Voice and the Valentine

On Saturday, I had lunch with some chapter mates from the Washington Romance Writers. The subject of “author’s voice” came up – what elements go into crafting a story so that a reader knows who the author is after reading a single page. We agreed it was in part a series of choices an author makes from vocabulary to core story to setting to how a hero and heroine relate to one another.

Over lunch, I mentioned I was thinking of writing a vignette about two teens and their high school Valentine’s Day dance for my blog post today. As I sat down to write it, I started to wonder how some of my favorite authors might take this situation and make it their own. What elements would they combine to infuse the story with their voice?

Betty Neels would have made our heroine a bit of a wallflower, possibly bullied by her beautiful step-sister, and resigned to the prospect of staying home the night of the dance. The afternoon of the dance, our plucky heroine, in her practical anorak, would have rescued a starving kitten or a drowning puppy. The hero would have arrived just in time to help and later would make it clear to the evil step-sister (and the harpy step-mother) that our true-blue heroine was his intended and they’d just have to lump it.

In Jayne Ann Krentz’s hands, our intrepid and determined heroine would have pestered her reluctant hero into taking her to the dance so they could break into the office of the crooked high school principal. She’d be certain that the principal used his psychic talents against her cousin who went missing at the beginning of the school year. Our trusty heroine would know on a deep metaphysical level that, with the help of our brooding hero, their combined psychic talents would save the day, the dance, and her cousin.

Linda Howard’s bad-boy hero would make a point of coming to the dance in his torn jeans, maybe even roaring into the gym on his motorcycle. He’d lay a hot, sexy kiss on our smart-mouthed heroine and ride out, leaving her to get on with her life (and occasionally to wonder what-if) for the next decade before he comes rumbling back into town as an ex-Special Forces officer on the same Ducati bike, looking to rekindle their relationship. The make-up sex will be hot, hot, hot, but our heroine won’t make a permanent reunion easy for him as they race to stop the bad guys from winning.

Each of these authors has an extensive body of work that makes this exercise relatively easy to do. Betty Neels wrote over 90 books, mostly capable and compassionate heroes who recognized the true worth of often overlooked, overworked and underappreciated heroines. Jayne Ann Krentz (also writing as Amanda Quick) has developed a successful paranormal romantic suspense series in which her protagonists must work together as equal partners in order to overcome the bad guy. A Linda Howard hero is always the alpha in the room, if not always Special Forces, and her heroine does her damnedest not only to hold her own against him but to forge a link between them that is more than just passion. In the end, I still don’t have a great definition of voice. But I definitely know it when I read it.

I never did get to writing my vignette. But I’m pretty sure my heroine’s heart flutters whenever he’s around. She watches him when he’s not looking so her crush is not completely obvious. My hero’s hands sweat just a little when he’s in the same room with her. He teases her relentlessly so she’ll notice him but not guess just how into her he is. What, besides the standard teenage approach-avoidance tango, keeps them apart? A centuries-old blood curse.

Yeah. My voice tends toward the paranormal. Also often the quirky, the sentimental, the flowery, the obvious, the comic and the visceral. This is, in turns, deliberate, instinctive and subconscious. But always distinctly mine.

So, given this set-up – teenaged not-quite-lovers and the Valentine’s Day dance – how would you or your favorite author spin it? A happy ending? A dose of the macabre? A mystery to unravel? A peril to escape and defeat? Curious minds want to know!

Voice and Writing

"All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen." (from "A Child's Christmas in Wales" by Dylan Thomas)

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a very unevenly edited book and contains many passages that simply seemed to its editors like a good idea at the time.
One of these (the one Arthur now came across) supposedly relates the experiences of one Veet Voojagig, a quiet young student at the University of Maximegalon, who pursued a brilliant academic career studying ancient philology, transformational ethics and the wave harmonic theory of historical perception, and then, after a night of drinking Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters with Zaphod Beeblebrox, became increasingly obsessed with the problem of what had happened to all the ballpoints he'd bought over the past few years." (from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams)

