disadvantages. You do get background noise. And in certain jurisdictions audio recording of people who’re unaware of it might be illegal, and at the very least probably unethical. Hmmmm. But hey, that’s something for us to sort out later – if you are not using it in any way, this is just good practice. And writers borrow from the world around them ALL the time. Alan Bennett has said he’s got a lot of his good stuff eavesdropping on buses.

I have tended to find audio recording a bit too cumbersome and/or I’m a bit too cowardly, or too clumsy to use technology. So I’ve preferred writing in a notebook very quickly in a shorthand of sorts. For this reason (and others), it’s good to carry notebooks at all times. Bobbie told us to buy a bunch of cheap little notebooks, and have one in your coat, one in your bag, one by the phone, one on your beside table, etc., for those moments when things strike you, or you overhear gold.

But you could write at a keyboard too. You can probably type faster at a laptop than you can handwrite. Or you could always pretend you are sending an email on your phone or iPad, when in fact you’re tapping out that juicy conversation between that couple in the seats in front of you on the train.

What to do with this writing? Using your findings is a separate process: some overheard gems might provide content, sparking some brilliant idea for a story, or a new direction for something you’re having trouble with. Other things could provide stretches of dialogue you can shape or adapt for your work. Some snatches of dialogue can be lifted verbatim into your own dialogue.

But let’s not just be utilitarian. This week I’m mostly interested in how you LISTEN.

Listening
Listen for the shapes of the sentences. Listen for the rhythms of sentences. Note the halts and repetitions (some or most of which we’ll probably prune in later drafts of writing). Note the use of questions or other rhetorical flourishes. Observe patterns in syntax, e.g., the position and choice of the grammatical subject in a sentence, the active vs the passive voice. Also note the use of parts of speech: verbs and nouns in particular, and where and when adjectives and adverbs are deployed (not so often, you’ll note). Speech is economical: little description, little fat. Speakers can assume that whoever they are talking to will get the gist of what they are saying without too much back story or explanation (something to note in our writing – too many manuscripts labour detailed and mechanical explanations). Note how people telling stories often have a particular way of speaking that’s easy and direct.

In particular, work out where the ENERGY lies in the voices you hear. Maybe even write notes to yourself identifying some of these features in the writing.

Later on, if you’ve been recording this, you can type it up. Think about where you might pepper the sentences you hear with punctuation such as exclamation marks, dashes – e.g., for interruptions – or ellipses … e.g., for pauses and gaps … Consider where you might add semi-colons or commas. You might also want to start spacing out the dialogue with dialogue tags and/or physical description (though that’s another exercise).

When I took a workshop on monologue with Bobbie, we’d start every class by sharing our overheard dialogue from the week before. We’d whip out our notebooks and read our gems aloud for half an hour or maybe more. It’s a lot of fun. People are fun, and funny, and tragic sometimes. And overheard dialogue taps right into that.

Do as much overheard dialogue as you can this week. Even when you are not actively recording, or unable to record (eating in a restaurant, standing on a crowded tube train, waiting for the lift at work, shopping, watching a rugby game), keep your ear out. LISTEN. Absorb the patterns made by the human voice. Slow down and listen. Grow that instinct for the sound of words, and how words can be used and put on a page.

Listening is one of the greatest skills a writer has. Learn to listen to the world around you. Learn to listen to yourself.

Further resources
Overheard dialogue from Script Gods Must Die
Overheard in New York
Tube Gossip: Overheard on the London Underground (Oh, how I love the language of city life – the guttural, expletive Anglo-Saxon joy of a person uttering, ‘Twat!’ at someone barging past. Beauty in the ugly.)

Some overheard dialogue I’ve recorded
* ‘Would you mind if I sit with you for dinner again tonight?’ ‘Erm, no – I have my Goethe, and I think I want to sit and read that tonight.’ (In the restaurant of a pensione in Venice.)
* ‘He knew all of the crowned heads of Europe. He married one of the Barton-Johnsons. I knew Jenny way back. Almost the first girlfriend I ever had. He can be a bit chippy … He’s a very good man … I don’t think the magnums will go very far. He’s a very witty man. Beautiful manners. It’s very easy for people like him to become pompous and patronising.’ (On a train to Waterloo.)
* ‘Let’s get into one that’s not being rained on’ (Tourists at Windsor station.)
* ‘I don’t want to spend my Saturday mornings sitting in a church hall listening to other people’s problems. They’re all so stupid. They were asked to sit there and come up with two things they could do to improve their marriages, and they did. One couple said it was really helpful. They’d never talked about these things before. Like, how stupid can they be? What sort of people are they?’ (At Wahaca’s burrito booth on the SouthBank.)

