4. Finding Your Voice - Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass (The Art of Storytelling)
“You’re going to write short stories that nobody reads, that don’t really work. That’s okay...After you’ve written 10,000 words, 30,000 words, 60,000 words, 150,000 words, a million words, you will have your voice because your voice is the stuff you can’t help doing.”
I keep on writing down points from this class! In this lesson we hear that your writing will develop its own style and personality, or your writer’s voice.
While each writer has their own voice, sometimes a story demands a voice of its own, called a persona. Neil gives three examples of persona in his works:
The “American transparent” in American God – the author seems invisible
The old-fashioned “formal” voice in Stardust—any writing style with syntax or vocabulary borrowed from an earlier time period.
The cicerone in The Ocean at the End of the Lane— this persona is informal, close, and often not very literary.
Young writers imitate other writers until they discover their own voice.
Mistakes may be the most important thing for a writer. The way to find your mistakes is easy — you write stuff.
Your job as a writer is to get the bad words out so the good ones can come.
WRITING EXERCISE:
“You learn more from finishing a failure than you do from writing a success.”
On a page in your notebook, describe yourself as a writer. Pretend you are a different person explaining what your work is like to someone who has never read it. What similarities exist in your works? Think of the overt ones (i.e. you always use the same genre or same type of characters) as well as the quieter ones (i.e. attitude, emotional registers you use in your fiction, etc).
Give a short selection of your writing to someone else and ask them to describe it in three adjectives. Do they recognize you in the writing?
To develop confidence, challenge yourself to write a short story in one sitting. You’re not allowed to go away from the project until you have a completed draft. It can be any length, but tell a complete story that will satisfy a reader. Don’t do too much editing while you write, just let your ideas flow and then structure them once you’ve got everything on the page.
“Each story has its own voice. But the attitude, the soul, the thing you take away from it, hopefully that’s all me. And that can be all you.”
WRITING EXERCISE:
Choose an author whose writing you admire and read a few pages of their work. Now write a passage in a voice that mimics theirs, using characters, settings, and problems of your choice. What makes this author’s voice so appealing? How does it make you feel?
Now write a paragraph or more on any topic of your choice. Make an effort to use a voice that feels more natural to you. What sets your voice apart? What tone does it give? Do the characters and setting feel different when you write in your own voice?
READING EXERCISE
William Faulkner once famously advised young writers to “Read everything: Trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it.” Part of your apprenticeship is learning what you love and hate.
Go to a library or bookstore and select five books from authors you’ve never read before (and perhaps know nothing about). Open each book to a random chapter and begin reading, observing which aspects of the writer’s voice you enjoy, and which ones you dislike.
Make a list of all the qualities you observe and note your feelings about them.
COMMENT
This is probably one of the most important lessons for me. I feel like I haven’t found my voice yet, by far, and I’m still looking for it. Still trying to feel secure enough to write like me. I suppose it doesn’t help that I write most things in a language that’s not mine. I’m not sure I can give up the safety I get from writing in English yet, though, but I can try to write both in English and Norwegian. I’m definitely doing the exercises, too. I probably need to use a couple of weeks on the exercises for this lesson alone.