Voice & Style

Word choice, syntax, conflict, and tension

“Cowboy Singing” by Thomas Eakins, 1892. Denver Art Museum.

In my first years teaching English at a large high school in Kansas, we used to grade essays using the “6-trait” writing model. For the record, I was fond of it. It consisted of the following six rubric categories:

1. Ideas & Content

2. Organization

3. Word Choice

4. Sentence Fluency

5. Voice, and

6. Written Conventions

Five of these categories were relatively easy to define and grade. The sixth, listed here in the fifth position was notoriously difficult. “Does it feel like there’s a real human there?” was one of the best guiding questions facilitators used to ask during “6-trait” trainings before we graded state writing assessments. Similarly: “Is there a personality?”

For the most part, I and the teachers I graded alongside erred on the side of caution, and the “voice” score typically fell in line with the other scores on the rubric. Provided nothing seemed terribly amiss, I marked an awful lot of students with one of the middle scores. When students achieved the highest rating, it was typically because the writing exhibited some sly bit of humor: a parenthetical clarification or well-handled aside. In my conversations with other teachers, this was frequently the deciding factor for many of them, as well—though some also referenced the “Word Choice” and “Ideas & Content” categories and simply said that if these received the highest marks, they gave “Voice” the highest marks, too.

The 6-trait model has fallen out of favor today, and the rubrics I use most often now are those provided to me by College Board for grading AP Literature exam, but I still think often of this old model and its difficult category labeled “Voice.” A popular philosophical question that comes up in my AP class: do we have core selves? When are we the most ourselves? Is it our words who make us who we are, our actions, or… what?¹

Because I teach English, read fiction, and write fiction, questions about ‘voice’ and ‘core selves’ are perennially interesting to me. While I’ve made arguments about the importance of story and structure recently, voice is the primary quality of a novel that draws me in during the first few pages and then, after those pages have passed, keeps me reading. My former writing instructor Susan Rodgers commented, seemingly offhand one day in class, that we read and reread authors because we fall in love with their voices—because theirs are voices that we want to have in our heads—and I’ve always felt this to be true. When I start reading a book, my first, immediate question isn’t “is this premise interesting” or “is this conflict engaging?” but rather “is this a voice I want in my head?” As a reader who writes, I’m critical of the voices I share my consciousness with. A fictive voice is one that I’ll be borrowing for minutes, half-hours, and hours at a time; it’s a voice that will be rubbing off on me. I’m quick to rule out voices I don’t want to spend time with—I don’t want them to infect my own fiction.

This runs the risk, I know, of sounding solipsistic. Am I saying I only read people who remind me of myself, who I can easily identify with? No; I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t know that I’m aiming for an experience like my own so much as a written sophistication that I admire and want to emulate. Faulkner, for example, has a sophisticated way of writing ostensibly unsophisticated people who are pretty different from me and drawing out their sophistications. My experience in this life has been very different from the experiences of many other authors I admire and the characters they write—think Henry James, James Baldwin, Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, Jonathan Lethem, and Zadi Smith—but I keep going back to these authors’ stories and novels again and again to analyze how they have done what they’ve done, hoping, both by direct inquiry and also general osmosis, to hone my own voice by examining their styles and voices.

I did a thing just now in the last three words of that last paragraph—I conflated “style” and “voice.” In truth, I’m not sure what the difference between these two entities is, or if they belong to circles that, in a Venn diagram situation, don’t largely overlap. The best definition for “style” I have ever read is from Stephen Koch’s The Writer’s Workshop, in which he claims “Your style is what your writing will sound like after you have finally finished the seemingly endless internal argument over the rightness and wrongness of every detail on the page. It is nothing more, but also nothing less, than this rightness” (113). To me, it seems that voice is largely the same thing, and that Michael Chabon will do a detective’s voice one way and, assigned the same character, premise, and plot, Conrad, Smith, Lethem, and Murakami will do it differently.

When I started writing, I longed for a voice like Salinger’s—not from The Catcher in the Rye, but his collection Nine Stories. As I've grown and matured, I’ve found myself admiring the voices of John Cheever, Richard Yates, Toni Morrison, Michael Chabon, Jane Austen, Jonathan Lethem, Zadie Smith, and Richard Russo in particular. When I’ve read their books I’ve thought This. This is what genius sounds like—and then I’ve taken my seat to try to suss out what it is they have done. I have found, of course, that trying to “do” other writers’ voices is easier said than done. And, of course, one can “do” an impression for a while, but never truly write in anything but their own voice, which, of necessity, an author must find, and which, naturally, changes, evolves, and sounds different in different situations. Perhaps voice isn’t just a consequence of who we are and the experiences we’ve known, but also the times we’re living in and how we’ve experienced these times? But the people we read can be “experiences we’ve known,” too, and I can’t help feeling that, as I’ve already suggested above, in small ways and large, the writers we read change us.

