Can you change your narrative voice?

I’m in a fiction writing workshop, and last class, the teacher was talking about narrative voice (the manner in which a story is conveyed). I asked him if he thought a person could change his or her narrative voice, and his response was that you could refine it, but not completely change it. He went on to say that the author’s voice is a reflection of how the author thinks and sees the world, and it’s awfully hard to change yourself that thoroughly.

Personally, I’ve noticed that I’ve been influenced quite a lot by an author I read back in college, and I’m sure my voice would be substantially different if I had not read a bunch of his novels. So I guess I’m wondering if I read a whole bunch of books by one author, if I could start picking up elements of that person’s style as well.

I change my narrative voice all the time. I write for work, and use a different voice depending on the particular type of writing and audience. I also change the voice I use in personal writing. My fan fiction used a different voice from other personal writing I have done (probably to mimic the source work).

I have noticed the same thing as you, that my narrative voice is affected by what I am reading. A Dickens novel will have me writing in an entirely different voice from a work of magical realism. I recently read On the Road for the first time, and it had me writing (and thinking) in a dramatically different way.

Don’t authors who write from the point of view of first-person narrators have to change their narrative voice when they change narrators?

Nonsense. I just had a story published told in the first person by a 14-year-old girl. Needless to say, that doesn’t describe me in the slightest.

For first person, one of the first things you have to learn is to create a voice that isn’t your own.

As Thudlow and RealityChuck mentioned, any author who writes in the first person using different characters had better be able to change his narrative voice. Check out the first pages of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn versus A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for classic examples of this being done well. In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace writes in several radically different voices. I’m sure others will come up with many more examples. I think the professor in the OP was describing his own limitations.

Yep, I’m currently reading “The Rook” by David O’Malley and it’s told in two distinctive voices, 3PL and 1PJ, following the main character in both cases - she has amnesia and is reading several letters left to herself before her mind was wiped. It’s working quite well.

You can write a story from the perspective of a 14-year old girl, and still have it be in your own voice. People write YA first-person narratives all the time that are a little too smart for reality (I’m not saying that’s true in your case, just saying it can happen).

Now that I think about it, an author might change at least something about his narrative voice even without switching viewpoint characters, as in Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon.

WWW??

In this case, the girl spoke a teenage slang of the future and went through the type of teen dramatics I didn’t have at that age, let along when I was in my 50s (when I wrote the story). (It’s in the anthology Futuredaze, BTW).

Last year, I also sold a first-person retelling of the Sleeping Beauty legend, where the narrator is not smart enough to really understand the situation. The voice of the character couldn’t have been more different than that in the Futuredaze; Reeni was fairly sharp, if immature, while Fritz is a few steps behind the reader and doesn’t understand what’s going on even at the end.

As an author, you observe other people and slip into their voice like an actor slips into the voice of his characters. And you change the voice in order to make the story work best.

I don’t even use the same voice for posting on the Dope that I do in regular nonfiction.

As a casual comment, though, the statement mostly works. The reality is that most writers have a certain way of approaching the world and their fiction. That is often true for many famous writers because it is so much a part of who they are and how they write. You can’t ever confuse Hemingway and Fitzgerald or Faulkner and Joyce. And lesser writers converge onto a voice because they spend many years refining their approach into something that consistently works. Lots of writers say that their early works were imitations of some other writer’s voice. You grow out of it if you’re good. And even for major writers there are always exceptions. John Updike tried hard to change voice for different books.

Obviously, it’s possible to mimic voice or parody would be impossible. Genre writers tend to have less of an overwhelming voice than literary writers; I’m pretty sure that it’s the lack of a voice that makes many bestsellers sell. Maybe it’s easier to make the comparison in music. The Beatles always sounded like The Beatles even though they wrote songs in 50 subgenres. But Beyonce at the Superbowl was interchangeable to me with 50 other female singers.

And despite what I said earlier, my posts are going to reflect me and my worldview and never sound anything like Sampiro or Nzinga or the “…and shit” guy or a thousand others. I have some control over voice and my science fiction doesn’t have a consistently identifiable voice, but you’ll never confuse it with Asimov or Delany.

It’s not a simple yes/no question, IOW. It’s not even a spectrum. It’s multi-dimensional, with lots of lines running through the center.

This is what I’m getting at. Perhaps narrative voice is the wrong term to use?

In my opinion, a lot of the examples above are more so examples of changing perspective as opposed to changing your voice. Most authors I read have a certain consistency in their writing. They can choose different characters, different settings, different topics, but there are certain trademarks in there. This is why a lot of people have favorite authors, because those authors make stylistic decisions that the reader enjoys. Similarly, as the OP said, no one’s going to confuse William Faulkner with James Joyce, because they sound different.

Again, am I using the wrong term?

Sounds like your teacher’s never read, just to grab some very quick examples off the top of my head, Black Ajax or Cloud Atlas or The Poisonwood Bible.

Of course some writers can change their narrative voice, and of course some can’t. That’s like asking if an actor can play characters who aren’t facets of himself: some can, and some can’t.

