A Word in Your Eye

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-10-the-cold-open-voice

Key Points: Voice? Sound, cadence, rhythm... Voice-driven openings. Someone ruminating about something. Aesthetic voice: cadence, rhythm, tone. Story questions. Reason to care. Genre. Failure? Writer trying to figure out what the story is, so the ruminations have no significance or bearing on the story. An interesting person thinking about an interesting thing for an interesting reason. Authority and control. Make it interesting, dynamic, engaging. Don't be too flowery. Beware purple prose. Feels like poetry, like a song. Beware lack of focus, so much ornamentation that the reader doesn't know where to focus. Songs! Voice-driven openings filter readers. It also gives the reader a lens or filter to use. Usually both things at once, voice and action. Interesting characters need to deal with something. Some transition. Do it for a reason. Listen to people. Use movement, songs, other prose to get the rhythm. Read your prose out loud! Use voice sparingly. Balance action and voice. 

[Season 21, Episode 10]

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 21, Episode 10]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The Cold Open - Voice.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Mary Robinette] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Erin] And I'm super excited today about voice as a way to open a novel, a story, a whatever you're writing. We've been talking a little bit about the idea that there is a difference between an action-focused opening and a voice-focused opening. And, of course, those are a spectrum, but if it is a spectrum, I prefer to be on the far voice side of things. So, I'm interested to find out why am I doing that, and what am I gaining from it? Mary Robinette, you're the one who sort of introduced this, like, interesting balance that we're standing on. So what would you say a voice-driven opening has in it?

[Mary Robinette] Well, I have to give credit that I became aware of the distinction from Donald Moss. I took one of his classes on opening, and he talked about this as the thing that is kind of one of the pieces that is hooking the reader and bringing them in. In an action-driven opening, it is... Which we'll talk about in depth next week... It is... There's a character who is doing a thing, and that pulls you into the story, an interest in what they're doing. With a voice-driven opening, the thing that pulls you in initially is the sound, the cadence, the rhythm, all of those things for the voice. And these are like... Most stories have both of these things happening. There is a voice and there is action. But there are some that are... That there's nothing happening. So I'm going to give you an example of a voice-driven opening, which I think most people will recognize. But in a voice-driven opening, it's a character who's ruminating about something. There's a thing that they are pondering, or... And it's not always... The character can sometimes be the narrator.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And not someone who's going to appear in the story. But, here's an example:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 98 million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] This is [garbled] by your voice, when you read those words.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I think, like... I have tried to read this... I can read this in my normal voice, but it calls out for that...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Among other things.

[DongWon] Well, I mean, that's part of the specificity of voice is that you're hearing a voice with it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. But there's nothing happening in this. There's absolutely no action. There's not even a character in this. So John had a list of things that he thinks are the tools. I have modified it for myself. There's the aesthetic voice. Like, cadence, rhythm, tone, that kind of thing. And there's the story questions, like what do we want the readers to wonder about? And then a reason to care, like, why is this important? And it's not that the reader has to understand... The reader doesn't need to understand why it's important. Yet. But it's important for the author to know. And then you usually want to try to get across genre during that section. And so when you look at that opening, again, there's the story question of, like, who is looking at us that thinks that we are primitive, and that digital watches are not a pretty neat idea? I mean, like, who is this person?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It definitely sets up genre. Because this is... We're clearly being viewed by someone who is not human. There's a definite aesthetic voice. And then the reason to care, why is this important, as we move into the story, we find out that it's really important because a Vogon construction fleet is about to come through.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So even though we don't necessarily know yet, when I see voice-driven openings fail, it's a lot of times less that it's voice-driven and more that the writer is trying to figure out what the story is. And so the thing that the character is ruminating about is something that will have no significance or bearing on the rest of the story. So there is no reason for us to invest in it at all.

[Erin] Yeah. Sort of the... As you were saying that, the way I was thinking about it is an interesting person thinking about an interesting thing for an interesting reason.

