Opening Pages Intensive Week 4: Using voice effectively
Let’s talk about voice, baby (and what it has the potential to reveal about your characters)
If you are new to the Opening Pages Intensive I’ve been running over the last month, let me recap what we’ve been learning here so far.
In the intro to the Intensive, I outlined everything we’d be covering.
Week 1, we worked on Establishing Setting in literary fiction/nonfiction from your very first page.
Week 2, we looked at World-Building in Genre Fiction.
That same week, I shared my first round of feedback on subscribers’ opening pages (in literary fiction and nonfiction).
Week 3, we learned about the preoccupation/occupation checkpoint.
This week, we’ll look at voice.
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This week, we’re tackling the V-word
If you’ve ever heard agents and editors reveal what drew them to the work of a previously unpublished writer, they often lead with voice. “There was a unique voice right from the get-go,” “The voice just sung out from the page,” “I’d never read a voice like this,” “I just knew that readers were going to fall in love with this protagonist.”
What does this mean, voice? Usually, people talk about voice on the craft level: they equate voice with original, memorable writing that sears into your brain. On a craft level, that might mean short, blunt sentences (my friend Matt Sumell’s writing comes to mind) or experimental syntax (“A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing” by Eimear McBride) or lyrical, expansive writing (Brit Bennett’s “The Mothers”).1
I think about voice differently. To me, voice is the subtle communication of the age, background and lived experiences of your main character(s). While this definition isn’t as sexy and elusive as “craft,” it’s practical and practicable. If you’re opening your pages without using voice to communicate these elements (age, background, lived experiences), your writing could feel vague and lifeless to the readers you’re aiming to beguile.
If you want to get your opening pages to a place where an agent or editor is desperate to keep reading, then everything your narrator is sharing needs to support the protagonist’s lived experiences, by which I mean, you should be making comparisons, similes, remembrances and observations that stem directly from the protagonist’s social class, the time in which they were living, and how they were raised.
To understand what it looks like when this doesn’t happen, I’m going to run you through three categories of voice fails. Ready? Here we go.