Samantha Edmonds: Voice is something one tends to hear a lot about when discussing fiction writing—“Oh, this has a great voice!” or “The voice of this piece really compelled me.” Those of us who teach may encourage our undergraduates to make better use of it—“Let your character’s voice drive the story.” But what exactly does it mean for a story have a great voice?
It doesn’t (usually) mean writing in dialect or slang or barely recognizable jargon. Rarely does it include, though it certainly can, the sprinkling of a foreign language. The best voices are subtler than that, more innate, something to be felt in the character, not just a rendering of speech.
Great voice is a line like “the way she forgot to wear unders like a lady should.” This appears in the first paragraph of Chelsea Bieker’s gorgeous story “Raisin Man” in CR’s current issue (12.1) and immediately gives the reader a clear sense of who Herd Collis is, where he comes from, the way he was raised.
In writing that something is “sweet like cane” or “the crops ain’t fit for nothing,” Bieker is offering more than characterization; she is offering backstory, setting, insight into why and how the narrator behaves as he does.
The voice in “Raisin Man” is also worth praising for its restraint. The language never becomes overbearing. It does not try to sound the way many think a narrator in a rural setting should, burdened with dropped g’s and verbs ending in apostrophes and phonetically spelled dialect; it merely shows us a particular human, both in scenes of great interiority and in spoken dialogue. The sentences are short but elegant in their brevity, simple and gorgeous, and the overall sense is that Herd is standing just before you, saying all of this out loud. Even when he isn’t speaking, you can hear him in every word.
