What does it mean to have “Voice” in your story?

From Jane Friedman’s blog: What does it mean to have voice in your story?

I agree with this basic question: “voice” is so totally nebulous as a concept. I’ve always struggled with defining it. What does this post say?

One reason voice is such a tricky concept to grasp is that it’s used to refer to three different elements of storytelling: character voice, narrative voice, and author voice—and they can often overlap.

Character voice is the way your characters express themselves and their personality. In direct-POV stories (first person and deep third), where the character is also the narrator, character and narrator voice are essentially the same.

In indirect POV stories (limited third and omniscient) the narrative voice is distinct from that of the characters and may be neutral and nearly invisible, or distinctive and even specific. Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, for instance, features a narrator who is also a minor character in the story yet takes an omniscient POV with a unique, strong voice, as does Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief, narrated by omniscient, personality-filled Death, also a major player in the tale. [Learn more: Choosing Story Perspective: Direct versus Indirect POV]

And overlaying all of that is author voice—perhaps the most ephemeral and hard-to-define area of voice. Author voice is why, though the characters, setting, genre, and approach may be different in each of an author’s books, they always have a deeply personal stamp on them of the author’s style—and it’s so often why readers repeatedly seek out a favorite author’s work.

Bold is mine. All right, I will just say that it should be “overlain across all of that” or “overlying all of that,” and then I’ll move on and never refer to lay/lie errors again (in this post).

You know, while I’m being nitpicky, I don’t think it’s correct to say these three things CAN OFTEN overlap; it looks to me like they MUST ALWAYS overlap, because I’m not sure how you’d prevent that from happening. If you’ve got characters and a narrative and an author, there you are. The only way to remove one of these features is to generate a story, thus removing — one presumes — authorial voice.

All that aside, fine, I have to say, this looks basically true to me. Except that authorial voice, as treated above, is actually the same thing as narrative voice in a novel where there is no narrator — isn’t that right? — and therefore “narrative voice” becomes really unclear and easily confused with “narrator voice” and therefore we should stop talking about narrative voice entirely, splitting the concept into a much more cleanly defined narrator voice / authorial voice distinction. Is that right? That’s how it looks to me.

And then the linked post completely fails to define “authorial voice” except as a highly nebulous “personal stamp,” whatever that means.

Well, I think I know what it means, so let me try this again:

Character voice incudes the style, register, tone, assumptions, perspective, convictions, and behavior of the character.

Narrator voice is identical to character voice, except the character in question is the narrator, not the protagonist or any other character. If the pov is so close to one character that there is no clear outside narrator, then poof! narrator voice is not a thing for that novel.

Authorial voice, which arises from the author’s assumptions, perspective, preoccupations, and convictions and is expressed in the themes of the novel regardless of the novel’s style or the characters that move through that novel. It’s the themes of the novels that are consistent throughout all or a large part of an author’s body of works. The themes and the tropes, because an author tends to keep coming back to the same tropes as well as the same themes. That’s why I added “preoccupations” to this particular type of voice.

When an author keeps setting one character into a situation where he is isolated in a foreign society, which CJC does … how many times? Counting series once each? Foreigner, Faded Sun, Brothers of Earth, Hunter of Worlds, Cuckoo’s Egg, Chanur, In a sense, Fortress. This is highly noticeable, it’s a preoccupation, and it’s intrinsic to CJC’s novels.

How many times does she set up a situation with a tremendous power imbalance and make that central to the story? In fact, it would be quicker to count the titles where this doesn’t happen — if there are any. How many times does this enormous power imbalance work out okay for the vulnerable person? Nearly all the time — or maybe all the time, no exceptions — and that contributes massively to CJC’s voice as an author. I might call this a sort of overall thematic coherence that encompasses all her work. This, it seems to me, is a lot of what we mean by authorial voice.

What do you all think? Does this seem like a reasonable way to define character voice / narrator voice / authorial voice?

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