As an exercise for my own benefit, and perhaps the entertainment and edification of my audience, I thought I would look at opening pages from a handful of books I like—we’ll do five—and break down what it is about these novels’ written voices that draws me in. Choosing from books whose openings I haven’t seen analyzed anywhere else (which isn’t to say they haven’t been—only that I haven’t read these analyses, and am thus going in “cold”), I thought I’d go with The Ambassadors by Henry James, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Straight Man by Richard Russo, Empire Falls by Russo, and Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem.

The Ambassadors by Henry James:

Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted. A telegram from him bespeaking a room “only if not noisy,” reply paid, was produced for the enquirer at the office, so that the understanding they should meet at Chester rather than at Liverpool remained to that extent sound. The same secret principle, however, that had prompted Strether not absolutely to desire Waymarsh’s presence at the dock, that had led him thus to postpone for a few hours his enjoyment of it, now operated to make him feel he could still wait without disappointment. They would dine together at the worst, and, with all respect to dear old Waymarsh—if not even, for that matter, to himself—there was little fear that in the sequel they shouldn’t see enough of each other. The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive—the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade’s face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first “note,” of Europe. Mixed with everything was the apprehension, already, on Strether’s part, that it would, at best, throughout, prove the note of Europe in quite a sufficient degree.

First off, I just like Strether’s name, which is suggestive of the words “stretch” and “striver.” Second to that, it never hurts to have a word like “question,” with its implied tension, so early in a text. I like that the question is about his friend—who could this guy be?—and I like that the first sentence is compound: that there is a semicolon in it—that it feels I’m in the hands of a complex, sophisticated consciousness. “Not wholly disconcerted”? I’m interested. “Waymarsh” is an interesting name, suggestive, to me, of stagnation as much as Strether’s name seems to suggest something like seeking or “striving,” and I can feel further tension rising in Strether’s satisfaction at the likelihood the two would “at worst” dine together. A first-person “I” comes in—does this mean it’s a first-person narrator, or that there will occasionally be some kind of authorial intrusion from a knowing “author”—or an “author” device? I’m fond of the phrasings “sharp sense” and “delightful as it would be” [to see his friend’s face]—Strether is wary of how this face might play the role of sounding the “note” of his European experience—something he seems to anticipate; an anticipation the reader might already suspect as not be quite lining up with what he’s going to get.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

I24 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old—as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once—the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn’t have a number then, because Cincinnati didn’t stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.

Baby Suggs didn’t even raise her head. From her sickbed she heard them go but that wasn’t the reason she lay still. It was a wonder to her that her grandsons had taken so long to realize that every house wasn’t like the one on Bluestone Road. Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn’t get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present—intolerable—and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.

“Bring a little lavender in, if you got any. Pink, if you don’t.”

Morrison’s sentences read with so much precision they feel etched into the page. I love the first short, declarative, personifying sentence; love that Morrison begins with a number—so many writers, I think, are afraid to write numbers, for fear of upsetting written-word flow. I love that the emotion that animates the personified house is spite, and not something more humdrum like anger or sadness or lust for revenge. I love the five-word fragment that follows the first sentence, love the conversational flow of “and so” that lets that sentence roll out. Many, I think, would place a comma after “it,” but Morrison lets the sentence roll. Spite appears in the next sentence again, and we get two character names and a date before the end of the fourth sentence. We get three more characters in the sentence after that and a few more orienting locations (and the evocative suggestions of locations: “Ohio,” “Cincinnati,” “Bluestone Road”) before the paragraph finishes. The fifth sentence—slide back up there and check it out: it’s masterful. After the relative simplicity and simple elegance of the first four, we get a long one that includes five commas, a dash, a semicolon, and two parenthetical inclusions. The rest of the paragraph is taken care of with seeming effortlessness: semicolons, colons, dashes, a single-word sentence (“No.”)—Morrison guides her reader through it all with apparent ease, the marks populating the sentences as perfectly and unobtrusively as the words to lower the reader into the story.

I could say much the same about the next paragraph, which now sees Baby Suggs in her sick bed, between life and death—the motifs of life and death gaining weight with each mention; the implications for haunting becoming more apparent; the table further set for that harrowing gravestone bit coming up soon—and then the stuff about color: this simple joy in life. Lavender. Pink. Some words from the back cover of a different Morrison novel come to mind: she presents us with a fully realized world.

