II. Recognizing “Voice” When You See or Hear It.
The best way to hear voice is to start listening to it and for it. We’re going to listen to the voices of some authors today and you’re going to respond to what you hear. There are no right or wrong answers. You just need to listen and then we’ll talk about each excerpt. I’ve given you a handout with a couple of questions for you to think about as you’re listening to the excerpts:
1. What is the tone of the excerpt? Choose an adjective – or six – remembering that there are no right or wrong answers.
2. What kind of language does the author use? Listen to his or her specific choice of words and choose an adjective to describe it.
3. Does the author use modifiers, like adjectives and adverbs, and if so, do they have anything in common?
4. Does the author use metaphors and analogies, and if so, how would you characterize them?
5. What kind of person do you think this author is? Can you tell where the author is from or what his or her educational background is? What else?
Now, you won’t have answers to all of these questions for every excerpt, because voices are individual, but that should get you started.
This is Exercise A. We’re going to step out of the romance section for these first three readings, because it will give greater contrast between voices. These are all commercial authors but they were published in the main list from the outset, almost certainly because of their strong voices. (It might help you to read these excerpts aloud, or have someone read them to you – as I read them to the workshop participants.)
Here’s the first excerpt:
“By a curious coincidence, “none at all” is exactly how much suspicion the ape-descendent Arthur Dent had that one of his closest friends was not descended from an ape, but was in fact from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he usually claimed.
Arthur Dent had never, ever suspected this.
This friend of his had first arrived on the planet Earth some fifteen Earth years previously, and he had worked hard to blend himself into Earth society — with, it must be said, some success. For instance, he had spent those fifteen years pretending to be an out-of-work actor, which was plausible enough.
He had made one careless blunder though, because he had skimped a bit on his preparatory research. The information he had gathered had led him to choose the name “Ford Prefect” as being nicely inconspicuous.”
What are your impressions? What is the tone of the excerpt? Think about the use of language in the excerpt, too. Make some notes before you read on.
For me, this is a humourous passage from a light book. It’s not hard to believe that it was derived from a radio series. It’s quite entertaining.
This first excerpt was from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
Now the next excerpt is totally different:
“It was impossible to see her approach without a shudder of distaste. She was a grotesque parody of a woman, so fat that her feet and hands and head protruded absurdly from the huge slab of her body like tiny disproportionate afterthoughts. Dirty blonde hair clung damp and thin to her scalp, black patches of sweat spread beneath her armpits. Clearly, walking was painful. She shuffled forward on the insides of her feet, legs forced apart by the thrust of one gigantic thigh against another, balance precarious. And with every movement, however small, the fabric of her dress strained ominously as the weight of her flesh shifted. She had, it seemed, no redeeming features. Even her eyes, a deep blue, were all but lost in the ugly folds of pitted white lard.
Strange that after so long she was still an object of curiosity. People who saw her every day watched her progress down that corridor as if for the first time. What was it that fascinated them? The sheer size of a woman who stood five feet eleven and weighed over twenty-six stones? Her reputation? Disgust? There were no smiles. Most watched impassively as she passed, fearful perhaps of attracting her attention. She had carved her mother and sister into little pieces and rearranged the bits in a bloody abstract on her kitchen floor. Few who saw her could forget it. In view of the horrific nature of the crime and the fear that her huge brooding figure had instilled in everyone who had sat in the courtroom, she had been sentenced to life with a recommendation that she serve a minimum of twenty-five years. What made her unusual, apart from the crime itself, was that she had pleaded guilty and refused to offer a defence.”
Again, make some notes, and think about what you’ve heard. What kind of a book do you think this is? Can you guess the genre?
This is a grim and realistic passage for me. It’s not a huge surprise that it takes place in a jail. It’s the beginning of a mystery novel, by a British author, one who I find very compelling.
It’s from The Sculptress by Minette Walters.
The third excerpt is different again:
“The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.
The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip…
The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.
The beet was Rasputin’s favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.”
Make some notes and reactions before you read on.
I love the distinctive metaphors this author uses and the mix of unexpected humour. The prose is more dense, but the books always make me smile, probably because the writing is clever and irreverent.
That excerpt was from Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins.
Now, we can see how distinct those voices are. One of these three authors also wrote the following passage. Keeping in mind what we’ve discussed so far, see if you can figure out which one by recognizing his or her voice. Don’t guess:
“It was a bright, defrosted, pussy-willow day at the onset of spring, and the newlyweds were driving cross-country in a large roast turkey.
The turkey lay upon its back, as roast turkeys will; submissive, agreeable, volunteering its breast to the carving blade, its roly-poly legs cocked in a stiff but jaunty position, as if it might summon the gumption to spring forward onto its feet, but of course, it had no feet, which made the suggestion seem both empty and ridiculous, and only added to the turkey’s aura of goofy vulnerability.
Despite its feetlessness, however, its pathetic podalic privation, this roast turkey — or jumbo facsimile thereof — was moving down the highway at sixty-five miles an hour, travelling faster, farther on its back than many aspiring actresses.”
In the comments today, tell me which of these three authors you think wrote this fourth passage, then tell me why. Was it:
• Douglas Adams
• Minette Walters, or
• Tom Robbins
?
Deborah Cooke: Author 