Have I Lost My Voice(s)?

Jeff Cohen

Two recent incidents have me questioning the concept of voice in writing characters. They're unrelated and possibly unimportant, but they've hung in with me for a few days and why shouldn't I dump them on you given the chance?

The first occurred over a period of a couple of weeks. Against my true instincts I have purchased a gym membership and as a result did something else that conflicts with my better judgment: I got an audiobook of someone else's work to listen to while I'm plodding away on the treadmill or the elliptical every morning.

In this case it was Once A Crooked Man by the actor and director David McCallum, who at 82 has apparently decided working on a weekly TV series isn't enough and has taken on writing a novel to fill the hours. And as loyal visitors to this blog know, I have been a McCallum fan pretty much all my life, so I begrudge the man nothing. I'm not going to post a review of the book because I don't review books here and besides, envy is such an ugly emotion.

Nonetheless, the exercise during exercise proved to be a somewhat troubling one. It's one thing to read a novel and hear the words in your head even if the author's actual voice is well known to you. It's another entirely to hear the author reading the book aloud into your ears. When the author is also an accomplished actor, the characters' vocal patterns and accents take on a real life of their own. But more than anything else, the rhythm of the words becomes not so much predictable as familiar. Before you know it, you can hear that tempo in you own words.

And that's the problem. I'm trying to write 1000 words a day and now I have Illya Kuryakin's voice in my head. My sentences started getting longer. My tone was more polite (the last thing a Jersey guy needs). I started being just a little Scottish. Not really, but the sentence structure definitely was there.

I've often said I won't read other crime fiction while I'm writing, but now I'm always writing. And while I'll confess that I don't read as much as I used to anyway, the platitude I've offered that I don't want the other author's voice in my head is now proving itself true. I have to take a moment before I start typing and remind myself that I'm writing in Rachel Goldman's voice for the second Mysterious Detective mystery, and not in McCallum's for his standalone thriller/satire.

The second, and more disturbing, incident involving voice came late last week when my wife and I were at the home of some close friends for dinner. Our good friend--we'll call her Judy because that's her name--was asking about the writing and what's coming up and all the usual questions. I try to make the answers entertaining, at least for me because I've heard them all before. And Judy is one of the few friends I have who not only buys the books when they come out but actually reads them. So that's something to respect.

But at one point in the conversation, she mentioned casually that whenever she reads one of my novels she hears only my voice. I think she meant it as sort of a compliment, in that the words seem realistic and casual enough to be from an actual human being. But the fact that I'm now writing four mystery series and a very good friend thinks all the first-person narrators sound like me was very distressing.

I mean, I work hard to try to differentiate among my characters. I'm a firm believer in character and I write from one protagonist's viewpoint in each book. So the Haunted Guesthouse mysteries should sound like Alison Kerby, the Asperger's mysteries should sound like Samuel Hoenig, the Mysterious Detective books should sound like Rachel Goldman and the upcoming Agent to the Paws series should, in theory, sound like Kay Powell telling you the story.

If they all sound like me, that means I've done a poor job of creating credible, believable, realistic characters and giving them separate personalities. They're all me and that just have different names. That would be a problem. A big problem. Maybe I'm not as good as I thought I was.

Now, I realize that Judy's comment was more about knowing the author and less about the quality of the contents. If I'd been reading McCallum's book and not listening to his recording, I probably would have still had a version of his voice (likely from 1966) in my head because I'm familiar with what he sounds like when he's speaking. And I've never met the man.

When I mentioned to my wife that Judy's comment had stung, she was surprised. When she reads my books she hears my voice, she said. It's about expectations and not execution.

But it's still taken me a few days and I haven't totally shaken it yet.

P.S. Opening Day is 21 days from today.

6 Comments

I will pick up a narrator's voice if I do listen to an audiobook. Craig Johnson's Longmire will always be George Guidall to me, even the TV series with Robert Taylor can't shake that. However, I never do it with a print book that I haven't heard an audio. Those books always have a voice that fits the sex and usually age of the narrator/speaker. I don't know a lot of authors (western South Dakota is a bit far for many authors to visit) but I haven't picked up those voices, nor have I picked up ones I've heard interviewed. Stephen King has narrated a couple of his books and I've listened to them, but only those books have his voice, all other books are fine. Maybe I'm not very good at recreating a voice while reading a book.

Posted by: Patty | March 14, 2016 at 09:05 AM

Let's see...I've read stuff from four series of yours--Aaron Tucker, the Elliott Freed books, the Guesthouse books, and the Hoenig books. I would have to say, as a reader who does not know you, that your characters read very differently to me. So don't worry about it.

I don't think I'm reading too many books by Jeffery Cohen or E.J. Copperman, but...

Posted by: Donald A. Coffin | March 15, 2016 at 11:09 AM

I don't buy the books as soon as they come out, but I do buy everything I can find that I don't already have each time I visit the States. And when I've read them, I pass them on to my husband and daughter. Does that count?

Posted by: Lynne Patrick | March 16, 2016 at 11:49 AM