Words Need a Voice

The eleventh rule to writing well is voice/style. Over the summer I read nine books and I noticed that it was more the writing style and the voice of the characters or the narrator that I liked. A story needs a voice as much as it needs words. A story can sound great, but if the characters don’t sound as they should, the story is falls apart. It isn’t the words that make a story what it is. It doesn’t matter the if the voice is crazy and long-sentenced like “A Clockwork Orange,” or a black humored, satiric voice like in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It is important that the characters have a unique voice that makes them worth writing about.  

 “A Clockwork Orange,” was a hard read because Anthony Burgess constantly uses run-on sentences like, “Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till’s guts.” The voice of his book is complex and long. He uses words that aren’t real and run-on sentences, but it is that crazy voice that makes the book a classic.

In “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Kurt Vonnegut writes about a writer writing a story about a man unstuck from time, who believes to have spent time in an alien zoo. The narrator uses the story of Billy Pilgrim to tell his story of the Dresden firebombing. Whenever someone dies the narrator says, “So it goes.” But the narrator is writing the story and his voice stays consistent with the coming unstuck of Billy Pilgrim. The voice of the narrator and Pilgrim helps the reader really get into the story. If it wasn’t for a voice and the writing style, the crazy story wouldn’t work.  

Another book I read, “SteelHeart,” has one of the most annoying characters in any book I have ever read. David is an okay character, but he is constantly making bad metaphors. The character then has to explain how what he said is a metaphor. This was annoying and Sanderson must have realized this, because in the second book the metaphors disappear.

This week I got the text, “Hey everyone! So kinda last minute but would anyone like to meet at chilis tonight (Christies choice) it’s for Christies Birthday.” I responded with, “Yes, and it is Christy’s.” I don’t really mind the “kinda” instead of “kind of,” but I hate when the possessive Y becomes ies just because.

My friend on facebook is always trying and failing to use periods and commas properly: “Having an anxiety attack is like jumping into an ice covered pond, first when you hit the ice it hurts then when you hit the water it's so cold you can't move or breathe and before you know you're trapped under the surface gasping for air while your lungs fill with water.” She uses commas instead of periods and then doesn’t use commas where she should. Her thoughts end up being run-on, sometimes what seems like forever, sentences.