Straight Man by Richard Russo:

When my nose finally stops bleeding and I’ve disposed of the bloody paper towels, Teddy Barnes insists on driving me home in his ancient Honda Civic, a car that refuses to die and that Teddy, cheap as he is, refuses to trade in. June, his wife, whose sense of self-worth is not easily tilted, drives a new Saab. “That seat goes back,” Teddy says, observing that my knees are practically under my chin.

When we stop at an intersection for oncoming traffic, I run my fingers along the side of the seat, looking for the release. “It does, huh?”

“It’s supposed to,” he says, sounding academic, helpless.

I know it’s supposed to, but I give up trying to make it, preferring the illusion of suffering. I’m not a guilt provoker by nature, but I can play that role. [paragraph continues]

The first bit that grabs me about Russo’s opening is the physicality. Books are notoriously ‘places of ideas,’ but Russo understands that we must ground these ideas in our physical, ‘bodied’ experiences of the world. And this character’s body: it’s bleeding. Was he punched in the nose? Certainly a bloody nose suggests conflict. We also have two characters within two sentences—so we’ve set the table for potential conflict and tension there—and the words ‘ancient’ and ‘die’ are connotatively loaded. A Honda Civic is, of course, a pretty inexpensive car, but it also has a loaded name: “Civic.” The third sentence brings a third character: June, evocative of a ‘hot’ month—perhaps foreshadowing of her physical appearance or temperament (it’s the latter), and, come to think of it, “Teddy,” our other named character—and her husband—sounds kind of soft.

“Oncoming traffic” is suggestive of tension, as is the question mark after “Huh.” Academic and helpless being paired together is enormously telling of the book’s ‘attitude,’ and then there’s that contrast between the way the narrator knows he’s supposed to behave and the way he does—the suggestion that he plays a “role”; perhaps plays many roles. I read these short paragraphs and I’m hooked.

Empire Falls by Richard Russo:

The Empire Grill was long and low-slung, with windows that ran its entire length, and since the building next door, a Recall drugstore, had been condemned and razed, it was now possible to sit at the lunch counter and see straight down Empire Avenue all the way to the old textile mill and its adjacent shirt factory. Both had been abandoned now for the better part of two decades, though their dark, looming shapes at the foot of the avenue’s gentle incline continued to draw the eye. Of course, nothing printed a person from looking up Empire Avenue in the other direction, but Miles Roby, the proprietor of the restaurant—and its eventual owner, he hoped—had long noted that his customers rarely did.

No, their natural preference was to gaze down to where the street both literally and figuratively dead-ended at the mill and factory, the undeniable physical embodiment of the town’s past, and it was the magnetic quality of the old, abandoned structures that steeled Mile’s resolve to sell the Empire Grill for what little it would bring, just as soon as the restaurant was his.

The word “Empire” is so grand and freighted with symbolic potential, and “Grill,” set off against it, is, well, not. The Empire Grill is long but it’s low. There’s a condemned and razed building next door: is this the imminent future of this “empire”? Or its recent past? We’ve got a lunch counter—and I’m a sucker for everyday people who eat at lunch counters in fiction—and an echo of “Empire” to name the avenue, then an “old” textile mill and shirt factory, each “abandoned.” There’s a mood, here, and it seems… forlorn? Evocative of grandeur lost? “Dark,” adds to this mood, as does “looming.” The sentences here are mostly workaday, neither too long nor too short, the language interesting without really calling attention to itself, and then we have this little bit of complexity with the clause set off by dashes—“he hoped” providing the promise of some conflict—at the end of the first paragraph.

The negating “No,” starts the next paragraph in an interesting way, and the writing becomes a little more interesting—or at least self-conscious—in “both literally and figuratively dead-ended” in a sentence that stretches five lines. I like “undeniable, physical embodiment,” “magnetic quality,” and “steeled Mile’s resolve.” The register of the writing as a whole is intelligent and relatable, perhaps insightful and wise… As with the intros above (and, indeed, those below), I’m hooked.

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem

I first met Perkus Tooth in an office. Not an office where he worked, though I was confused about this at the time. (Which is itself hardly an uncommon situation, for me.)