[Mary Robinette] That's a great way to say it.

[Erin] And it sounds like if any of those three is not interesting, like, their voice is very, like, monotonous for whatever reason, it doesn't have a lot of rhythm and cadence, they're... The story question is, like, should I eat peanut butter and jelly today? And the reason they're thinking about it is, it's Tuesday. Like, unless they're about to get hit by a meteor two seconds after this happens...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's not really... I mean, you can have a... Like, an aggressively boring voice, boring reason, like The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, I think. Isn't that the one that's about a guy who's like... He's living a really, really boring life.

[DongWon] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Erin] And just wishes his life was better.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so some of the opening is like forcing you to live his really, like, boring life. But I think as long as one of those three is interesting, or all three of those things are interesting, then it really works.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think when we talk about voice-driven openings, it is that thing that I was talking about in an earlier episode about authority and control. Right? This is a place for you to really exert control over your reader, in a certain way, and you're going to be like, no no no no no no. Slow down. We're going to look at this really simple quiet thing. We're going to talk about why pocket... Or digital watches are a neat idea, and how silly that is. Right? We're going to be in a particular perspective and experience something in a very controlled way at the pace that I want you to. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] So if that is eating a peanut butter sandwich for some reason, then you have to make that interesting. Right? You have to make that dynamic. And this really relies on a lot of the prose tools that we've learned, around rhythm, musicality, word choice, sentence structure, all those things you have to be interesting and engaging. And I think where a voice-driven opening can fall flat is one, by being too flowery. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I think the failure mode of a voice-driven opening is what we call purple prose. Right? Of something that just goes so out of pocket, so deep off the one end of it that you're like, okay, this is just word salad. I don't know what's happening here.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] The good version of that uses all of the tools available to you, and the one that I think about the most is rhythm and musicality. I think what drives a voice-driven opening is that thing. of it almost feels like a poem, it almost feels like a song. And that cadence is bringing you deeper into the story, even though no action is happening yet. And so I think that's one thing I want you to think about, is think about epic poetry, think about how Homeric verse grabs you and pulls you in. Think about how Seamus Heaney grabs you and pulls you in, in his translation of Beowulf. Right? Those kinds of things are the things I think to really think about when you're like, How do I set up a long story using just the tools I have at my disposal for description?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The... I'm really glad you said all of that, particularly mentioning purple prose, because I think the problem... It's the same problem on two different scales. The problem with purple prose is that people put in so much ornamentation into the language that you don't know where to focus. And when you have a voice-driven opening that is not about a specific thing...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Let that reader doesn't know where to focus or why they should be paying attention.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And so, like the thing with The Hitchhiker's Guide is this is about Earth, like that's... We start far out, and we zoom in, but it is just about Earth. It's not about anything else. It's not about the Vogon's coming in, it's not about any of those other things. It's just one thing that it's about. So I think that's one of the things that you can also think about is where do I want to put my readers attention and why?

[Erin] Yeah. I also think, like, you're talking about epic poetry. But I also think just songs.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So, songs have to catch you really fast. They all... A song is very hooky, in the sense that, like, you don't have, like, a thousand pages to get into that song. And so thinking about songs that you like... Why is it that... If you have a song that you're like, I really feel emotional whenever I listen to this particular song, what is it that it's doing? Now there's certain tools we can't use because they're musical, but a lot of times you can see, if the cadence speeds up, that's something that you can emulate. If they're using a particular rhythm, and I like to talk about sort of, like, the technical, like, poetic terms. So, like you have your iambs, which is like, if I remember, like the da dum da dum da dum da dum. And then you have, like, your trochee, which is the other way, dat dum dat dum dat dum dat dum. In fact, when I was looking at examples of trochee, somebody was saying that Taylor Swift uses them a lot. Nice to... Meet you... Where you... Been... It's very, like, rhythmic, and then it changes. So it establishes a rhythm, and then it changes. When music swells, that could be you using more interesting words or having a story question that comes to the front, because you can't swell the music, but you can swell the meaning.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah...

