Yesterday’s writing workshop was on the narrative voice—who emerges from the page when you write something longer than a tweet? (On Twitter everyone sounds almost identically manic.) Or longer than a Facebook post? When your writing—a letter, a story, a blog entry, a news release—demands more than a “Nuff said,” when enough isn’t said until you’ve delivered your readers something that will grab their attention, steal their hearts, pique their curiosity about the world and the mysteries of human behavior.
You write conversation—dialog—in the disparate voices of individual characters; narration creates your voice. Narration tells readers when and where events takes place, it provides the carefully chosen details that bring characters to life. Narration turns the world into words.
Each of us, if we stood on a mountaintop gazing out at the countryside spread below, would choose different words to describe it—once past “Awesome!”, that is—we would put the words together in our own unique way, with reference to our own particular past experiences and our own expectations for the future. Think how you might describe the scene above if you were standing on that peak preparing to descend into the valley to wed your sweetheart, then think how differently you’d describe it if you’d climbed up there to scatter your lover’s ashes.
This difference is the basis for maybe my favorite of John Gardner’s challenging writing exercises: “Describe a building as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war.” The diabolical aspect of this is that you’re not to mention the son, war, death, or the man. No cop-outs of referring to him as a father. But Gardner goes on: “Then describe the same building, in the same weather and at the same time of day, as seen by a happy lover.” Again, you’re instructed not to mention love or the loved one. By applying those strictures, he guarantees you do not default to easy or hackneyed prose and the descriptions that result are inevitably in the writer’s own voice, not a second-hand one.
In my own writing, whenever a passage comes too easily, I realize it’s not wholly mine. It originated in one or a dozen movies or television shows—bad ones, probably—and I have to go back and hack my own path through the situation, in my own way. Dialog is especially prone to unconscious borrowing.
Voice is why, in my writing group, we really don’t need to put our names on our work any more. Each of us has a voice so distinctive, we’d recognize who wrote the page in front of us, even if it arrived in an envelope posted from Mars. It seems each of us is truly learning to turn worlds into words, to create “his world and no other,” as Raymond Carver said.
Exploring Further
“Sharpening the Quill,” a series of writing workshops by Lauren B. Davis
The Art of Fiction – John Gardner, the classic “Notes on Craft for Young Writers.”
“On Writing” – Raymond Carver
New York Times essay, “Once Upon a Time, There Was a Person Who Said, ‘Once Upon a Time,’ – Steve Almond. The significance of narration in literature and life and its fragmentation in the media age. Well worth reading.
“I’ve always wanted to write a book,” people tell me when they find out I write. “I have a great story in mind.” Clearing desk and mind-space to do it is the problem. They need help getting started.
The other four nominees (and all the documentaries) were pretty depressing. True, Curfew opens with a young man (filmmaker Shawn Christensen) sitting in a bathtub full of bloodied water, and he’s holding a razor blade. Damage has been done. Still somehow there’s a sense of incipient redemption, because when his sister phones in desperation (“you’re last on my list”) and asks him to babysit her nine-year-old daughter for a few hours, you know he’ll say “OK.” After he cleans himself up.
The fourth movie was about an aging gentleman, a concert pianist, facing a confusing mélange of past and present, real and unreal, as he searches for his wife. Well done, if a little too predictable and a lot too like Amour, so a no-go for this year in such a 
A real treat this weekend, viewing all the Oscar-nominated short films in the documentary and live action categories! The treat part was seeing such remarkable filmmaking, though the subject matter of the documentaries, described here, was, well, let’s just say, “tears were shed.”
The two books I’ve finished most recently couldn’t be more different. One was the 2012 Pulitzer-nominated Swamplandia!, about a 13-year-old girl who lives on an island in the Everglades and whose family earns its living by alligator wrestling and other dubious pursuits; the other was Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, which takes place in Oakland, California, separated from Florida by three thousand miles and cavernous cultural divides. Yet Chabon’s book and Karen Russell’s have a striking similarity in the way they are written, a process I think of as embroidery. They both use unexpected and vivid images to snare the reader, creating a rich, colorful, multilayered text. Russell isn’t quite up to Chabon’s skill as yet, and some of her efforts fall flat, but then she will pick up again, writing, “With a grim, spiderlike lacemaking Kiwi’s brain knit his surprise into a dull and terrible knowledge,” followed a few lines later by “A pat of sun slid down the doctor’s biscuit-white face.” I didn’t mark up either book, thought I’d illustrate just by picking a page at random, which I just did with Telegraph Avenue and found “For years he had been on and off various medications whose names sounded like the code names of sorceresses or ninja assassins. . . . each wore out its welcome in his father’s bloodstream without ever managing to lay an insulating glove on the glowing wire inside him.” He could have said, “For years, he’d tried numerous mood-controlling drugs to no avail.” Thank goodness, he didn’t. Nor did he say “The old man stood up”; instead, he wrote, “The old man was up and on his feet like an umbrella opening.” What both books require is the reader’s attention. The images are so startling, so unusual, every page holds a revelation. In an era when writing is often stripped down and fast-paced, these authors’ art demands that readers slow down and luxuriate in the fresh ways they use words to stitch the hues and patterns of the worlds they have created.