What is My Voice?

Our ‘on-the–page’ voice must match our ‘real-life’ voice if we want our writing to have an authentic ring to it was the advice Charles Foran emphatically drove home to a WCDR breafast last week in Ajax. Winner of The 2011 Charles Taylor Prize for “Mordecai: The Life and Times”, his biography of Mordecai Richler, he illustrated his message with remarks and readings from his book of essays, "Join the Revolution, Comrades" and with stories and readings from his biography of Richler.

Since then, I have been thinking about my voice  and wondering just what it is? I have a soft voice that wouldn’t project when I was in the drama club at Northview Collegiate. I have a quietly intelligent voice. I have a thoughtful voice. I have an inquiring voice. I don’t speak without thinking. I’m not quick to draw attention or promote myself. On the page, I lean towards a more journalistic style, listing facts and documenting my points. Is it only an inviting engaging voice that entices the reader to go on? Do you have to be an Irish story-teller to captivate an audience?

A challenge Charles didn’t address was how to capture my child’s voice, maybe age 6 or 7 and then grow myself up to the concluding chapters of my memoir. How do I move my voice along as I change? I know I did change. My effervescent child’s voice was stifled in adolescence. I became shy and introverted. Then I gradually reasserted myself. Can change be shown by picking several points along my timeline to illustrate the differences? What do you think?

Any thoughts on voice?

Tips from Tish

I almost finished this post a few days ago on the Blog Direct gadget on my iGoogle page, but something happened, and I lost it all. I may have I touched the wrong key or it just refreshed and disappeared.

Not sure if I can even recall what it was about. Something about what Tish Cohen said the other night about selling one of her books ‘direct to film’. I just about fell off my chair when she said that. I had never thought about a film for my book except as a remote possibility in a book contract long after the book came out. But the reverse order got me thinking. What would it take for a book to sell directly to Hollywood?

Tish herself revealed one feature that could be your ticket to Hollywood: a unique voice. Voice trumps everything, she said. Even if your plot is weak or your characters sketchy, you can still hit a home run with a fresh voice that grabs the reader. Once you’ve found your voice, she suggests going so far as to incorporate a hint of it into your query letter. Clearly she’s a risk taker. I would calculate my risk here and choose my words and style with care. The point is don’t make your query letter too business- like.

The other way a writer could hedge her bets on Hollywood is to focus on the scenes, making them as vivid and cinematic as possible with a lot of sensual detail. What do you see? What can you smell? What sounds do you hear? How do things feel ? How do things taste? And the 6th sense? Emotional awareness. How does it make you feel? I recently reviewed a novel by Canadian filmmaker Shandi Mitchell, UNDER THIS UNBROKEN SKY. The reader comes away with so many images, vivid scenes begging to be transposed to the big screen. With her background, this may be what Shandi intended.

How I Lost My Voice

I’m thinking about the child I was when I moved to the suburbs. I was nearly 10. I remembered the feeling of 10 for a long time afterwards. I was able to tap into those feelings of frustration and powerlessness, sometimes without even trying. But now when I try to get back to my 10 year old voice, I struggle. When did I lose the ability to transport myself back? What caused me to stop remembering? How did I lose that connection to what’s been called my ‘inner child’? Where did I lose my child’s voice? These are tough questions that I really don’t want to delve into.

I once read the advice: write toward what you want to know using all your senses. I forget whose suggestion it was. So I will try to write towards my child's voice and tell the stories, some of them already written, in the voice of that child. Maybe by writing my way into the character who is me, I will rediscover that part of myself.

I start with the new house and put myself in it. Now what? Just start writing. Something. Anything just use all your senses. Here goes...

I’m not sure when this is. I can see us around the kitchen table. I can feel the vinyl sticking to my legs on the kitchen chair. We're having supper. Mom is standing with her apron on, back to the stove serving pork chops from the old frying pan that fell off the Eaton’s truck on the lane behind our house on Charles Street. I remember when it happened but the boys don’t. They remember nothing of our old life on Charles Street. Dad is chomping away enthusiastically on his food while Jim has just polished off his potatoes and is asking for another helping. I glare at my brothers and Dad eyes me from the other end of the table. Mom doesn’t notice and doles out seconds to Jim. There’s not much conversation just 'pass the butter' or 'I need a spoon'. Mom’s face is flushed and she cuts her meat while the rest of us scrape our plates. No one asks me about my day. No one asks me if I’m happy here. If I offer something about school, my parents listen with interest but only if it’s positive. When I complain about a teacher, Mom runs to his defence and points out all I have to be grateful for. I quickly learn to bite my tongue and keep it all inside.

My Voice

I am tired of hanging out at the transition between the Beginning of my memoir and the start of my Middle. I’ve written pages on various scenes I remember but nothing feels right. It feels like an external description not an engaging story to grab the reader.

I ponder my options.
• Go deeper
• Find the thread
• Omit the irrelevant
• Change the voice

Ahah! The last one: change the voice. Maybe I need to retell my stories in the real voice of that 10 year old girl whose world has been changed irreversibly by moving to the suburbs. But I thought I was using her voice. I thought I was putting myself back in her shoes. When I compare the two stories, I realize how I was mistaken. See sample paragraphs below:

Story 1 as originally written:
I thought it would be nice to have a new house. But outside it was so dusty and the street was a construction site every way you looked. The streets were empty and there were fewer kids my age around. Inside, my mother seemed to be obsessed with cleaning and polishing and dusting everything. Washing, ironing, the beds, cooking. Again, as the oldest, I was supposed to help.

Everything was so far away here. To go to the store for something was a 15 minute walk each way. In the city there was a grocery store just across the street on Charles.

Story 1 rewritten in the voice of a 10 year old girl:
Mommy said it would be so great to have a new house but I hate it here. I can see nothing but trucks and dust everywhere. There’s no one to play with either! They’re all babies here! All Mommy wants to do is polish the floors and fix up her house! She’s busy dusting and cleaning all the time. Why can’t she pay attention to me and talk to me? She only talks to me when she wants help.


There’s nothing here! The stores are so far away it takes me 15 minutes to walk one way! On Charles Street, I only had to run across the street to get something.

The second version comes alive in the child’s voice. I find it harder to write in her voice. The adult in me judges her petulance and neediness. But this is exactly what I need to write, in order to engage the reader’s petulant inner child. I’m going to try it from now on.