Writing Wednesday: What is voice?

I was talking to a writer friend recently who was frustrated because she was getting comments back from a reader to change her descriptions and her style on a sentence by sentence basis. This was not a reader in the industry, just someone who liked books. And while I wouldn't say that the opinion didn't matter at all, I didn't think it was great advice to go around adding a bunch of adjectives with the idea that it would make the writing "richer" in some way.

I told the friend that the problem with readers who make comments on a sentence level is that they are messing with her voice. I do take suggestions on voice, but at this point, it is only when my editor who has made an offer on a manuscript or seems likely to make an offer, makes the suggestion. And even then, I do it cautiously. I'm not trying to be a diva or anything. I just have become chary about messing with my natural voice. Voice is the thing that sells a manuscript above all else. It's the thing that sets my manuscript apart from any other manuscript that has ever been sold. If a writer has a voice at all, that is something to be prized, not erased.

So what is voice? One way to describe is, as I said above, the thing that makes your style unique, that makes the reader say, when reading a first line--this is a manuscript by Mette Ivie Harrison. I've also been known to say that voice is the mistakes you make on purpose when you write. I think I'm a good enough student of language that I know what I am doing when I make word choices. I don't always use proper grammar. I made a choice a long time ago that I didn't want to stand out in that way in my speech, and so I purposely used more casual speech. It did get me in trouble with college professors a couple of times who thought that I didn't know what I was doing. When I write, I can use a variety of styles, an elevated college professor with lots of long words and long sentences, but I can also write like a five year old, and anything in between.

I think that voice also extends to other choices in the manuscript. Voice is my subject matter. Voice is the way that my plot unfolds. Voice is the balance of dialog and description I use in my books. Voice is the way that my villains are presented, and my heroes, as a certain mix of good and bad. Voice is the way I talk about men and women and the relationship between them. Voice is the kind of magic system that I employ, rule bound or not, magic as a metaphor or not. Voice is what I can't stop doing if I tried. But voice is also what I give up if a delicate balance of me feeling in charge of my own manuscript is given up. It's happened to me all too often, that I let critique groups or editors take charge of my manuscript and it loses my voice. I don't do it on purpose, and I'm not saying you should ignore critiques. But be careful that you keep your voice. That's the one thing that you are really selling. It's you, no matter how much distance we writers try to pretend is between us and the manuscript. That voice is yours.

BTW, this is a great post by Harry Connolly on 10 things writers shouldn't do, including a great point about "brand": http://www.harryjconnolly.com/blog/?p=5083