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[SPEAKER_00]: Season 21, episode 10.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is Writing Excuses.
[SPEAKER_01]: The cold open, voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tools not rules,
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Erin, and I'm super excited to talk today about voice as a way to open a novel, a story, or whatever you're writing.
[SPEAKER_03]: We've been talking a little bit about the idea that there's a difference between an action focused opening and a voice focused opening.
[SPEAKER_03]: And of course, those are a spectrum, but it is a spectrum I prefer to be on the far voice side of things.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, I'm interested to find out why am I doing that and what am I gaming from it?
[SPEAKER_03]: Mary Robinet, you're the one who sort of introduced this like interesting balance that we're standing on.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, what would you say a voice-driven, driven opening has in it?
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I have to give credit that I became aware of the distinction from Donald Moss.
[SPEAKER_01]: I took one of his classes on openings, and he talked about this as the thing that is kind of one of the pieces that is hook in the reader and bring in the men.
[SPEAKER_01]: and an action-driven opening, which we'll talk about in depth next week, it is, there's a character who's doing a thing and that pulls you into the story, an interest in what they're doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: But with a voice-driven opening, the thing that pulls you in initially,
[SPEAKER_01]: is the sound, the cadence, the rhythm, all of those things for the voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: And these are, like, most stories have both of these things happening.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there is a voice and there is action.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there are some that are that there's nothing happening.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm going to give you an example of a voice-driven opening, which I think most people will recognize.
[SPEAKER_01]: But in a voice-driven opening, it's a character who's ruminating about something.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a thing that they are pondering, or, and it's not always, and the character can sometimes be the narrator and not someone who's going to appear in the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: But here's an example.
[SPEAKER_00]: For out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the galaxy, lies a small unregarded yellow sun, opting this at a distance of roughly 98 million miles, is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-dissended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm just really, I'm just right.
[SPEAKER_01]: By your voice, you read this voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, like, I have tried to read this.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't read this in my normal voice, but it calls out for that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm another thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I mean, that's part of the specificity of voice is that you're hearing a voice, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's nothing happening in this.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's absolutely no action, there's not even a character on this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, John had a list of things that he thinks are the tools.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have modified it for myself.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's the aesthetic voice, like, you know, cadence rhythm, tone, that kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's the story questions, like, what do we want the readers to wonder about?
[SPEAKER_01]: And then a reason to care, like, why is this important?
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's not that the reader has to understand why it's important yet.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's important for the author to know.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you usually want to try to get across genre during that section.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so when you look at that opening, again,
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, there's the story question of like, who is looking at us that thinks that we are primitive and that digital watches are not a pretty made idea?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, like, who is this person?
[SPEAKER_01]: It definitely sets up genre because this is, you know, we're clearly being viewed by someone who is not human.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a definite aesthetic voice, and then the reason to care why is this important as we move into the story we find out that it's really important because of Ogon constructor fleet is about to come through.
[SPEAKER_01]: So even though we don't necessarily know yet, when I see voice driven openings fail, it's a lot of times less that it's voice driven and more that the writer is trying to figure out what the story is.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the thing that the character is ruminating about is something that will have no significance or bearing on the rest of the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there was no reason for us to invest in it at all.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the sort of the, as you were saying that the way I was thinking about it is an interesting person thinking about an interesting thing for an interesting reason.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a great way to say it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's like, if any of those three is not interesting, like their voice is very like monotonous for whatever reason,
[SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't have a lot of rhythm and cadence, you know, there the the story question is like should I eat peanut butter and jelly today and the reason they're thinking about it is it's Tuesday like unless they're about to get hit by a meteor two seconds after this happens
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not really, I mean, you can have like an aggressively boring voice, boring reason, like the secret life of Walter MIDI, I think.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's another one that's about a guy who's like, he's living a really, really boring life.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he just wishes his life was better.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so some of the opening is like forcing you to live in his really like boring life.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I think as long as one of those three is interesting, or all three of those things are interesting, then it really works.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, when we talk about voice-driven openings, it is that thing that I was talking about in the earlier episode about authority and control, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a place for you to really exert control over your reader in a certain way, and you're going to be like, no, no, no, no, slow down.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to look at this really simple quiet thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to talk about why, you know,
[SPEAKER_02]: or digital watches are a neat idea and how silly that is, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to be in a particular perspective and experience something in a very controlled way at the pace that I want you to, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So if that is eating a peanut butter sandwich for some reason, then you have to make that interesting, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: You have to make that dynamic, and this is really relies on a lot of the pros tools that we've learned.