Getting Published Day, 2 March 2013: Follow-up Notes

by Andrew | 9 Comments

I was at the Writers’ Workshop Getting Published day as a book doctor on Saturday. I met a number of writers to give them feedback on sample material for their proposed submissions to agents, and I also led a workshop on voice, in which I talked about the value of the natural speaking voice. It was a lot of fun, as it always is when you get to meet writers directly. And as ever the Writers’ Workshop people were fun and well organised and direct in addressing the needs of writers: thanks to Harry, Laura, Nikki, Deborah, Lydia, John, and everyone else involved, and it was great to meet the other book doctors again or for the first time.

Here are a few notes to follow up, including some of the resources mentioned during the day.

The workshop
* To start, we discussed the idea of trusting the natural speaking VOICE as a vehicle for your writing, and considered how TONE in writing particularly concerns itself with introducing an emotional quality.

* We looked at some examples of professional writing for the structures and patterns we often use in business or academic contexts (e.g., an objective tone; lots of subordinating clauses). Such voices often lack personality, and intentionally. But in fiction or more creative forms, a neutral voice can feel colourless, and fiction can start to feel cluttered by certain forms of syntax that let us pack in or even bury information when we need it. Yet very often, these have become the ways we write – our natural way of writing.

* By contrast, thinking about the NATURAL SPEAKING VOICE (and thinking and remembering voice), we read a selection from Joe Brainard’s ‘I Remember’, and wrote our own versions and then read them aloud. This form is natural and easy to use, and it is notable how it relies on simple sentence structures (okay, we’re going to introduce sentence variety later). It also has the strength of instinctively focusing our writing on concrete and specific words, especially nouns and verbs (adjectives and adverbs are so rarely needed, even if they do add a certain something).

* I read aloud the opening from Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal, and noted not only its gossipy quality, but how every sentence in that first paragraph is directed towards the idea of STORYTELLING or NARRATION. (And what is gossip, if not storytelling?!) We also noted that the voice and tone here belong to a specific PERSONA (in this case, judgemental and even bitchy), and this can enrich the CHARACTERISATION in our work (this being the persona, not the bitchiness – though maybe that too!).

* We also looked at and listened to Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Girl’ as an example of writing that takes a particular tone, again a judgemental one. I wish I’d had a bit more time to discuss tone, so I’ll mention it briefly here: there are specific ways we can vary the tone in terms of not only form (e.g., word choices, using different parts of speech, sentence lengths, modes of address), but also content (the narrative ingredients selected for observation and inclusion).

Something I did not mention in the workshop was this great statement on simplicity in writing from William Zinsser’s On Writing Well:

the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.

That might sound a bit extreme, especially if you’re working in a more literary mode. But this emphasis on simplicity – the simplicity found in the natural speaking voice – is perhaps one of the best foundations for most good writing.

Book doctoring
It was interesting that the writer whose voice I thought most striking and fresh from her submission turned out not to be a native speaker of English. Which perhaps accounted for the number of slips in spelling! But even those sorts of slips just go to show that a good voice shines through anyway. And also that there are differing definitions of perfection – after all, we need to keep some work for the copyeditors. Anyway, I’d never have guessed she was not a native English speaker; a particular name, in fact, made me think she was an English woman of a certain age, and that was what I was expecting. Wow. To do that in a language you weren’t born into; puts most of us native English speakers to shame.

In addition, this writer comes from a part of the world that might bring a fresh perspective to an established genre, and I encouraged her to think about introducing more of that into the writing too. Good luck to her!

Some of the things that came up in other samples: writing that packs too much in too soon; various other issues of pacing; developing a narrative focus, and letting unfolding action tell the story; overwriting, especially overexplaining (fiction can suggest, be allusive); using point of view to give a story an edge; prose style needing more life, texture, and colour (specific and concrete imagery often add a spike of energy, as do well-selected verbs and nouns).

It’s also a good idea to know your genre, and what might be expected of it – everything from conventions you can use, to trends, to word lengths. This knowledge can grow your own instinct in writing. It’s worth paying a visit to a larger or specialist bookshop, maybe during the morning when you might be able to chat with a bookseller about trends and popular writers. Pick up some recommended books, if you have not read them already, and sample them for what you can bring to your own work.

And beyond the writing, writers often need to think about the profile and platform that might help an agent or publisher promote your work. Even in fiction. In fact, personal experience can often inform the writing in good, instinctive ways, lending it depth and authority. Though of course we must always allow for flights of fancy and imagination, too.

Finally, don’t forget that publishing is something of a lottery. I tend to think that the best books eventually find a home, though whether they sell once published is another matter. And of course some not so great books get published and become roaring successes – but that is usually because they connect with something or other among a readership. What is that thing in your writing that might connect?

Recommended reading
Regardless of the genre you’re working in, these are some of the most useful books on writing. And yes, you probably can gain from doing a bit of studying of this sort, either on your own or in a creative writing class. Understanding techniques in writing will just add depth to your work.

