Voice

Voice control

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I was told this week that a character I’d written was clearly my creation, my type of character, and yet simultaneously also straight out of an Alan Plater drama. It was meant as a compliment and I took it as high praise.

Partly, actually, because one of my favourite things about Plater’s writing was when he dramatised Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War books. Watch the series, read the books, it’s clearly Manning throughout and yet the TV series is also simultaneously in Plater’s own voice too. I cannot fathom how he did that.

But I can fathom voice. I used to be proud of being able to adapt to any house style, any requirement, and now, not so much. I’m not proud of it and I don’t think I can do it anymore. Not when I now so cherish how a friend once recognised I was the writer of a particular piece, even when the job had required me to not sign or byline it. That reminded me of the radio broadcaster Fi Glover: the first minute I heard her on air, I knew who it was because I’d read her book.

She writes the way she speaks, which is fantastic and damn hard and may not be the only way to write but I have such a fondness for it that I think maybe it should be. Perhaps just on weekdays.

There’s also that I know, from direct experience, that you can encourage a writer to find their own voice but until the day they do, they’re as likely to have no clue what you even mean. Maybe we all start off trying to write like our favourite writers and maybe there just comes a day when you say sod that and write like yourself, but there comes that day, and there comes your voice.

Only…

I think the start of writing is finding this voice, but I worry that the end of writing is holding on to it too tightly.

This week I came across a few pages of The Golden Age, an unfinished theatre play script about 1960s British television. It may be that only those few pages were ever written, because I can’t find any trace of a full play being performed. I shouldn’t tell you who wrote it, but if you read it, you’d recognise the voice immediately. Just as you’d know it was a theatre script, even though at no point does it say that, or anything like it.

Suddenly, I’m wondering if I’m wrong and it was an unfinished TV script. I don’t think so. Plus, incidentally, the 1960s weren’t the golden age of television, we’re living in the golden age now. But I reckon that the play was started somewhere in the early 2000s, so the writer wasn’t to know.

It’s fine. Good gags, a wry and very clear opinion, but it’s the same opinion as in this writer’s other work. And though the specific words of the jokes are different, they’re really the same. The same kind of setup and the same kind of payoff, the same type of character making the same type of point.

Look, it was never finished so maybe this writer thought the same as I do.

But it’s like when you watch an Aaron Sorkin drama. There’s never the slightest pixel of a doubt who wrote it, and there are a thousand points to love and relish, but he has a very precise voice, he has a particular shtick.

And while his writing is so good that I have watched and many times rewatched his Sports Night comedy despite caring even less about sport than I know about it, it’s also so good that it stays with you. And consequently, I couldn’t watch his The Newsroom series, even though I really tried.

The trouble for me is that while the lead character in that, Will McAvoy, is apparently very good, I could never quite see him through the crowd of previous Sorkin characters standing in his way. This line sounds like Jed Bartlett from The West Wing, that one is clearly Danny Tripp from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and this is unquestionably Will McAvoy quoting Casey McCall from Sports Night.

In Sorkin’s case, he does also repeat stories between shows, which doesn’t help. A couple of characters in different series discover their father has been having an affair for decades, for instance, and a window gets startlingly smashed by someone in roughly identical situations in Sports Night, The West Wing and Studio 60.

There’s also the, to me, totally riveting issue of a man pursuing a woman. In Sports Night, you’re rooting for the two to get together. In Studio 60, the same story is creepy as hell.

So there is a difference in Sorkin’s characters, but again, you always know it’s him.

I think that’s great. I think a clear and strong voice is exciting and is so different to all the could-be-by-anyone dramas.

Only, his voice gets in his way for me, at least with The Newsroom. And on a rather smaller scale, I worry that having long found my own voice, it’s become too locked in for my own good.

Voice breaking

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I’m never going to claim that I’m a good writer but I have been writing for a long time and there is something I’ve seen. Actually, I see it quite often and in fact this time I saw it seven weeks ago. To the day. I’ve waited this long to talk to you about it so that there’s no chance the person involved can figure out it’s got anything to do with them.

Clearly, I’m chicken.

But also while they are the one who prompted the thought this time, they’re far from the first and this is hardly a new issue. It’s the voice. The writers’ voice.

I think now that if you’re new to writing, you ignore voice because you just don’t get what it is. And that if you’re not new to it, if you have found your writers’ voice, you ignore it because you can’t write any other way and, besides, it’s not something that takes any thought.

What’s new to me is this: I think now that voice is the divider between a writer who is good or experienced, and one who is not. And even more specifically and precisely, I now think you can see the division because the inexperienced writer puts voice in quote marks.

That’s what I saw on Twitter on Friday 29 September. A writer I vaguely know made a sarcastic comment about ‘voice’ and reading it, I knew she didn’t know what it is.

Voice is the undefinable something that makes my writing different to yours.

It’s how I walked into my kitchen while Fi Glover was on the radio and I recognised her immediately because I’d just read one of her books.

It is the choice of words, yes. It is the patterns and the rhythms, yes. It’s just somehow more than that. Which is fitting because voice is not something you can define very well and it’s not something you can learn.

I mean, even if you didn’t happen to know what voice was until a minute ago, you get it now yet that’s not the same thing as having your own voice in your own writing. You can be taught what the term means, you can’t be taught how to do it.

You only get there through writing more and more. It’s not as if you get your voice when you’ve passed a thousand or a million words, either. It happens eventually or it doesn’t.

Which is in truth why I was so keen to talk to you about this and why I felt I had to wait seven weeks. To the day. Because the real reason this one tweet stood out to me was that a day or two before, this same writer happened to come up in conversation and I had been saying that there is something missing in her work.

I was in a car driving a colleague who thinks she’s taking a long time to write her novel and who is worrying about it as we all do. I’ve read an early draft of her piece and I was trying to convey why I like it and in fact like it so much more than she does. I like it because it has life and verve, because there is something more behind the choice of words and the choice of rhythm and pace. I think her novel is alive.

Maybe it’s because I was driving, but for some reason it wasn’t until I read the tweet that I made the connection. My car colleague’s unfinished novel has voice. And this tweeter’s published ones don’t.