Whose Voice Is It?

I’m fascinated by the power of voice in fiction. How it draws you in and brands a novel. Think of Alix Hawley’s All True, Not A Lie In It. You wouldn’t mistake the voice she creates for her fictional Daniel Boone for Junot Diaz’s narrator in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Hawley isn’t a frontiersman living in 1700s America. So how did she make herself sound like one? Through word choice, syntax, perspective and great imagination, I’d say. Her own voice didn’t disappear when she wrote All True. It got filtered through Boone’s experiences, much as an actor’s personality is filtered through the script for the character she’s playing. I don’t consider myself in Hawley’s league but I enjoy pretending I’m an actor when I write, imagining how my characters view the world and what they sound like.

To write the novel Stony River, I imagined myself to be twelve-year-old Linda Wise, thirteen-year-old Tereza Dobra and fifteen-year old Miranda Haggerty in a small New Jersey town in the 1950s.

Linda’s voice came out repressed, naïve, idealistic, even a bit self-righteous.  (The Platters sounded like black butter, an observation she’d never share aloud lest anyone think she was prejudiced which she absolutely was not. For goodness sake, she’d even begged for and gotten the colored baby doll advertised on Amos and Andy when she was little.)

The dyslexic, profane and sexually precocious Tereza released my inner bad girl. (“Asshole,” she said, slapping Richie’s hand away, but she wasn’t cheesed off at him. Vlad either. Talking dirty was their way of showing they liked her. She only ever let them stick their tongues in her mouth and flash their dicks at her. Guys were so impressed with their dicks.)

I imagined Miranda speaking in the vernacular of her Irish-born father James whose death kicks off the novel. He has hidden her from others since she was three for fear she’d be taken from him because of his paganism. Her knowledge of the world is limited to what he’s told her and what she’s read in the books he allowed her. (When she’s eighteen, James won’t have to bring her lilacs each spring. She’ll seek them where they grow and drown her nose in their drunken scent. She will climb Merlin’s oak tree and Heidi’s mountain, row a boat down an enchanted river, tread on hot sand and sing as boldly as she wants without worrying someone will hear.)