Guest Post: Chelsea Eckert on On Writing Anthropomorphic Animal Characters (For Adults)

Ask many writers what got them to the next level, what separates great writers from good writers, sparkling writing from the merely competent, and they’ll often give the same answer: voice. A voice that stands out, that grabs the reader and yanks them in. The thing that makes an author’s writing completely their own.

Of course, nobody can agree exactly on what “voice” means. I’ve collected a few quotes:

“Voice is the author’s style, the quality that makes his or her writing unique, and which conveys the author’s attitude, personality, and character; or. Voice is the characteristic speech and thought patterns of the narrator of a work of fiction.”

(From a website: The Balance, and the thing that pops up as the definition if you type fiction and voice into Google.)

“What the heck is “voice”? By this, do editors mean “style”? I do not think so. By voice, I think they mean not only a unique way of putting words together, but a unique sensibility, a distinctive way of looking at the world, an outlook that enriches an author’s oeuvre. They want to read an author who is like no other. An original. A standout. A voice.”

(Donald Maas, Writing the Breakout Novel)

“Voice is a word critics often use in discussing narrative. It’s always metaphorical, since what’s written is voiceless. Often it signifies the authenticity of the writing (writing in your own voice; catching the true voice of a kind of person; and so on). I’m using it naively and pragmatically to mean the voice or voices that tell the story, the narrating voice.”

(Ursula K. LeGuin, Steering the Craft)

“I think it is because, in fiction, if you like the person telling you the story””which is to say the voice, not the author””you generally will let them tell you a story.”

(Ta-Nehisi Coates, “What Makes Fiction Good is Mostly the Voice” in The Atlantic)

So, “voice” is the thing that makes us want to read the story. To spend time with the characters and their story. How, then, does one learn to write in a “voice” that makes readers want more?

Nobody’s quite figured that out, near as I can tell. But I can share how I finally started getting a handle on the concept: I wrote fourteen novels about the same character.

Kitty is a werewolf who hosts a talk radio advice show for supernatural creatures. She first appeared in a short story in Weird Tales in 2001. The final novel in her series, Kitty Saves the World, was published in 2015, and this year a collection, Kitty’s Mix-Tape, pulls together short stories set in the world, plus a few brand-new stories. So I’ve been writing this character for more than twenty years. “Voice” was key to getting her right.

Kitty’s identity as a radio DJ was instrumental in her development. In a very early (abandoned) draft, Kitty was passive. Other characters argued while she stood there observing and thinking snarky thoughts. This wasn’t going to work””as clever as her snark seemed at the time, she wasn’t an active participant in what was happening, which is sort of a requirement for the protagonist, yes? (There’s another lesson and blog post there, I think””you’d be surprised how often I tell people in critiques: your protagonist needs to do something.)

So I went back and put quote marks around all those snarky thoughts. She was now saying those snarky things out loud. I realized””she’s a DJ who talks for a living, and would not keep her mouth shut. Of course she would use her outside voice. Suddenly, everyone in that scene turned to look at her. Suddenly, she was the center of attention.

That moment, that simple act of giving Kitty a voice, changed everything. Her chattiness became one of her defining characteristics, and it moved her to the center of the story. Moreover, that simple, mechanical act of characterization had bigger consequences. I had found Kitty’s literal voice””what she says and how she says it. But I had also begun to discover the more esoteric, ephemeral idea of “voice” in writing.

Kitty’s literal voice is powerful and quirky. I had to be able to portray that voice across all the prose, not just dialogue, or the stories would never work. That brash, quirky voice had to infuse the whole narrative.

That’s the lesson: Who is narrating your story, and how is that embodied through the entire work? If the story is first-person point of view about one character, that answer is easy. Close third person, also pretty easy. If you have a more distant narrator, or an omniscient narrator, you still have to answer that question: What is the narrator’s attitude toward the story they’re telling? What tone do you want to convey? Do you want the tone to sound friendly, distant, academic, casual? How will that tone interact with the story being told? How do you want the reader to react?

It all comes down to one thing: How confident are you, the author? Because that narrative voice has to convey that confidence, if you want your reader to trust you and come along for the ride.

I wrote fourteen novels about Kitty, and a couple dozen short stories, and I think I was able to do so because her voice was such an important part of her character I needed to infuse all of the writing with it.

I’ve been able to take that lesson and carry that to the rest of my writing, even with characters who aren’t chatty and outgoing. Four years or so after I started writing the Kitty novels, my short story writing in particular took a leap in quality. I think many writers, myself included at one point, think they have to be formal in their writing. Neutral, even, or dispassionate. In fact, the opposite may be true. Stories should be filled with personality. The personality of the world, the characters. Every word should feel like an actor delivering a monologue to an audience. You’re telling a story, not lecturing.

