Peeling Back the Layers on Author, Narrator, and Character Voice to Write Better Fiction - The Micro Elements Part 4

Writing CraftVoice

May 10

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“I just don’t get the voice.”

“It’s not voicey enough.”

“I’m looking for a fresh voice in the genre.”

These are common statements that float around the literary world—mostly from agents and editors—that leave writers scratching their heads. How do you fix a voice problem when you don’t know what this voice thing is or what it should be?

The Three Layers of Voice—Author, Narrator, and Character

Voice is one of the more ambiguous literary terms. When I started writing fiction, I had no clue what people meant when they referred to “voice.” Whose voice? The author’s, the characters’, or an unknown narrator?

It turns out we’re talking about all three, all at once, but here’s where it gets really confusing—everything stems from the author’s voice.

In this article, we’ll examine the three layers of voice so you can learn how to lean into yours and what to stop worrying about.

What is the Author’s Voice?

Here’s my dry definition: The author’s voice is their unique attitude, personality, and worldview, forged from their lived experience, conveyed by their writing style (part natural inclination, part study).

In short, your voice is not something you find outside of yourself.

It’s you: your interests, tastes, and questions about the world and how you choose to share and explore them with your words.

In my opinion, your voice isn’t something you so much as discover as you uncover through writing.

Semantics, maybe, but when we’re just beginning to learn the craft, most of us are trying to “WRITE” something good. And usually, we try too hard.

At this stage, we do all sorts of funny stuff. We write it fluffy. We purple the prose. We run away with metaphors and similes. We get busy trying to make it sound like “writing” instead of just telling it like it is—how we’d naturally tell it to a buddy.

If you are a new writer and guilty of these things, it is not your fault. It’s just part of the evolution of becoming a writer and learning the craft.

Case in point:

Here’s a line from one of my early novels that went in the drawer. I tried hard to make the writing “good” by using a smart simile to express my character’s conflicting thoughts.

“Her thoughts unspooled like a ribbon, then twisted and wound back on themselves . . .”

Okay. Fine. But the problem is I don’t speak like that, I don’t think like that, and neither did my angsty seventeen-year-old protagonist, who happened to be born in the twenty-first century.

I was trying to be a writer instead of just writing. But I didn’t know how to do that yet—not really. It took time to learn to trust my voice by writing and reading what I enjoyed and learning how to use my narrator.

Now, I know I prefer short, punchy phrases, sentence fragments, deep POVs, and characters who are snarky and rarely say what they’re thinking. They definitely wouldn’t compare their thoughts to the unspooling of a ribbon. But hey, at the time, I thought it sounded pretty good. LOL.

What I’d say now is something like, ‘She couldn’t think straight.’ Or, ‘Her thoughts were as scrambled as the eggs she had for breakfast.’

I hold no shame around my first attempts. This was just me learning the ropes and myself—and I’m still learning. I urge you to give yourself the same grace.

How to think about the layers of voice:

The voice of the narrator and characters stem from the author’s voice. It’s all connected.

Imagine yourself on a patio surrounded by a bunch of lovely potted plants. The author’s voice is like the dirt inside the pots—it’s a mix of all kinds of organic material. Completely unique. The dirt here won’t be like your neighbor’s dirt. In one pot, you might have a fern, and in another, perhaps petunias; still another, maybe there’s a vine. Those are your stories. The stocks, shoots, leaves, and flowers make up your choices: Narrators, Characters, POVs, Plot, and so on - but it all starts in the dirt.

Without the dirt, you have nothing.

My advice: Don’t worry about finding your voice. Instead, get busy uncovering it by using it frequently.

Write. Write. Write.

Write (and read!) about what you like and are curious about, and learn the craft so it reads well but still reads like you.

“My own feeling is that voice is a natural attribute. You can no more control it than you can the color of your eyes—nor would you want to. …To set your voice free, set your words free. Set your characters free. Most important, set your heart free. It is from the unknown shadows of your subconscious that your stories will find their drive and from which they will draw their meaning. No one can loan you that or teach you that. Your voice is your self in the story.” Donald Maass Writing the Breakout Novel.