You mentioned Faulkner and Joyce, both of whom have very distinctive voices. But other writers don’t; they’re all about showing readers their worlds through the eyes of characters who aren’t them.

There’s nothing wrong with a writer being in either camp, or somewhere in the middle. But there is, IMO, something wrong with someone who’s actually *teaching *writing claiming that his own camp is the only one that exists.

Voice is much like grammar. For most purposes, it is easier for teachers to lay down a set of rules for grammar which will serve their students in good stead almost all of the time. If you’re a professional and want to get deeply into it, books on grammar take up hundreds of pages of nit-picky examples and no two books agree upon everything. And that’s just in English. Unless you’re taking an advanced course in grammar 99% of it is useless to you.

Voice is much more than a superficial use of language. Cloud Atlas is mainly a series of parodies or pastiches, deliberately trying to convey the sense of known styles of voice along with a contrived one. Possibly one of them does reflect David Mitchell’s regular voice, the one he uses for his other novels, but even if not the example doesn’t make a case. Thomas Pynchon wrote a book in mock 18th century prose but it’s hard to argue that he doesn’t have a normally distinctive voice. Anthony Burgess made up a dialect to write A Clockwork Orange in, but that doesn’t change the rest of his career.

As a piece of parting advice in a fiction writing workshop, find your own voice is about as good as any I can think of. It doesn’t need to be true without exception. Once you have control over your voice you can play with the material all you want. It’s still You writing it and that You will come through even in invented dialect.

I’m an author, and I do this all the time. I write for children’s magazines mostly.

As an author, I probably have stylistic similarities from book to book or story to story; I’m sure a forensic writing detective could pick up my fingerprints, so to speak. :slight_smile: (My overuse of parentheses, semicolons and em-dashes would totally give me away–like this, for example!) Still, the narrative voice I use when writing a 19th century historical romance (with densely detailed descriptions of settings, character appearances, and emotions; era-appropriate terminology; longish sentences and generally a slower pace–except during action or some sex scenes, of course) is absolutely not the voice I use when writing a modern, guy-goes-undercover-in-the-mob arc for my online fiction serial. Indeed it’s through that serial that I probably change my narrative style most often, because though I write in the third person, the POV is very narrow. When readers are intended to see the world as seen by my mob informant, the scenes are written with vocabulary he would use, terse descriptions, everything tense and sharp and generally pretty cynical. He exists in a dark, scary world and he doesn’t notice what isn’t important to him, so neither does the narrative.

I remember in one scene from this character’s POV I wrote a line that ended up tripping me up every time I re-read the paragraph while editing: it’s the morning before a big operation was about to go down, and the undercover guy (Jonnie) answered his boss’s “You scared?” with basically “Hell yeah, what the fuck else should I be?” I added a line from the narrator, something like, “Nick [the boss] repeated, ‘what the fuck else should you be’ and nodded in satisfaction, as if Jonnie had just given him the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx.” (I’m totally paraphrasing, I don’t remember the exact wording.)

Anyway when I was editing that scene, I kept stumbling on that line. I knew it was wrong. I knew there was no way Jonnie would know who the hell the Sphinx was–or if he’s maybe heard of the Sphinx in Egypt, he still wouldn’t have heard of the riddle. I didn’t want to lose the line, because as I said, it conveyed precisely the feeling that Nick was giving off. But at last I had to suck it up and removed the reference. I can indulge that kind of thing when writing other scenes for other characters, because some of them are better educated and/or just think more along the lines of similes or metaphors, or know literary/historical references. With this storyline and this set of characters, the line just stuck out like a sore thumb to me. When using a less narrow POV (such as in my novels), I can get away with letting my own voice seep through like that; here, it just betrayed the ‘fourth wall’ so to speak. Even if none of my readers would have noticed (and I think they would’ve), I knew it had to go.

So even though I use a narrator and my readers know I loves me some analogies, word play, and almost cinematic descriptions when I have my druthers, I try not to betray the feel of each scene or the characters who inhabit it. At least for this serial. For my novels, I tend to pull the camera slightly back and let my own voice be heard in the narrative.

We might be talking at cross-purposes. I took the OP to mean, by ‘narrative voice’, what birdwatchers and planespotters call ‘giss’ (Wikipedia defines it as “the indefinable quality of a particular species, the ‘vibe’ it gives off”) - the something that means you can open a Saki short story or a PG Wodehouse novel and know who you’re reading within a paragraph. I wasn’t arguing that Mitchell, for example, doesn’t have a narrative voice of his own - just that he’s able to alter it, to the point where I wouldn’t know it was him writing. You seem to be saying the same about Pynchon and Burgess.

There’s a huge difference between stating something as a universal rule, when in fact it can be broken or bent, and stating something as a universal truth, when in fact it isn’t always true. Yeah, you start by teaching students that ‘I’ is the subject and ‘me’ is the object, even though there are circumstances when a writer might choose to go for the incorrect ‘between you and I’ - those can come later. But - while ‘Find your own voice’ is good advice - ‘No author can alter his or her narrative voice’ is just plain untrue, and saying it doesn’t serve any useful purpose except to dismiss any alternatives to the teacher’s own writing style.