[SPEAKER_02]: around rhythm, musicality, word choice, sentence structure, all those things you have to be interesting and engaging.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think where a voice-driven opening can fall flat is one by being too flowery.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that the failure mode of voice-driven opening is what we call purple prose, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Of something that just goes so out of pockets, so deep off the one end of it that you're like, okay, this is just word salad.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know what's happening here.
[SPEAKER_02]: The good version of that uses all of the tools available to you, and the one that I think about the most is rhythm and musicality.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think what drives a voice-driven opening is that thing of it almost feels like a poem and almost feels like a song, and that cadence is bringing you deeper into the story, even though no action is happening yet.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I think that's one thing I want you to think about is think about epic poetry, think about, you know, how
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, Homeric verse grabs you and pulls you at think about how, you know, James Hayney grabs you and pulls you in in his translation available, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Those kind of things are the things I think to really think about when you're like, how do I set up a long story using just the tools I have at my disposal for description?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I'm really glad you said all of that, particularly mentioning purple prose because I think the problem, it's the same problem on two different scales.
[SPEAKER_01]: The problem with purple prose is that people put in so much or an ornamentation into the language that you don't know where to focus.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you have a voice driven opening that is not about a specific thing that the reader doesn't know where to focus or why they should be paying attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so like the thing with the hitchhikers guide is, this is about earth.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like that's, we start far out and we zoom in, but it is just about earth.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not about anything else.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not about the Vogue on's coming in.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not about any of those other things.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just one thing that it's about.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that's one of the things that you can also think about is like, where do I want, where do I want to put my readers attention and why?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I also think like you're talked about epic poetry, but I also think just songs.
[SPEAKER_03]: So music songs have to catch you really fast.
[SPEAKER_03]: They all, you know, a song is very hooky in the sense that like you don't have like a thousand pages to get into that song.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so thinking about songs that you like, why is it that if you have a song that you're like, I really feel emotional whenever I listen to this particular song, what is it that it's doing?
[SPEAKER_03]: Now there are certain tools we can't use because they're musical, but a lot of times you can see if the cadence speeds up, that's something that you can emulate.
[SPEAKER_03]: If they're using a particular rhythm and I like to talk about the technical poetic terms, so like you have your I am, which is like if I'm remembering like denim, denim, denim, denim, and then you have like your troke, which is the other way,
[SPEAKER_03]: In fact, when I was looking at examples of Troquet, somebody was saying that Taylor Swift uses them a lot.
[SPEAKER_03]: Nice to meet you where you've been.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's very rhythmic and then it changes.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it establishes a rhythm and then it changes.
[SPEAKER_03]: When music swells, that could be you using more interesting words or having a story question that comes to the front because you can't swell the music but you can swell the meaning.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so thinking about what is a song doing to capture that
[SPEAKER_03]: not to say that your story can't be let the bodies hit the floor, but I think sometimes like with purple prose it's like a really like a screamo like that's a lot for three minutes it's great for an entire book that might be a lot and maybe not everyone is your audience for that.
[SPEAKER_03]: So thinking about what can grab you and therefore how you can grab other people.
[SPEAKER_03]: And with that we are going to take a short break.
[SPEAKER_03]: think right before we went to break down when you look like you had something.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you know one thing I was thinking about and I think one of the uses of a voice driven opening is a little bit filtering your reader.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think one thing to think about with.
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, a particularly a voice of an opening is that some readers will bounce off.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're readers who will pick this up and be like, this isn't for me.
[SPEAKER_02]: This isn't my kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I would argue that's a very good thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: What you want to do in the early pages of your book are communicate this book isn't for everyone.
[SPEAKER_02]: This book is for you dear reader.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if that readers like none or not me, this for somebody else, they close in a walk away.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what we find.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're trying to find your audience and the way to find your audience is by being fully yourself in an engaging and
[SPEAKER_02]: So a voice-driven thing is often communicating things about genre and tone and voice in a way that is specific enough that people bounce off of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you are out there taking your voice-driven opening to your crit group and half the group is being like, I don't get this and half the group is like, I love this, then congratulations, I think you've done the thing, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't need everyone to love that opening.
[SPEAKER_02]: You need some people to
[SPEAKER_02]: but the people who it's for better really love it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think also the the word filter is like one of the other things that a voice driven opening does for you besides filtering out who your readers are it also provides them a filter or a lens to which to view the book.
[SPEAKER_01]: It it says like this is this is some of the frameworks that you should take coming into it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like coming in with the hitchhikers guide thing,
[SPEAKER_01]: some of the frameworks that you're getting is we are viewing this from the perspective of people who are more advanced technologically than we are and everything that the character experiences is encountering people that are that think he's primitive and so that's that's kind of the lens that the filter that that everything that happens in the story is.
[SPEAKER_01]: The other thing that I want to switch tangents just a little bit and talk about the fact that most books actually have those things happening at the same time.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so Aaron, you do a lot of this where you do actually have a character who's doing a thing in the beginning, but it's also very voicing.
