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Last night, I attended an intimate concert at a local coffeehouse. There were a few opening songs by singers with lovely, pleasing voices who performed excellently harmonized duets. Then the main act took the stage and the lead singer launched into his first song. Immediately, I sat up straighter in my chair and my attention was riveted to the stage. Now, this was a Voice! Over the course of an evening, this cover band performed everything from Kenny Rogers to John Mayer with such charisma and attitude that it made each song sound like a vibrant original.
Voice—in writerly terms—is a funny thing. It’s inescapable and yet elusive at the same time. Everyone has a voice, after all. It’s merely the style and tone and structure chosen while writing and every writer has to make some sort of decisions, consciously or subconsciously, when they put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). And yet, having a distinctive voice in writing is both highly valuable and more rare than one might imagine.
I recently read a collaborative novel by several accomplished authors. Now, one might expect that three distinct sets of style, tone, word rhythm, etc. would result in a sort of non-distinctive blend of all three voices. Or perhaps a very disjointed novel where it was immediately clear for which parts each author was responsible. Curiously, this was not the case, but rather the voice of one of the writers—the most successful of the trio in fact—very clearly saturated the complete novel. I couldn’t tell for sure, even though I had some previous knowledge on the matter, which parts were hers because, frankly, the whole thing sounded like her.
Interestingly, the other two writers don’t usually employ voices similar to the dominant voice in this novel. I wondered briefly if they consciously decided to change or mimic the dominant author’s voice. One usually assumes that a writer’s voice comes naturally to them, but some writers have found great success by switching to a new voice. Sophie Kinsella is a prime example. Though she penned several moderately successful novels under her own name of Madeline Wickham, when she found the bubbly, slightly daffy, first-person voice of Becky Bloomwood and wrote her first Shopaholic novel, she finally became a massive bestseller.
Some author’s voices are so distinctive they even creep into our own subconscious when we read them. Every time I read a Stephen King novel, for about a week afterward, I find myself thinking or sometimes writing in the style of his characters replete with that aw-shucks-folks kind of country-tinged colloquialisms that “Uncle Stevie” likes to serve up for his “Constant Readers.”
So, what makes for a distinctive voice? I’d venture that it’s a heady mix of flair and confidence that probably makes the difference between everyday voice and Voice with a capital V, but I can’t seem to pin it down more specifically than that. It could be first-person or third-person or perhaps omniscient, fast, pulse-pounding action or slow, lush prose; there’s simply no formula. I guess it’s rather like that old saying (I think originally made about pornography):
“I couldn’t describe it, but I know it when I see it.”
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Hmm. I think I read the same book you did, Tara, and came away with a slightly different impression. I could easily pick out which characters were written by which author, although I agree with you that the overall tone of the book was dominated by the most prominent voice. If we’re talking about the same book (and I think we are), I thought it was much more successful than a previous collaboration that the primary author tried. Although now that I think about it, outside of distinctive shifts among certain — differently authored — characters, the surrounding parts definitely seemed to reflect one particular authorial voice, which is perhaps what you’re talking about here.
What I want from a collaborative novel is not just a smooth blend of authorial voices — and perhaps not necessarily that perfect balance. But I DO want some kind of transcendence, some synergistic effect that makes it absolutely clear to me that this book could not have been written by only one author. In other words, I want the whole to truly exceed the sum of the parts, and I haven’t yet found that in genre collaborations where the authors were not used to collaborating. Tori Carrington is a successful Romance collaborative, yes? And then there was Laura London, aka Tom and Sharon Curtis, of course. But that’s different, isn’t it, because the voice originally arrives as combined, so whatever individual nuances or dominating characteristics are there are not noticeable to the reader.
by Robin
on June 25th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
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I read The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes. Not sure why I didn’t just say so in the first place, actually. Perhaps I was feeling delicate that day…(snort).
Anyway, yeah I felt like Crusie had somehow infused the entire book with her usual tics and tricks (which I like, so I liked the book). I know she wrote Mare’s part and although Lizzie and Dee didn’t feel so much like Crusie characters as a whole “type”, they did Crusie-like things and had Crusie-like thoughts (IMO…book’s not with me right now so no specific examples come to mind but it was rampant I thought). I thought it was interesting and I don’t know how it happens, because I’m sure they each wrote their separate chapters, but perhaps Crusie did a final edit and her voice got liberally sprinkled over the whole thing?
I felt like her last collaboration with Bob Mayer, Don’t Look Down, was similar in that, to me, it felt like an alpha male and a bunch of daffily plotted action sequences got shoved into a Crusie book by accident (to less successful or enjoyable ends, IMO). It wasn’t a balance, but was pretty heavily Crusie with some other stuff happening.
With a Tori Carrington or a Laura London (or PJ Tracy or Perri O’Shaughnessy) you never really know the voices as separate, so it’s hard to say how it happens. Even though I stopped reading Evanovich around book 8, I’m sort of interested in checking out her forthcoming collaboration with Stephen J. Cannell just to see what kind of mix they come up with. My suspicion is that Evanovich’s voice will win out…but maybe it’ll be something completely different that I’m not expecting.
by Tara Gel
on June 26th, 2007 at 11:43 am
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I reviewed the Unfortunate Miss Fortunes for DearAuthor.com, and my take on the book is basically that it seemed like it was probably a lot of fun to write, but it didn’t break any new ground for me, which I expect from a collaborative work, simply because of the nature of collaboration, especially among genre powerhouse authors. Lizzie felt very Anne Stuart-ish to me, that slightly annoying naive stubbornness and yet effective disabling of the controlling mate, and I haven’t read Dreyer’s books, but I knew Dee was her heroine because she was the least familiar to me. Xan felt very much like Crusie to me, but I wouldn’t bet the ranch that she wrote her, only that, as you say, she influenced that element of the novel.
I really did not like the first Crusie-Mayer collaboration, in part because I felt absolutely no blend of voices, the love story seemed ridiculous to me, and the action/adventure aspects annoyed the holy heck out of me. I thought Crusie and Mayer’s dueling blog was much more successful than that book. I still have to read Agnes to see if things have changed, but the UMFs seemed a vast improvement in terms of collaborative writing, so I liked that. But as a book, as a story, it really threatened to bore me much too often, in part because it was so familiar. Maybe that familiarity was the domination of Crusie’s voice, but whatever it was, in the end I still had the sense that the three authors had a better time writing the book than I did reading it.
by Robin
on June 28th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
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I’ve never read any of these books. Except Tori Carrington, and when I read them I didn’t know it wasn;t one person. Ofcourse I read them before I ever started writing and I didn’t even know what voice was. LOL Now that I do, I should try one of the books mentioned, see if I notice anything different.
Intersting topic. 
by Sasha
on June 30th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
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