"Lula and the couch were almost identical shades of brown, with the exception of Lula's hair, which happened to be cherry red today.
"I always feel sort of anemic when I stand next to Lula. I'm a third-generation American of Italian-Hungarian heritage. I have my mother's pale skin and blue eyes and good metabolism, which allows me to eat birthday cake and still (almost always) buttoning the top snap on my Levi's. From my father's side of the family I've inherited a lot of unmanageable brown hair and a penchant for Italian hand gestures. On my own, on a good day with a ton of mascara and four-inch heels, I can attract some attention. Next to Lula I'm wallpaper." (from Seven Up by Janet Evanovich)

"She started to laugh. She couldn't help it, she had to, and then she couldn't stop, even when Shane knocked on the door and said, "Agnes?" she still couldn't stop, and he rattled the door but she'd locked it, so he kicked it in and came in and held her and said, "It's okay," and she held on to him and said, "I know," and cried and then after a while she stopped, and he kissed the top of her head and patted her back, and she said, "That was bad," and he said, "Yeah," and she said, "I won't do it again," and he said, "I thought you meant the shooting," and she said, "That, too," and let go of him and got dressed and put on her glasses.
"When she had herself together again, she went out to the kitchen and got Rhett a dog biscuit in case he'd been traumatized. "At least is won't ever get any worse than this," she told him. He seemed comforted by that.
"Then as Brenda's goddamned son of a bitch ugly black grandfather clock gonged midnight in the front hall, she went out onto the porch to wait for somebody named Carpenter to come and clean the blood out of her kitchen." (from Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer)

Voice. I've quoted above four of the most distinct voices in 20th or 21th century fiction. Certainly not the only authors I could have selected, but four that I happened to have on my bookshelf and four of whom I actually read on a fairly regular basis. Dylan Thomas, Douglas Adams, Janet Evanovich and Jennifer Crusie.

Voice. Can you hear it? If I lined up Brian May, Eric Clapton, The Edge and Mark Knopfler, I might make Yvonne's ears bleed. But as well, I could tell you within 2 chords, if it took that long, which of those four men was currently playing. Even if they each were playing the one song I've conquered on the guitar - Jamaica A E-minor C - I'd recognize their individual guitarist's voice.

Voice. What is it? Barbara Samuel tells me, "Voice is the potato, style is the French fry." Voice is the ingredients that I have shopped for literally all my life. It is in part my grandfather's humming and stacking and restacking cutlery at the dinner table and my grandmother's yearly family reunions; it is my eldest siblings learning Spanish when I was two, teaching my absorbent mind to count to 10 in Spanish before I could in English. It was my minister's Welsh accent and my weekly Scottish Country Dance lessons with an English neighbor. It was the first book I ever read by myself, Fraidy Cat, and the first song I learned in another language, "Frere Jacques."

Voice. What is it? Kathy Gilles Seidel tells me, "Voice is the result of everything -- who you choose to write about, where you set your books, what you notice in your descriptions, your values, your interests, pretty much everything about you as a person/writer."

Voice. Can you figure out someone elses? When I read Dylan Thomas, I can hear the sound of the sea in his language, in the rhythm of his words which comes from the rhythm of the Welsh language and accent. But what about in popular fiction or genre fiction rather than literary poetic-prose? Can I hear Cambridge in Douglas Adams' voice? Or the Fens? Did he listen to the Rolling Stones and the Yard Birds? How obvious is the Mid-West in Jenny's writing or Jersey in Janet's. At least if Jenny's weren't situated in Ohio or Janet's in Trenton?

Voice. Can it be nurtured? Can it be killed? Because Style is different than voice, an author's voice should shine through no matter what he's written. Be it an opinion piece he wrote for Entertainment magazine, his memoir On Writing, or Cujo, Stephen King's voice resonates through all of his writing. What if he hadn't written Carrie, though? What if he had tried a different genre? Cozy mysteries. Fantasy. Romance. Would he still be Stephen King, multi-million selling, bestseller-writing author? Or did he stumble onto a style that fit his voice?

