VOICE by Sondra Soderborg

VOICE! VOICE! Publishers, editors, and agents all want it. Ask them what they mean and they will all say something a little different. So what is it? And how do we get it?

Voice is hard to define. Most definitions treat it as equivalent to style or to mean the voice of a first person narrator. These are fine, and both style and first person POV are tools we might use in creating voice, but neither captures what we’re being asked for.  Publishing professionals are asking for something bigger. They want VOICE.

My own way of thinking about VOICE is that it is the current buzzword for what publishers always want--an authentic story told fresh and true and up close. Our style may be recognizable from one book to the next. But the VOICE of each book, the song and sound and feeling of it, will be unique every time. Think how distinct the VOICE in THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX is from FLORA AND ULYSSES, and yet both are strong and fresh and for me, hard to get out of my head. Kate DiCamillo has a great toolbox for creating VOICE. So does Gary D. Schmidt, who will be speaking at our SCBWI-MI fall conference. I can’t recommend him enough.

Every decision we make as a writer shapes the VOICE of our novel. I’ve been fortunate to study VOICE at Highlights Foundation Workshops taught by Patricia Lee Gauch, who has written many books for young people and who had an illustrious career as an editor at Philomel. She has helped me build my own toolbox for VOICE, and with her permission, I am sharing some of her insights.

Intimacy: As writers we have to know and convey who are characters are intimately and specifically. Whether we are writing in first person or third person personal, we must be right up close, revealing our character’s innermost thoughts and feelings in words only they would use. I love the frank intimacy of the opening pages of Sherman Alexie’s THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN. In an instant, we know many things about him, including that he has a brain condition, thinks of himself as a weirdo, and moves between cultures and classes.

Surprise: If we are writing fresh stories or old stories in fresh ways, our readers should hear and see things they don’t expect and yet accept and believe them because they belong in the world of the story. Neil Gaiman’s THE GRAVEYARD BOOK is based on a surprising and unlikely idea, and he integrates the unexpected everywhere, including plot, characters, setting. Surprise helps define the world of this novel, in whimsical and scary ways.

Concrete Nouns: Ordinary objects ground a story. When we choose the details that make up a scene, nouns make the world of our novel more real, immediate and visible. We can wind ordinary objects through our story, so that they occur again and again. Kate DiCamillo does this well in DESPEREAUX, where ordinary things—soup, spoons, bowls, kettles—recur. This is unremarkable stuff, except that in the world of the book, soup is outlawed, so that these ordinary objects, things the reader sees and touches every day, become filled with meaning.

Repetition: Words, ideas, details, phrases that repeat throughout our story reinforce whatever they are connected to. In OK FOR NOW Gary Schmidt’s main character loves the Yankees. Details about the Yankees show up over and over. Better yet, in his eleven word, three sentence third paragraph, the words “to me,” show up three times. After that repetition, I know that Doug Swietek, the boy who repeats those words three times, struggles to know who he is. Kelly Barnhill in THE GIRL WHO DRANK THE MOON, uses repetition to drive plot and theme and to simply create her magical world.

Break the Rules: In order to create VOICE, we need, to quote Patti Gauch, “to write in the distinct way our characters or narrators speak and think and react. If they speak in aberrant ways, ways that break grammatical rules, so be it. Communication doesn’t always follow the rules.”

Sondra Soderborg writes middle grade novels and will be taking two to market later this year.  She lives in an Ann Arbor and loves the support and encouragement of her SCBWI chapter.  

Thanks for sharing what you learned at the Highlights Foundation workshops, Sondra! Author Gary D. Schmidt's novel, OKAY FOR NOW, was one of Sondra's VOICE examples, and she mentioned that he will be speaking at the SCBWI-MI Fall Conference. Here's your opportunity to learn directly from him. Go here to see the entire faculty line-up, and save the date: Sept. 15-16, 2017.

* The SCBWI-MI Illustrator Mentorship submission window is now open! Learn more here.

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Happy creating!
Kristin Lenz