An author’s voice is what defines an author’s style. As an author, when we describe things, we are describing the world through our eyes and experiences. We are showing the reader who our characters and narrator are through our voice. As a result, voice is one of the most important tools any author has and it must be practiced constantly.
Consider two authors who are, in my opinion, vastly different in their narrative voices: William Faulkner, known for lengthy sentences and description, and Ernest Hemingway, known for terse and sometimes sparse sentences and description.
Look at the differences in the first paragraphs of some of their books:
For a full minute Jiggs stood before the window in a light spatter of last night’s confetti lying against the windowbase like spent dirty foam, lightpoised on the balls of his greasestained tennis shoes, looking at the boots.
-Pylon, William Faulkner
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
-Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
Here is another example:
Frenchman’s Bend was a section of rich river-bottom country lying twenty miles southeast of Jefferson. Hill-cradled and remote, definite yet without boundaries, straddling into two counties and owning allegiance to neither, it had been the original grant and site of a tremendous pre-Civil War plantation, the ruins of which —the gutted shell of an enormous house with its fallen stables and slave quarters and overgrown gardens and brick terraces and promenades—were still known as the Old Frenchman’s place, although the original boundaries now existed only on old faded records in the Chancery Clerk’s office in the county courthouse in Jefferson, and even some of the once-fertile fields had long since reverted to the cane-and-cypress jungle from which their first master had hewn them.
-The Hamlet, William Faulkner
Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.
-The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
It is safe to say that Faulkner does have some opening lines that aren’t quite so wordy, but you get my point: One author uses a lot of language to create a specific image and/or thought in the reader’s mind while the other uses minimal language to do the same. Both are effective.
Take a moment to really think about what each author is accomplishing with their differing styles. Think about why they chose to describe each place/person the way that they did. What does their description and choice of words tell you about what is to come? What do they want you to feel and what do they decide is most important to introduce right at the beginning?
Take this a step further into character and narrator voice and we are transported into a story where the voice controls what we, as readers, know about the world around us through that voice. Voice creates the control for how we feel, what information we get and how limited that information is, and much more.
The Challenge
Now let’s do something similar, but a little tricky.
As a challenge, pick a noun to write a short story about (really more of a descriptive essay). No real action should take place and just describe the person, place, or thing. But through describing it, tell a story. Is there something more to the person than meets the eye? Did the object belong to a lost relative and is now left as a symbol of who that person was and how the narrator feels about the loss? Does the setting you chose represent returning to a part of your childhood you had tried to forget?
Imagine this is the first page of a novel you’re about to begin.
Step 1: Go Overboard
Get creative… and go overboard. Describe what you chose using giant piles of words and sentences. Get describing with words you would never use normally and get downright flowery. A thesaurus is encouraged.
Step 2: Go Underboard… Er, I Mean Go Simplistic
Then, write the same short story or descriptive essay a second time. This time, cut almost everything out and describe certain elements of the noun you’ve chosen without much description at all – cut out words until it hurts, but try to accomplish the same feeling or underlying message of the first.
Summary
- Pick a noun and give it a deeper meaning. Imagine it’s your first page.
- Write a flowery descriptive essay using as much description as possible.
- Rewrite the descriptive essay with terse, sparse language.
- Having two vastly opposing versions of the same thing, analyze the differences between the two and the pros and cons of each version. Which do you like better?
What’s the Goal?
Experiment with your descriptive style and voice. As you practice both extremes, think about the benefits of each and exercise those benefits in your own, everyday writing.
Eventually, you may think differently about a certain character’s voice or a narrator of one of your short stories and exercises like this can add some variance to those types of dialogues and descriptions.
Prompts and Prose 