The Narrator’s Voice:

When you come to a story, you must decide who will narrate the tale.

Who will handle the action, context, thoughts, and descriptions woven between the character’s dialogue?

Your narrator can be a character, as with a first-person, or an outside entity, as with third-person limited, or an immersive narrator/character combo that blurs the lines, seen in deep or close third-person POV. It might be an omniscient (all-knowing) non-obtrusive entity, or maybe you want your narrator to be noticeable (meaning it has opinions and attitude—think Lemony Snicket or the unnamed omniscient narrator that opens up the Harry Potter Series).

In today’s genre fiction, point-of-view characters are often narrators, either in the first or close third-person. For them, you need to find a way to access their character voice, which we’ll talk about in a second.

How to Home In on Your Narrator:

Decide who will narrate your story and from what POV. If that POV is in the third-person, decide on their level of objectivity. Will they know everything about everyone (omniscient), or will they be limited to one character only?

Will they have access to character thoughts and feelings?

How much do they know about the story?

Are they standing at the end of the tale and relaying it to the reader, or are they along for the ride, watching it unfold as the characters experience it?

When you read the books you love, ask yourself those questions about the narrator.

Pick apart what they know, how they present, and how the narrator anchors into the POV character’s personality to see everything through that particular lens.

When you find a distinct narrator, ask why that is. Do you notice their attitude? How would you describe it?

What Not to Do With Your Narrator:

Break the dream with “authorsplaining”

Reading a story should be an immersive experience, and there’s nothing worse than pulling the fictional world around you and getting into a comfy reading groove, only to have the author stop the story to drop an explanation bomb.

We call this “author intrusion” or “authorsplaining.” It’s when the author injects information they believe the reader needs to know, often forgetting to apply the viewpoint of the character’s lens. It can also be where authors push their own agenda, whatever that might be.

Sometimes, author intrusion looks like stuffing dialogue with exposition—what the characters already know, but the reader doesn’t. The result is forced and usually pretty clunky: “Hey, Dad. Remember when you and Mom kissed in front of all my friends on my first day of middle school? Gosh, that was embarrassing. I’m still scarred fifteen years later. No wonder I’m having trouble with my girlfriend.”

Sometimes, the author steps outside the POV character’s experience to “explain” something that the character wouldn’t know or feel. Instead, the author shares their opinions on the matter.

For example, imagine my POV character is a woman visiting a ranch who knows nothing about cows or horses. If I describe how sparse the hay crop looks, the Hereford cows in the feedlot, or the buckskin horse in the pasture, I’m stepping outside my character’s wheelhouse of knowledge and experience. As the author (who is from that world), I’m intruding into the story.

Solution: Stay true to your character’s lived experience. Filter that through your narrator, and you’ll stay true to the voice of the story.

Inconsistent Distancing of Your Narrator

Shifting the distance between your reader and the narrator is something to watch out for when revising. If you tell your tale in a deep POV where the narrator is essentially the character, stay there. Stay close and tight. Don’t lock a reader outside the character’s head and heart if they’ve had previous access. It will frustrate your reader and break the dream.

As always, there are exceptions:

There are times when you can intentionally use author intrusion and shift the POV and distance around, but the key here is being intentional and having a good reason for doing it. We’ll cover those exceptions in a different article on another day and look at some examples.

The Character’s Voice:

Now to the meat and potatoes. The voice you need to focus on finding is that of your characters.

A character’s voice is their personality and attitude on the page.

It’s what they think, what they say, how they say it (or don’t), and when.

This, my friend, is your paydirt right here because the character’s voice is what you want the reader to experience regardless of your narrator. The character’s voice can give the prose an auditory quality. You can hear it when you read it. That’s what makes a work of fiction voicey.

Take this example from one of the voiciest books I’ve ever read: Sadie by Courtney Summers.

I find the car on Craigslist.