[Erin] And so thinking about what is a song doing to capture that rhythm, and why... Not to say that your story can't be let the bodies hit the floor, but I think sometimes like, with purple prose, it's like a really... Like a screamo...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Like [screaming]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, that's a lot. For 3 minutes, it's great. For an entire book, it's maybe a lot.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And maybe not everyone is your audience for that. So thinking about what can grab you and therefore how you can grab other people. And with that, we are going to take a short break.

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[Erin] I think right before we went to break, DongWon, you looked like you had something to say.

[DongWon] Yeah. I... One thing I was thinking about, and I think one of the uses of a voice-driven opening, is a little bit filtering your reader. I think it... One thing to think about, with particularly a voice-driven opening, is that some readers will bounce off of it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] There are readers who will pick this up and be like, this isn't for me, this isn't my kind of thing. And I would argue that's a very good thing. What you want to do, in the early pages of your book, are communicate, this book isn't for everyone, this book is for you, Dear reader. And if that reader's like, no, no, no, no, not me, this is for somebody else. They close it and walk away, that's totally fine. You're trying to find your audience. And the way to find your audience is by being fully yourself in an engaging and interesting way. So a voice-driven thing is often communicating things about genre and tone and voice in a way that is specific enough that people will bounce off of it. So if you are out there taking your voice-driven opening to your crit group and half the group is being like, I don't get this, and half the group is like, I love this, then congratulations. I think you've done the thing. Right? You don't need everyone to love that opening, you need some people to love that opening. But the people who it's for better really love it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, and I think also the word filter is like one of the other things that a voice-driven opening does for you besides filtering out who your readers are, it also provides them a filter or a lens through which to view the book. It says, like, this is...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Some of the framework that you should take coming into it. Like, coming in with The Hitchhiker's Guide thing, some of the framework that you're getting is we are viewing this from the perspective of people who are more advanced technologically than we are, and everything that the character experiences is encountering people that are... That think he's primitive.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And so that's the kind of lens, the filter that everything that happens in the story is. The other thing that... I want to switch tangents just a little bit and talk about the fact that most books actually have both things happening at the same time.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And so, Erin, you do a lot of this, where you do actually have a character who's doing a thing in the beginning, but it's also very voice-y. What are the kinds of things that you're thinking about when you're creating that?

[Erin] I think I just don't... It is, again, like the interesting person doing an interesting thing. Once you have created a voice of somebody that you find... That I find interesting, I'm less interested in the boring parts of their lives...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] In some ways, and so I want them to be moving. I want them to be having to deal with something. Because it's like if you create a character and you like them, then you kind of want to throw things at them and see if they will catch them. And so their musings about life as a whole are less interesting to me. I'm also a big fan of starting a character in... Not in media res, but in transition. At a point in which they are leaving something behind, or something new is being introduced to them, so they have to... Which is... When we're in transition, we often reflect more on where we came from, and think about where we want to go at the same time.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Which allows us to use time a little bit. It gives you a reason to flash back to something, it gives you a reason to anticipate something. But it's all through this particular character's voice as they're thinking about it. So I sort of cheat and give myself like, what's a really cool situation that this person could be in? Okay, Now let me see, like, what their voice wants to do and how I can bring it into the story.