Sin and Syntax, by Constance Hale
Steering the Craft, by Ursula Le Guin
The Making of a Story, by Alice LaPlante
How to Write, by Harry Bingham
On Writing, by Stephen King
The Art of Fiction, by John Gardner
The Writer’s Journey, by Christopher Vogler
20 Master Plots, by Ronald Tobias

Memoirists might also find useful:

Old Friend From Far Away, by Natalie Goldberg
The Arvon Book of Life Writing, by Sally Cline and Carole Angier
my own notes on writing a nonfiction book proposal

And for revising your work:

The Artful Edit, by Susan Bell

Thanks again to the Writers’ Workshop, and it was great to meet everyone else there too.

Friday Writing Experiment No. 21: Dream Come True

by Andrew | Leave a comment

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This last weekend I went to Helsinki. It was my first time in Finland, and it was fabulous. Monumental buildings, a ferry across an icy harbour, friendly locals, a culture devoted to design. The food was fantastic: bright flavours, fresh (and I’d dare to say just about every meal we had there was better than just about every meal we ate in Venice when we went at Christmas: so there, Silvio Berlusconi). We came home with a case full of goodies such as crowberry jelly, sea buckthorn muesli, and lingonberry jam, as well as several heavy rye loaves and some super glass dishes I found in thrift stores. The Finns make beautiful glassware, and I love beautiful glass. The language is fascinating: all those double vowels in combinations I’m unused to.

So Finland was everything I wanted it to be, and more, since I first read Moominsummer Madness some decades ago. It was a dream come true. I’m still processing it, and writing an ongoing ‘I Remember Helsinki’ and having fun with it.

For this week’s experiment, write in whatever form you like about a dream come true, real or otherwise. Use all the senses: sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and physical sensations.

Friday Writing Experiment No. 20: Lists, Lovely Lists

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ListBooks

I love lists. I have whole spiels on lists in literature. ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg. Sections of the Old Testament (all that begetting). Christopher Smart’s ‘For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry’. The lists in Moby-Dick. Joe Brainard’s ‘I Remember’. Anne Waldman’s ‘Fast-Speaking Woman’. Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book. Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried’. Contents lists. Lists of illustrations. Indexes; how I loved to copyedit indexes when I worked in-house. When I was about thirteen, I was rarely happier than when I was geekily flicking through The Book of Lists (both volumes).

Lists have life, lists have colour, lists point in many directions nearly all at once. Lists don’t overexplain, or editorialise, or whine (at least the good ones don’t); lists just are. Lists accrete. Their items are not connected by cause and effect, but just sit beside one another with paratactic superpowers. Sometimes life’s like that: wonderfully random, surprising.

I recently read a couple of good articles on lists in literature: ’10 Lists That Read Like Poems’ in Flavorwire (which itself is a site somewhat devoted to the form) and ‘Literary Lists: Proof of Our Existence’ in the Guardian. They mention Umberto Eco, whose beautifully illustrated The Infinity of Lists sits on my shelf. In it he itemises lists both practical and poetic, miraculous and non-normal, and with some fantastic imagery states a case for the presence of lists in visual as well as written arts, and also for the list as a form that aspires to the infinite:

There is, however, another mode of artistic representation, i.e., when we do not know the boundaries of what we wish to portray, when we do not know how many things we are talking about and presume their number to be, if not infinite, then at least astronomically large.

This week, write a list. Or lots of lists. A list a day. Here are some more inspirations or models:

* Anne’s Porter’s ‘List of Praises’

* A list of gratitudes (thanks to Bhanu Kapil for that idea)

* What I will and won’t miss (inspired by Nora Ephron; I love the way in which the tone shifts from the terse itemisation of things she won’t miss to the more open and affectionate style in the list of things that will be missed; and we miss you too, Nora)

* A list of friends (elaborated or not)

* A list of questions without answers (thanks to Jack Collom for that one)

* An ‘I Remember’ on a specific subject, e.g., first times, last times, friends, enemies, people you’ve worked with (that one’s fun), holidays or vacations, places you’ve been, things you’ve eaten, Christmas presents

* A manifesto of reasons (for x, or y maybe – to change the law, to not go to school, to follow advice, to be cheerful)

* An ‘I Remember’ for a character in a novel

* A shopping list for a character

* A bucket list of things a character wants to do before he or she dies

* A list of ingredients

* A menu of desires (seeing your desires through food imagery)

* A pillow book of adorable things

* A list of prayers for weak or fabulous (or whatever else) beings (inspired by ‘Twenty-One Prayers for Weak or Fabulous Beings’ by Toby Martinez de las Rivas)

* A classification system for your library

* A bestiary of imagined animals

* The things you carried

* A catalogue of new things, and/or an archive of old things

Gosh, this list-making is addictive. I could go on. One day I’ll teach a whole class on lists. But for now I’ll post this, early in the week for a change. That keen. Maybe some of you have snow days, and need something to do.

As ever: be concrete, and specific. Though some abstractions can work well, as William T. Vollmann’s ‘List of Social Changes that Would Assist the Flourishing of Literary Beauty’ proves very neatly.

Further reading
Larry Fagin, The List Poem
A List of the Greatest Lists in Literature (from the Atlantic)