Mary Ann - 30 December 2007 08:46 AM
Folks: I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic of voice that Erin has presented. This piece, Reading Throne, offers a wonderful example for study of use of voice in storytelling.
What is the voice the reporter uses?
What are some examples of voice (versus information) carrying the story?
Thoughts on Voice in this story:
Usually, it’s helpful for me when discussing an abstract term to either provide or respond to a definition of the word before I get started writing about it. Since I’m the first to post here, I’ll take a stab at defining it and try to capture what Erin meant when she sent the story.
Voice seems to be more than simply “tone” or the style in which the story is written. It feels more like a conscious effort to me than that. In other words, every story has a tone, but not every one has a voice. Let’s say voice is an intentional tone that adds a post-textual, non-informational element to a story. It expresses a personal take on a story with the goal of establishing a consistent mood throughout. Perhaps, above all it is about the writer demonstrating his/her control over a story.
In this piece, “story-booky” jumped out at me immediately as the voice of the story. It seems as it was written FOR the children. That’s not to say it was written in a simple style, but rather it seems that’s who the author wanted her audience to be. I think her use of short sentences/paragraphs, linking verbs and unusual punctuation for a newspaper, i.e. exclamation points, are some examples of how she did it.
To answer the second question, here are a couple examples of where voice carried the story rather than information and some comments about it:
1. “The students came every day to paint the chairs.
The little kids watched them work.
Wow! Look at Zach’s chairs!”
Short sentences. Separate paragraphs. Exclamation points. There’s not much going on here action-wise, but the picture one develops in his/her mind of this process is pretty complete.
2. “He was a good man who loved children. “ to describe the principal.
A sentence like this one is usually beaten out of us by the time we start writing seriously: Where’s the attribution? Why are you telling and not showing? Why a linking verb? But here I think she’s able to pull it off because it fits in the larger voice of the story and because she backs it up very simply in the next two lines.