Tag Archives: voice

Voice: Charlie Huston – The Joe Pitt Books

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , ,

I have a thing for detectives with a supernatural bent. If you like the Dresden Files, you’ll enjoy the Joe Pitt books by Charlie Huston. Huston’s characters speak in monologues even if they only have quick vocal bits here and there. It’s apparent from their clothes, to the entrance, to the accoutrements that create the sound of their voices in our minds.


A spoiled rich kid is at home in a limo and on the street with her bleach blonde arrogance. The, uh, kindly vampire peacenik is a beatnik without the finger snaps. And the main character is a hardboiled vampire detective who breathes life in to the story even if his body doesn’t.


So how did Huston get here? I honestly have no idea. I have one supposition – his background includes playwright. The novel gives one the freedom to move about the universe and more importantly, to settle in a particular set of molecules for a length of time. It is the only form that allows for that solid rumination. Because of the peculiarities of this style, Huston has the opportunity to create the perfect actor to inhabit the space of the character he is attempting to portray.


Read a few plays. We’ve all suffered high school Shakespeare. Now watch some video portrayals if you can’t watch a play in person. Sure, we can call them movies. But plays exist in a different sphere.


You can also try this: who is the actor currently portraying your character?
Now what if someone else inhabited that skin?

Voice: Covers

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , ,

I thought Dr. Dog did “Heart It Races” and then some other band covered it. That band was Helsinki Architecture, which earned mad points for the name alone. It turns out, Helsinki Architecture came up with this eerie beat laden ballad and later, a folk type band covered it.


Covers are the greatest way to completely change the meaning of a song without altering a single word. When Hozier does Beyonce, it’s very much Hozier. I’m still wrapped in flannel, my toes digging into the soil of the forest as I wait for dawn, even though I know this should be an anthem as Beyonce presented it.


Sometimes covers can be controversial. Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” is an anthem of the domestic abuse victim as survivor and don’t you damn well forget it. But when Cake took a stab, their signature spoken word and sort of singing took a triumphant victory and turned it into something else. I have a theory that these songs can be sung by the same person, just at different times in their fight. At some point, you are victorious over your abuser, apart and whole and changed and alive. But at some point before that, you are trying to get up the courage to walk out that door. To change the locks. To get up off the floor. Both viewpoints are necessary. Neither one is better. Just different.


You have at some point written a story. You have perhaps not realized that you were the only person in the whole entire universe who could have written this story at this time as this person that you are. Were. Point being, sometimes people do things differently. You weren’t telling the same story. You were talking about the same thing from different angles. Neither one is better. Both are necessary.

Practice: Copy Style

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Somewhere in college I had a very earnest travel literature teacher. He was actually pretty good; terribly enthusiastic about Mark Twain as we all should be, and as happy to talk about the world the authors lived in as he was to talk about their works.


One day, he talked to us about writing. One part of understanding travel literature or literature in general is understanding how that literature is created.


He recommended getting a notebook and hand writing a paragraph or two from a famous author, just to feel how the words came out of the pen. Do a page each day for a year and you will develop your own style.


What you’ll actually get is a keen understanding of other people’s styles. Try this instead. Get a notebook and write a paragraph of someone else’s work. Then try your own work in their style. Did you say enough? Did you say too little? How does the punctuation feel? Are you inspired to continue?
By practicing your words in another style you get incrementally closer to finding the one that pours forth and sounds irrevocably like the voice in your head when no others are speaking.


If this one doesn’t sound quite right, turn the page. Try again.


I didn’t keep it up for a year. I hit the normals like Hemingway and Shakespeare, and the not quite normals like Amy Tan, John Steinbeck. For a little while, I was terribly studious of the micro style. The comma placement, the sentence length, the rhetorical questions. It wasn’t until I turn to the macro style – the living setting, the satirical description, the single sentence reveal that upends the universe – that I discovered how to say what I was trying to say.

The comma placement in Steve Martin’s Pleasure of My Company told me less than the slight handful of sentences that revealed the core of the character. The short and devastatingly sensorial re-visitations of a single location in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the earnest and bombastic humor in Terry Pratchett and Mark Twain, the intertwining of physics and magic in Diane Duane’s Young Wizard series gave me permission. I could say what I wanted to say, the way I wanted to say it.