It doesn’t matter what kind, I don’t think, but if you need more than that to work with, it’s boxy, midnight black. The kind of color that disappears when it’s next to any other. Backseat big enough to sleep in. It was offered up in a hastily written ad in a sea of hastily written ads, but this one riddled with spelling errors suggested a special kind of desperation. Make an offer, please settled it for me. It means I need money now, which means someone’s in trouble or they’re hungry or they’ve got a chemical kind of itch. It means I’ve got an advantage, so what else can I do but take it?

Shrewd? Yes. Calculating? Yes. A person on a mission? For sure. Can you hear it?

A character’s voice is steeped in their identity, which comes from their lived experience—the full lives they’ve led before we meet them on page one. It’s a combination of desires and past influences that merge into a predictable pattern of behaviors the reader can experience.

Check out another passage from Sadie:

I’m going to kill a man.

I’m going to steal the light from his eyes. I want to watch it go out. You aren’t supposed to answer violence with more violence but sometimes I think violence is the only answer. It’s no less than he did to Mattie, so it’s no less than he deserves.

I don’t expect it to bring her back. It won’t bring her back.

It’s not about finding peace. There will never be peace.

Determined and vengeful, Sadie is a nineteen-year-old woman on the hunt for her younger sister’s killer. She grew up rough, and I won’t spoil it for you, but her desires and lived experience create a palpable page-turner of a book.

So, when you think of a character’s voice, think of attitude, upbringing, and persona. Unsurprisingly, the character’s voice informs their interiority and internal monologue.

Think of it this way: a person from Maine who grew up a longshoreman will have different lived experiences and perspectives than someone who grew up wrestling steers in Waco, Texas, or someone who grew up in Manhattan and works in the fashion industry.

How to Find Your Character’s Voice

One of my favorite resources for creating character voice comes from James Scott Bell’s book Voice: The Secret Power of Great Writing.

He suggests five critical questions to ask about your character, which I think are a great base, so I’ll present them here (in italics) and then add my thoughts. I suggest you consider these questions for every character in your story.

1.What is your character’s dominant impression?

What adjective describes their personality, and what noun describes who they are in the story’s world?

For example, a haughty princess, a browbeaten king, a drunk stable girl, an anxious middle-schooler, a grieving mother, or a stubborn army cadet—you get the picture.

I like to come up with three adjectives: one or two to describe the external and one linked to the character’s internal struggle based on their wound and false belief.

Example: A drunken but clever, stable girl with a guilt complex.

2. What do they look like? How do they think they look? How do they feel about their appearance?

3. What is their basic background?

Where did they grow up? How did their caregivers treat them?

What were the economic conditions?

What’s their level of education?

What are their hobbies, likes, dislikes, and general interests?

4. What major life-altering events occurred in their formative years? Bell specifically says sixteen, but that’s too narrow for me. I like: What significant events shaped the worldview they hold in the story present?

5. What do they desire (yearn for) more than anything in the world? What hole inside them do they desperately want to fill? What do they think will fill it?

But what if you don’t know your character’s personality or any of that other stuff yet?

There’s no getting around it: You’ll need to make some decisions, and they might not work initially. The good news is that you can always change things if they don’t fit.

In general, try not to worry. Getting to know folks takes time. So, as you create your character’s backstory, be patient with them and yourself as you write. They will reveal themselves to you over multiple drafts.

Main Takeaways:

Your author’s voice is inside of you. You don’t need to find it, and you can’t lose it. You can only refine it as you lean into your tastes and improve your writing craft.
One of the most critical decisions you’ll make is who narrates your tale, so make sure you have a good reason for that choice and test out different viewpoints to see what feels right for the story.
Work on developing your characters and practice expressing their attitude and personality on the page. Stay true to your characters, and you’ll make their voice pop.
When you read, practice identifying the narrator and the main POV character (remember they may be the same). See if you can describe their personality and how they view themselves and the world around them.
Trust yourself and your taste. Write a lot. Study the craft and learn to wield POV like it’s a weapon!

Peeling Back the Layers on Author, Narrator, and Character Voice to Write Better Fiction - The Micro Elements Part 4