[SPEAKER_01]: What are the kinds of things you're thinking about when you're creating that?
[SPEAKER_03]: I think I just don't, it is again like the interesting person doing an interesting thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: Once you have created a voice of somebody that I find interesting, I'm less interested in the boring parts of their lives in some ways, and so I want them to be moving.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want them to be having to deal with something because it's like if you create a character and you like them, then you kind of want through things at them and see,
[SPEAKER_03]: if they will catch them, and so they're musings about life as a whole are less interesting to me.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm also a big fan of starting a character in not immediate res, but in transition, at a point in which, I guess this is what the Insighting Incident does, at a point in which they are leaving something behind or something new as being introduced to them, so they have to, which is when we're in transition, we often reflect more on where we came from, and think about where we want to go at the same time, which allows us to use time a little bit,
[SPEAKER_03]: It gives you a reason to flashback to something.
[SPEAKER_03]: It gives you a reason to anticipate something, but it's all through this particular character's voice as they're thinking about it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I sort of cheat and give myself like, what's a really cool situation that this person could be in?
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, now let me see what their voice wants to do and how I can bring it into the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know that that's cheating so much as working smart.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think using time is one of the most important things you can do in the open book in terms of foreshadowing what's going to happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: Reflecting on what just happened, thinking about the distant past, all these things that you can do in the perspective of a character that you can play with time in really useful ways.
[SPEAKER_02]: In the voice is how you like paper over those cracks.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's how you kind of like move us smoothly from point to point as you're jumping around at time, filling in those details.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you can use the voice, you can use that to sort of move us through the action in a way that even if I don't entirely get in a physical blocking way, what's exactly happening here?
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll roll with it if I'm enjoying the pros and enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And like you just were making me flash back to the metaphor that we've been using about decorating a house.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I've been using we've been using the word voice and I should say that I think of it in like kind of three ways.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's the mechanical voice like first person, third person, that kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: What we're talking about here specifically the aesthetic voice and you can have you know the a building can have rooms and the rooms can be sterile
[SPEAKER_01]: or if they have a strong aesthetic voice it can be they can totally transform.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's one of the things that you're doing when you're bringing in that aesthetic voice is you are saying okay well here's the structure stuff of what's happening but this is how I want you to feel when you're inhabiting this face.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you're like focused like I in my one of my very first studio apartments I painted three of
[SPEAKER_02]: It was a vibe.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was a vibe, but it was, it was a vibe.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think like, but my like, all my like decor and things like reinforced that this was happening.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think what people came in, they were like, murder town, no way.
[SPEAKER_03]: It actually seems like this has a reason.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think you can do things that are striking in a voice as long as it seems like you have control over them.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you did them for a reason.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they're like, it seems like you're doing something on purpose, which is one thing that I like is to think
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, you control the voice, the voice doesn't control you.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think sometimes, and I do this, too, like you almost want to talk about the voice, like it's just doing things, like, it's run off with your story, and it can feel like that, but it's like, you ultimately have control, you can change how the voice is, you can change how heavily you lean into it, and try to create levels.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because I think the purple prose happens when you're so exaggerated the entire time, which is why I think it's always fun to go out and listen to people talk.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Even the people that you know who are like the most animated, whatever they will, they have cadence.
[SPEAKER_03]: There are times they pull back in order to get you to lean in and then they get excited again.
[SPEAKER_03]: Most people have a lot that they're doing with their personal voice.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can listen to the way we use our voices on the podcast and think about what is it that we're doing?
[SPEAKER_03]: What's the difference between the way that each of us speak?
[SPEAKER_03]: How would we each be different as characters in a story?
[SPEAKER_02]: This one, I clocked when I was talking about the rhythm thing that I started nodding my head in a specific rhythm in cadence, and then I started speaking along with that rhythm in cadence, and I'm doing it again right now.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's unconscious, you know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_02]: I think we all use voice in interesting dynamic ways as we talk.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we all know someone who's a great storyteller and someone who's a terrible storyteller.
[SPEAKER_02]: that person who's a terrible storyteller is not really using their voice and dynamic in interesting ways.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're not framing it in that perspective.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're not making interesting language choices and their problem, their rhythm is probably all over the place when they're trying to talk.
[SPEAKER_01]: That also brings up a really great tool that people can use.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I'm learning how to do a new accent for audio books, one of the things that they'll
[SPEAKER_01]: in order to remind you of how it should what you should be doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: So like when you're doing French, you draw your hand along and then you go up.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is so now I am very French.
