Paying Attention to Voice

I may never have to master anything more difficult than thinking, and thinking convincingly, like multiple characters. It’s not just a matter of the word choices and rhythms of their dialogue (although it includes that). And it’s not just a matter of the outward manifestations of their natures — gender, style of dress, and so on (although it includes that, too). It’s a matter of looking at the world in a way shared by no other characters in the same scene and/or book.

This makes sense, right? People born at different times, to different families, subject to different economic pressures, attending different schools — all that: they can’t possibly regard and respond to a given event in exactly the same way, from events small (a single question, even a single word like Why?) to enormous (the impending end of the universe).

All these considerations — not just the way someone talks but his/her psychological/emotional stance in relationship to events and other characters — constitute what I think of when I think of voice. And it’s damned hard for me to understand, let alone work with.

So when I set out on the work-in-progress now called Seems to Fit, well, naturally I’d give it a half-dozen main characters and a gaggle of lesser ones. (Ha. Joke’s on me, isn’t it?)

Now, today, I do understand those main characters much better than I did fifteen, twenty years ago, when I first dreamt up this story. At the least, I’m that much older now than I was then — almost the age, in fact, of the youngest of the main main characters.

But I still struggle with making each character honestly different from all the others — not just reflections (or projections) of facets of my own self.

Dialogue is one of the easiest ways to do it. (Well, relatively easiest.) In a conversation among two or more parties, I think I’ve finally gotten the hang of making them sound different enough, without relying on hokey verbal tics, that their personalities — their background and so on — come across as different, too.

But dialogue has its own dangers. There’s that dia- prefix, for one. In any ordinary human conversation, the talk ping-pongs back and forth. Even when Person A is narrating a story to Person B about events which B knows nothing of, it goes back and forth. Maybe five sentences in, B will interrupt: Why’d you do that? And then what happened? Or — the killer — Cool, something like that happened to me, too, why, once upon a time…

This reminds me of a humor/self-help book published some years ago, about the way yuppies talk. Its title: But Enough About You.

This is a problem because sometimes you do, in fact, need one character — especially a secondary one — to relate a lot of information to another. Short of putting Person A at the podium in a lecture hall and B in the audience, it just doesn’t come across as realistic.

Now, one can telegraph the conversation: instead of having huge blocks of quoted text, you put chunks of the story into third person, maybe bracketed and interspersed with key lines and phrases in quotes, and interrupted (per the demands of conversation rhythm) by comments from the listener. Or you can put the whole story in third person, maybe in a separate chapter, in a way which makes it plain to the reader that these words paraphrase the real conversation.

I’ve had to deal with this situation numerous times in Seems to Fit. No getting around it, not in a story focusing on the activities of people of advanced years: as someone ages, more and more of his or her life will have occurred in the past. As the stories get repeated — rehearsed — they assume greater importance. (Which, I think, is one reason why the elderly often remember their childhoods better than what happened last week.) Fewer of their contemporaries survive. Result: one person remains alive to tell a single, moderately lengthy story.

I’ve used multiple techniques so far — my favorite probably being the “take it out of quotes altogether” method.

But I do think an author’s interest level drives the reader’s, at least in part: if you’re boring yourself writing a passage, you’ll probably bore the reader there, too. For this reason, when it recently came time to again share a particular character’s rather lengthy story, I wanted to try something different.

I layered on a further challenge: the character in question speaks only with great difficulty, as one result of an automobile accident many years ago. He speaks with the aid of an artificial larynx, a process which tires him after just a few minutes. How could he possibly tell a story of nearly a half-hour’s duration all at once?

Answer: he couldn’t. But he could have prepared the story in advance, by tape-recording it across numerous sessions — all of which could be listened to by another character as though it were a single session.

So in this chapter, I’ve got multiple voices — multiple points of view — to communicate and keep consistent:

• First, there’s the speaker himself, a semi-retired corporate executive named Chuck Bolas. He still maintains an office at the headquarters of his old employer, Sarras Enterprises — a multinational conglomerate which includes (among other subsidiaries) an importer of alcoholic beverages, known as King & Co.; a Welsh brewery of fine ale, St. David’s Brewing; and a small metalworking firm, Castle MetalCo.
• Second, there’s Chuck’s audience — a friend named Larry Weston, formerly an executive with Castle MetalCo who has come out of the woodwork, as it were, asking questions about a series of famous TV commercials for the ale named Diwrnach Wyddel. These commercials featured a large silver flagon, a Welsh music-hall entertainer named Dickie Jones, and Dickie’s, um, sidekick. Although Larry himself does not make an appearance in this excerpt, his presence, and the way he and Chuck relate to each other, is implied in the way Chuck speaks to him — and that becomes part of Larry’s voice, as it’s part of Chuck’s.
• Finally, looming large as the subject of this excerpt, there’s Dickie Jones himself. He appears almost nowhere else in the book, except in a few glancing references. But I wanted, needed him to be visible, almost audible, and able to be understood by readers. They need to get his voice, too.

I have no idea how well I pull this stunt off. But that’s what you’ll find ostensibly going on in “The Tale of Dickie Jones.”

[Note: This is a fairly long excerpt, about 3500 words. Thus I've broken it into two pieces, with links from one part to the other.]