[Mary Robinette] I don't know that that's cheating, so much as...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Working smart.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think using time is one of the most important things you can do in the beginning of a book...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] In terms of foreshadowing what's going to happen and reflecting on what just happened, thinking about the distant past. All those things that you can do by rooting your character... Us in the perspective of a character that you can play with time in really useful ways. And voice is how you, like, paper over those cracks. That's how you kind of, like, move us smoothly from point to point as you're bouncing around in time, filling in those details. You can use the voice, you can use that to sort of move us through the action in a way that even if I don't entirely get in a physical blocking way what's exactly happening here, I'll roll with it if I'm enjoying the prose of it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And it's like... You just were making me flashback to the metaphor that we've been using about decorating a house.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So I've been using... We've been using the word voice, and I should say that I think of it in kind of three ways. There's the mechanical voice, like, first person, third person, that kind of thing.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] What we're talking about here is specifically the aesthetic voice, and you can have... A building can have rooms, and the rooms can be sterile, or if they have a strong aesthetic voice, it can be... They can totally transform, and so that's one of the things that you're doing when you're bringing in that aesthetic voice is you're saying, okay, well, here's the structural stuff of what's happening, but this is how I want you to feel when you're inhabiting this space.

[Erin] And you're like focus... Like I... In one of my very first studio apartments, I painted three of the walls a blood crimson red...

[DongWon] Wow.

[Erin] And we had one white...

[DongWon] Vibe.

[Erin] It was a vibe. I think like... But my like... All my, like, decor and things, like, reinforced that this was happening. So I think that when people came in, they were like, Murder Town? No, wait...

[laughter]

[Erin] It actually seems like this has a reason.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So I think you can do things that are striking in a voice, as long as it seems like you have control over them and you did them for a reason. And they're like... It seems like you're doing something on purpose.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Which is one thing that I like, is to think about, you control the voice, the voice doesn't control you. I think sometimes, and I do this too, like, you almost want to talk about the voice like it's just doing things, like it's run off with your story.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And it can feel like that. But, it's like you ultimately have control. You can change how the voice is, you can change how heavily you lean into it, and try to create levels. I think the purple prose happens when you're so exaggerated because...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] The entire time. Which is why I think it's always fun to go out and listen to people talk.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Even people that you don't know who are, like, the most animated, the... Whatever. They have cadence. There are times they pull back in order to get you to lean in. And then they get excited again. Most people have a lot that they're doing with their personal voice.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If you listen to the way we use our voices on the podcast and think about what is it that we're doing, what's the difference between the way that each of us speak, how would we each be different characters in a story?

[DongWon] That's funny. I thought when I was talking about the rhythm thing, that I started nodding my head in a specific rhythm and cadence, and then I started speaking along with that rhythm and cadence, and I'm doing it again right now.

[laughter]

[DongWon] And, like, it's unconscious. You know what I mean? And, like, I think we all... You're right, we all use voice in interesting, dynamic ways as we talk. I mean, we all know someone who's a great storyteller and someone who's a terrible storyteller. That person who is a terrible storyteller is not really using their voice in dynamic and interesting ways. They're not framing it in that perspective, they're not making interesting language choices, and there's prob... Their rhythm is probably all over the place when they're trying to talk.

[Mary Robinette] That also brings up a really great tool that people can use. When I'm learning how to do a new accent for audiobooks, one of the things that they'll often do is give you a movement to do with your body in order to remind you of how it should... What you should be doing. So, like, when you're doing French, you draw your hand along and then you go up.

[oh... Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And this is... So now I'm French, I'm so sorry to everybody that is listening to me...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But it is a thing you can do.

[DongWon] Yeah. That's a really cool trick. I love that.

[Mary Robinette] And so... And it's a way... Like, it's a way to get an exaggerated form of the accent...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Into your body. But I think that the writing version of that is the song, like putting music on that is the rhythms that you want to use. The other trick that I'll use to capture rhythm is sometimes I will look at a writer that has a very distinctive voice, like Rudyard Kipling's Just So stories has a really distinctive aesthetic voice. And so I'll actually just key in a page of that to get those rhythms into my fingers before I start writing.