[SPEAKER_01]: I am so sorry to have a body that is listening to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it is, it is a thing you can do.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a really cool trick, I like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's a way to get an exaggerated form of the accent and to your body.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think the writing version of that is the song, like putting music on that is the rhythms that you want to use.
[SPEAKER_01]: The other trick that I'll use to capture rhythms is sometimes I will look at a writer that has a very distinctive voice like Richard Kippling's just so story.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's has a really distinct aesthetic voice and so I'll actually just key in a page of that to get those rhythms into my fingers before I start writing.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I also like to listen like watch like real people and by that I mean like some people on like judge duty or like you know a crime documentary just because it's an interesting way to hear how different people speak.
[SPEAKER_03]: When I was in college I took a class by somebody who was like a
[SPEAKER_03]: mentee of Anna Diverr Smith, who is an actress who does these one-woman shows where she embodies all these different characters.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he talked about, yeah, how do you change your physicality?
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you change how clip to your speeches?
[SPEAKER_03]: How fast it is when you go up and when you go down.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think all that stuff is just really, really fun to think about when you're writing because
[SPEAKER_03]: when you read it which is also why reading out loud is great because when you read something out loud a lot of times you can hear the rhythm and the cadence in a way that is sometimes difficult to hear it fully in your own head.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and I think the thing to really keep in mind when it comes to voice is that it's best to you sparingly, like a seasoning, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: You can really overdo it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I think it is, there are moments we're gonna want to dial, turn it all the way up, but don't sustain that for too long, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's really important to hit it right in the opening and then ease off of it and then pick it up again and like heighten the moments.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think we're again, we get into purple pro-staratory is when like spinal tap you're at 11 and you stayed 11 the whole time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's also something that you can use for transitions.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, again, using audiobook narration.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I'm doing character voices, I hit the character voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hardest when I come into that character to make a distinction between characters.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I can drop off because the readers are like, oh, okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they will, they will intuit the voice in the rest of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: and so you can use that you can hit it a little bit harder when you come into a new chapter or a new scene in a short story or heightened places, as you're saying, but it isn't something that you have to maintain all the time.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's funny.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm like, I don't know that I agree with that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hit that voice part, beat it like it's totally not.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I think that like,
[SPEAKER_03]: I think the problem you can come into is when the voice like obfuscates, it hides what's happening.
[SPEAKER_03]: In the same way that like world building can get in the way of the story, if like every animal has like is like a gleepe drop instead of a cat, at a certain point like you need some sort of like, you know, you don't even know like is this four legs like the gleepe drop had four kick or talkers.
[SPEAKER_03]: At a certain point, you cannot understand what is happening.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're laughing over here.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can't understand what happened to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know why you're pretend to pretend to pretend to pretend that you can't, you're not laughing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, Big Glee Club had a Ford Ticket Tigers.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were flicker flustered.
[SPEAKER_01]: Flicker flustered.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, flicker flustered.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, that's okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: The Ticket Tigers wasn't flustered.
[SPEAKER_04]: What's like, Puffer flustered.
[UNKNOWN]: Puffer flustered.
[SPEAKER_03]: All right, all right, anyway, the next example of how you know what I'm saying which is that voice can do that to where you get so into the voice and the way somebody would say something that you lose the plot of what it is they're saying and so does your reader
[SPEAKER_03]: And we just did it as we just lost the plot.
[SPEAKER_01]: Which goes back to this being a spectrum.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's it's about what is driving the moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whether it's what's driving it is the voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think if you it's there's the, oh, you can obscure the meeting, but there's also the you can forget to have any action happening.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there are some moments where you're going to want action to be the driver, and there's some moments where you want the voice to be a driver, but it's not that when the action is driving that the voice isn't there, it's just it's not the thing that's propelling the scene in that moment.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, in fact, and then I'll take this to the homework.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think one of the reasons to have action is the more action that's happening, I think even in our own lives, the less voicing we become.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, even your most poetic friend, like if being attacked by like a pack of wolves, pizzing going to be like, they're fur, like glints off the moonlight.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're going to be like, oh crap, wolves run!
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, and so I think it allows you to distill down to what is happening and give you a break.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then once you reach safety, you can reflect on how beautiful the wolves look as they try to tear your throat out.
[SPEAKER_03]: amazing and with that I will take us to the homework and your homework is not to put the clip off that's bonus homework but the actual homework is to take three voices that you can that you know well or can know well.
[SPEAKER_03]: One way to think about this is a celebrity that you do a good caricature of, that you think of, that has a really distinct voice.
[SPEAKER_03]: Someone you know well, who's like an interesting storyteller, does anybody that you think, like, I really understand their voice and can get it in my head, and then write something very basic, like that person goes to the grocery store and buys eggs in all three of those voices and see what changes in the way in which you tell that story.
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