Voice. Do I have one? It is one thing to write about myself and my opinion and another to write about a fictional character or world. As an author, I must try and fail and try again and experiment in order to discover where my voice best fits. While I'm fairly certain it isn't in tech manuals, and I hope it isn't in hard science fiction as I have no interest there, the rest is as yet unsettled.
What about you? Can you see or hear your distinct voice? Have you ever thought about where it came from? Or do you think it's all hokum, and an author just needs to write a good story?

With all your might

I'm truly sorry. But it has happened again. And I can only hope that next week when you stop by to read, no one will have died. But someone did, and I feel I must take a moment to tell you why this matters to me.

Salinger is dead. I have no scholarly insight to offer you; I can only tell you that his voice formed the writer I am and the writer I am becoming. It is and has been his lyrical, cynical, judgmental, patronizing, puzzled, thoughtful, idealistic, bewildered, lonely erudite voice that has echoed in my heart and ear for more than two decades. And I cannot believe that he is finally and forever gone, and with his death, that creative voice is now silenced.

There is nothing much to be said about the life or lifestyle of the man, Jerome David Salinger. It neither impressed nor altered my soul. He sounded like the worst kind of misanthrope who took patronizing to new levels. Besides, he was 91. It was probably as good an age to die as any. But I am not here to write about his life, his choices, his reclusiveness. Only, his voice.

No longer will words be plucked out of the universe and set carefully in certain orderly lines that in my view were meant to be written, meant to be read. When Zooey comforted his sister, Franny, and tried to draw her out of her stupor of the Pilgrim's prayer, he shared his idea of Jesus- a man who would join you for a glass of gingerale at the kitchen table. And ask for only a small glass.

Here was a Jesus that I understood. Here was a brother I understood. Here was a writer I understood.

I'm traveling just now, and my copies of Salinger's books, the used paperbacks, the early hardback editions that my brother found for me, are on the shelves in my living room, nestled between Douglas Adams and Jennifer Crusie. And I can't touch them, can't thumb through them, skim, dive in, remember a time when they were brand new to me, when I had yet to have read them, or even thumb through my dog-eared photocopy of "Hapworth 16, 1924" and remember the day I discovered it even existed.

It wasn't Catcher in the Rye that drew me; nor Nine Stories, whose stories saddened me as one by one, the Glass family let me down, those fictional, former contestants of It's a Wise Child who had seemed so precious and so wise in other stories. And "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" nearly killed me - though as a college student I understood both the lure and the hubris needed for suicide. Just not his. Not Seymour's.

No, the clarion call of JD Salinger sounded for me through Raise
High the Roofbeams, Carpenters/Seymour: An Introduction and Franny and Zooey. Here was the birth of my writing, and the solidification of my faith. I too wanted to write stories that could make their own way to the editor's desk by train with only a wax paper-wrapped sandwich and thermos of coffee for company. My stories too would one day make other passengers somewhat uncomfortable, I hoped. I felt his words. I understood in my teen-aged heart the Zen of shooting marbles. I wanted to tell Zooey that I would only ask for a small glass of ginger-ale, too.

I was in college when I first discovered his books, published in those solid, plain covers of white and green, mustard yellow, maroon. No frills. No pen and ink drawing of Holden, no shy watercolor of Franny. Just stripped down and serious. I wanted serious, something true and real, no gimmicks, no guile. I was 19 or 20, and really, who is more deep, who has more understanding of how the world works than a 20 year old? And who spoke to me about what really mattered? JD Salinger. Or more accurately, Buddy Glass.

I understood the Glass family. The paths that wove through the stacks of books in their apartment in New York City resonated with my childhood, binding my fantasies to my reality. An apartment crowded with brilliant, opinionated children, books and the smell of cooking meat and cigarettes. Elder siblings handing out reading lists to the younger, privacy invaded even in the bathtub, parents more than a little bemused by their offspring. This was the voice my heart heard.

Salinger in the flesh has never lived up to his alter-ego, Buddy Glass. Should I care? Allow his actions and pretensions rather than his writing to define his genius? Truth be told, the foundations have been laid too long and too solidly in my thoughts and writing for me to ever be released from the affect (some might say taint) of his voice. And I can only join with the cyber-wake in raising a glass- of whiskey as rye is a bit more difficult to come by these days- to salute the passing of the voice of JD Salinger.