Finding The Voice

Sunday 3rd December

For me, the essential part of writing is finding the voice.  Of the narrator, the storyteller, the characters.  In Victorian novels they used lots of description, but I rarely tell my readers what my characters look like.  The characterisation is all in the voice.   I am reading through Dickens at the moment – and he uses the same trick, it is in the voice, the conversational ticks and pauses he uses that bring the character alive for the reader.  Of course, he is the master – I am a mere apprentice, still learning my trade.  I belong to an amateur writing group; the subjects are pretty random – and it is only when I find the voice that I can really write something good.

And it may be the same for singers and artists.  What voice to sing the song in, sad or ecstatically happy, soulful or full of regret – it is all in the voice.  And for artists it is how you apply the brush, boldly or with a delicate touch, and of course the subject – the thing which talks to the observer.  All Art is mimicry really, copying, or attempting to reproduce something, sometimes just a mood or an emotion, but something the observer, the listener, the reader can recognise – an object, a feeling, a situation.  A true artist can then transform the ordinary into something unique.  Which I think is why I struggle with Abstract Art, or Jazz, or cheap novels – I can’t recognise the voice, there is nothing to sympathise with, nothing to hold on to.

In Catherine, I wrote as Catherine.  Or rather Catherine wrote and my fingers moved over the keyboard and recorded her thoughts.  She was my voice for that book.  I cannot really describe the process of writing, but I am definitely taken over at the time.  I simply become the conduit for the voice of my characters.  Maybe they are all part of me, different facets – who knows.  But re-reading some of the dark stuff I have written, I hope not.