Thinking about the narrator, and conveying confidence and personality and punch””it’s not just about reading stories, but feeling them. In a sense, every story is a confession to the reader, and voice is what helps the reader feel like they’re part of that story. I’m still reaping the benefits of what Kitty taught me.

BIO: Carrie Vaughn’s work includes the Philip K. Dick Award winning novel Bannerless, the New York Times Bestselling Kitty Norville urban fantasy series, and over twenty novels and upwards of 100 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. Her most recent work includes a Kitty spin-off collection, The Immortal Conquistador, and a pair of novellas about Robin Hood’s children, The Ghosts of Sherwood and The Heirs of Locksley. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. For more about Carrie Vaughn, visit her website.

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Fairy tales have been around in one form or another for centuries, even if they weren’t written down and compiled into collections like Grimm’s Fairy Tales. They’ve changed over the centuries as well, shifting from folk stories to morality tales to more sanitized or “Disney-fied” versions of what they once were. In the process of this sanitization, oftentimes the messages the fairy tales purported to dictate have changed. Gone is the Little Mermaid who watched her beloved marry someone else, at which point she cast herself back into the ocean and drowned, showing us that you shouldn’t change for someone you love. Instead, we get the version where the mermaid and prince live happily ever after, flipping the moral to be that you can (and should?) change in order to make someone love you.

“Original” versions of fairy tales can be a loaded term, in that most of the fairy tales we know today existed in an oral format prior to being written down. When the stories were written down, they were not always faithful to the original tellings. Charles Perrault’s versions of fairy tales were reworked so they would be popular amongst the seventeenth-century French aristocracy. In the nineteenth century, the Grimm brothers, in the first versions of their compilations of fairy tales, acted primarily as transcriptionists, interested in recording the stories as they were commonly told among the German populace. In later versions of the Grimm brothers’ collections, however, they began the sanitization process, making the tales more family friendly.

There is no denying that many of the “original” fairy tales were violent, sexist, and gruesome. They’re filled with death, abuse, self-mutilation, and more. Some of these tales were likely used by the tellers to imbue the listeners (or readers) with specific moral values or lessons or warn them against things like going into the woods alone at night or engaging in other dangerous activities. Perrault and the Grimm brothers also added to these moral lessons but shaped them to their own times and audiences. For example, stories that originally included birth mothers often were changed to instead include stepmothers, who were invariably vain, evil, and not interested in the welfare of their young charges. That the “original” stories ascribed these same motives to birth mothers is a fascinating bit of historical curiosity, but that stepmothers were so much more readily demonized might be even more intriguing as an avenue of study.

Beyond even the changes that Perrault and the Grimm brothers made to the “original” fairy tales, modern sensibilities have again shifted the telling of these stories, cleaned them up further, and completely rewritten them into things that barely resembles the “originals”. Like the Little Mermaid example above, the retelling of fairy tales as children’s movies, often animated and turned into musicals, can obliterate the original meaning, though not always for the worse. The “original” Beauty and the Beast story from seventeenth-century France was written to prepare young girls for arranged marriages, and had an emphasis on learning to love someone you didn’t know, whereas the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast involves character growth for both Belle and the Beast, who learn to love each other, rather than simply expecting the woman to do all the work. This example, in particular, also reflects the time in which it was turned into a movie, considerably different from earlier Disney films in which the female protagonists sometimes were denied the agency that Belle is permitted. Other retellings of fairy tales have stripped away the morality entirely, or occasionally taken a story that was more about avoiding dangerous activities, in a way that did not really require a moral, and added a moral in for good measure (like various versions of Little Red Riding Hood).
Though the origins of many fairy tales are lost to history, the ability to compare various versions of tales as they have been told over the centuries is a fascinating endeavor, both for what they tell us about broadly defined history and what they tell us about storytelling and writing in various times.

About the author: Dawn Vogel’s academic background is in history, so it’s not surprising that much of her fiction is set in earlier times. By day, she edits reports for historians and archaeologists. In her alleged spare time, she runs a craft business, co-edits Mad Scientist Journal, and tries to find time for writing. She is a member of Broad Universe, SFWA, and Codex Writers. She lives in Seattle with her husband, author Jeremy Zimmerman, and their herd of cats. Visit her at http://historythatneverwas.com or follow her on Twitter @historyneverwas. Dawn’s latest book is The Cask of Cranglimmering, Book One of Brass and Glass.