His was in the headquarters of the Criterion Collection, on Fifty-Second Street and Third Avenue, on a weekday afternoon at the end of summer. I’d gone there to record a series of voice-overs for one of Criterion’s high-end DVD reissues, a “lost” 1950s film noir called The City Is a Maze. My role was to play the voice of that film’s director, the late émigré auteur Von Tropen Zollner. I would read a series of statements culled from Zollner’s interviews and articles, as part of a supplemental documentary being prepared by the curatorial geniuses at Criterion, a couple of whom I’d met at a dinner party. In drawing me into the project they’d supplied me with a batch of research materials, which I’d browsed unsystematically, as well as a working version of their reconstruction of the film, in order for me to glean what the excitement was about. It was the first I’d heard of Zollner, so this was hardly a labor of passion. But the enthusiasm of buffs is infectious, and I liked the movie. I no longer considered myself a working actor. This was the only sort of stuff I did anymore, riding the exhaust of my former and vanishing celebrity, the smoky half-life of a child star. An eccentric favor, really. And I was curious to see the inside of Criterion’s operation. This was the first week of September—the city’s back-to-school mood always inspired me to find something to do with my idle hands. In those days, with Janice far away, I lived too much on the surface of things, parties, gossip, assignations in which I was the go-between or vicarious friend. Workplaces fascinated me, the zones where Manhattan’s veneer gave way to the practical world.

The beginning of Lethem’s Chronic City draws me in immediately. We have a “first meeting,”—always intriguing, as “first meetings” are typically only mentioned with reference to significant relationships—the bizarre name “Perkus Tooth,” a name with ‘teeth,’ and an office. It’s a short, declarative sentence that is immediately called into question—put into a state of instability—by the word Not to start the next sentence, which is, like the second sentence of Morrison’s novel, a fragment. Things immediately feel unbalanced and unpredictable, and this lack of stability is continued by the third sentence, a parenthetical which, in calling the narrator’s frequent confusion to the forefront so soon, suggests intrigue. (“Hardly an uncommon situation” is a more confusing, roundabout way of saying this than “a common situation for me,” and so the phrasing here reinforces the meaning and suggests the ‘confusing,’ roundabout ways we might experience the novel.)

Criterion Connection evokes the prestige, exoticism, and esoteric nature of that company’s catalogue, and “lost” and “film noir” are similarly evocative of the novel’s tone and subject matter. “The City is a Maze” would almost be too on-the-nose a title for many authors to use here in a novel about a character who is pretty lost in this maze-like city of misdirection—but there’s so much else going on, and it’s so casually shared that most readers are going to go right over it on their first few reads. For now it’s simply and almost subliminally evocative. The director isn’t simply a director, but “the late émigré auteur Von Tropen Zollner,” whose statuses (“ émigré auteur”?) and name clearly connote weight and prestige, and the speaker’s loose connection to this whole world—he’s not really a film buff; is only here because of his meeting with a pair of “curatorial geniuses” he’d met at a dinner party—the way he’s an outsider to the whole situation—well, it’s intriguing to me.

I won’t go any further—I think I’ve made the points I wanted to make about written voice and elucidated for my readers what it is I’m interested in. I’ve also, of course, elucidated some things for myself: several of the ‘evocations’ and ‘suggestions’ I noted above were understandings I had just passed over before, and in writing about these paragraphs I think I was able to better articulate why I was fond of them.

If there’s something I didn’t anticipate but likely should have in conducting this exercise, it’s the amount of tension and foreshadowing there is woven into these first paragraphs: the way many of these openings so thoroughly anticipate the conflicts of the books they’re found in. And I think that’s the note I’m going to end on: a further articulation of some arguments I’ve put forward in previous posts about novel writing being a narrative art; a reprisal of the argument that conflict is the lifeblood of this narrative art. Conflict and its diminutive forms tension and contrast abound in every one of these introductions. There’s some character-introducing, table-setting, and mood-setting, but all of it is infused with conflict-setting, all of it subtle, none too overt or in the reader’s face. In this, I think, the book’s mirror real-life as I experience it: complex and suffused with small conflicts and tensions with the significant potential of larger problems ahead.

Peter Shull is a novelist and short story writer. His novel Why Teach?, a story of youth, education, bureaucratic absurdity, and hope, has been called “A quintessential novel of the No Child Left Behind era” and “A supreme twenty-first century coming-of-age tale set in a swath of America referenced often but seldom truly examined.” The first chapter is available to preview here on Substack, and the book is available for purchase at Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Kindle Store, and Kobo.

1. It’s in reading Othello and speaking about some of Iago’s lines that these discussions about ‘core selves’ come up most regularly. Iago: “I am not what I am.” Students who have taken AP Psychology, it seems, often have interesting insights suggestions to offer.