[Erin] Yeah. I also like to listen... Watch, like, real people, and by that I mean, like, two people on, like, Judge Judy, or, like, a crime documentary. Just because it's an interesting way to hear how different people speak. When I was in college, I took a class by somebody who was, like, a mentee of Anna Deavere Smith, who is an actress who does these one woman shows where she embodies all these different characters, and he talked about, yeah, how do you change your physicality? How do you change how clipped your speech is, how fast it is? When you go up and when you go down? And I think all that stuff is really, really fun to think about when you're writing, because when you read it, which is also... Like reading out loud is great. Because when you read something out loud, a lot of times you can hear the rhythm and the cadence in a way that is sometimes difficult to hear it from in your own head.

[DongWon] Yeah. And I think the thing to really keep in mind when it comes to voice is that it's best used sparingly, like a seasoning. Right? You can really overdo it. And do I think it is... There are moments where you're going to want that dial turned all the way up. But don't sustain that for too long. Right? I think it's really important to hit it right in the opening. And then ease off of it, and then pick it up again at, like, heightened moments. And I think where, again, we get into purple prose territory is when, like Spinal Tap, you're at 11 and you stay at 11 the whole time.

[Mary Robinette] And it's also something that you can use to... For transitions.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, again, using audiobook narration, when I'm doing character voices, I hit the character voice hardest when I come into that character to make a distinction between characters, and then I can drop off because the reader's like, oh, okay, and they will intuit the voice in the rest of it. And so you can use that... You can hit it a little bit harder when you come into a new chapter or a new scene in a short story or heightened places as you're saying. But it isn't something that you have to maintain all the time.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's funny. I'm like I don't know that I agree with that. Hit that voice hard!

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Beat it like it... No.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But I think that like... I think the problem you can come into is when the voice, like, obfuscates... It hides what's happening...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] In the same way that worldbuilding can get in the way of the story, if, like, every animal has like... Is like a gleepglop instead of a cat. At a certain point, like, you need some sort of, like... You don't even know, is this four legs? Like, the gleepglop had four clickerclackers. At a certain point, you cannot understand what is happening... They're laughing over here... You can't understand what's happening.

[DongWon] Erin broke me.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I don't know why you're pretend... Trying to pretend that you can't... That you're not laughing...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] The gleepglop had four tickertockers?

[laughter]

[Erin] Clickerclackers.

[DongWon] Oh, clickerclackers. That's... I'm sorry. Tickertockers, gleepglop...

[laughter Peep Peep other strange noises]

[DongWong] All right.

[Erin] Anyway. So...[garbled] you hear what I'm saying, which is that voice can do that too, where you get so into the voice and the way somebody would say something that you lose the plot of what it is you're saying and so does your reader.

[DongWon] We just did, as we just lost the plot.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Which goes back to this being a spectrum. So it's about what is driving the moment, whether it's... What's driving it is the voice, and I think if you... It's... There's the, oh you can obscure the meaning, but there's also the you can forget to have any action happening.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And so there are some moments where you're going to want action to be the driver, and there's some moments where you want the voice to be the driver, but it's not that when the action is driving, that the voice isn't there, it's just it's not the thing that's propelling the scene in that moment.

[Erin] Yeah. In fact, and I'll take this to the homework... I think one of the reasons to have action is the more action that's happening, I think even in our own lives, the less voice-y we become. Like, even your most poetic friend, like, if being attacked by, like, a pack of wolves, probably isn't going to be like, the fur glistened in the moonlight...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Probably more like, oh, crap, wolves, run. Like, and so I think it allows you to distill down to what is happening.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And gives you a break, and then once you reach safety, you can reflect on how beautiful the wolves looked as they tried to tear your throat out.

[Mary Robinette] Amazing.

[Erin] And with that, I will take us to the homework.

[Erin] And your homework is not to put the gleepglop... That is the bonus homework.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But the actual homework is to take three voices that you com... That you know well or can know well. One way to think about this is a celebrity that you do a good caricature of, that you think of, that has a really distinct voice. Someone you know well, like an interesting storyteller. Just anybody that you think, like, I really understand their voice and can get it in my head. And then write something very basic, like that person goes to the grocery store and buys eggs, in all three of those voices. And see what changes in the way in which you tell that story.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.