Voice is one the most essential features of successful writing; if we fail to create an authentic, credible voice in our work, that work will fail — in spite of other virtues it may have. However, voice is often referred to as something elusive and indefinable. In their book, A Poet’s Companion, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux assert that voice is an “unmistakable something” that becomes the mark of a writer, making particular poems and stories unique. When I hear voice described as “always recognizable,” but as an “indefinable something,” I think of what Justice Powell of the Supreme Court said when trying to define “pornography” and to distinguish it from, say, erotica. Of pornography, he said: “I can’t tell you what it is. But I know it when I see it.” So with “voice.” When we hear it, it’s unmistakable. And although most writers receive little guidance concerning voice in their writing, I believe it can be addressed at the level of craft, and must, if we are going to learn to bring our writing to life.

Voice, obviously, like everything else in writing, is created with written words. How do we fashion those marks on the page to create a sense of a living, breathing voice?

Let’s examine several pieces of writing that have unique voices, and see if we can identify some of the elements that help to create that sense of voice. I’ll use mostly poems here, not only because I’m primarily a poet, but also because poems have to create a credible speaker in a short amount of space, so the necessary features of voice stand out clearly.

 Who Talks Like That? Diction and Word Choice
Persons in different groups, in different areas of work and social life create and use unique vocabularies that identify them: the pool hall, the mechanic’s garage, the farm, the ranch, the Pentagon, the church, the high school, the sex shop. Teenagers, who are inventing themselves, necessarily invent new words and expressions as part of their process of self-creation: “rad,” “awesome,” etc. It’s part of what makes a person proud of being in a particular situation of life. We have our own lingo, slang, vocabularies to identify ourselves.

Here is Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “We Real Cool”:

We real cool. We
Left School. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

With only a few words, Brooks creates a clear voice of a young, jazzy, probably-urban, probably-African-American, slightly “in-your-face” personality. The first three words alone give a sense of voice: “We real cool.” We can almost see the speaker leaning back against a car at 10 PM, cold beer in hand, a couple hip friends at his or her side. This is clearly not the voice of a Wyoming rancher bidding on cows or a CEO in the boardroom barking at subordinates.

Compare Brooks’ poem with the opening of a sonnet by John Milton, “On the late Massacre at Piedmont,” a poem written about the slaughter of members of a religious sect in the seventeenth century:

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints whose bones
lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold.

One of the clear differences we can see and hear in these pieces of writing is the diction, the word choice, the vocabulary in which the poems are written. Words like “avenge,” “slaughtered,” “saints,” “Alpine mountains cold” are not words we’d expect to be spoken by the speaker in “We Real Cool.” These are of a different diction. They sound more formal, elevated, educated, erudite. Milton’s words come from a different area of human experience, and a different age, than do those of “We Real Cool.” Similarly, the word, “cool” — meaning “hip,” “jazzy,” or “up-to-date” —  would never appear in Milton, nor would the three terms I just used to define it. Milton is many things, but he’s not hip.

So, one of the crucial aspects of creating voice is to find the unique vocabularies used in the area of life your speaker or narrator is speaking out of.

Where Are We, Anyway? Setting
Another strategy closely related to raiding the vocabularies of particular groups is that of setting realistic scenes in which the speaker or narrator is speaking. Interestingly enough, a scene itself prompts a reader to lend a certain quality of voice to the speaker. Look these sentences, which could be the opening of a story or novel.

My dad and I were working on the fence that Winsome, our mare, broke down on her way to the canyon. We’d finished the job about half way when my sister Annie rode in from town with the news about my mom.

Here a daughter speaks from a fence-mending scene with her father. Already we as readers begin to imagine the way such a youth might talk. We want to get to know her, and so we bring past experiences of our own or from film or TV to bear upon the way we hear the voice speaking. We’ve heard how ranchers talk. We project the tones, cadences, and rhythms we’ve heard in the past onto the voice of this youthful speaker, even though the diction, the actual words of this passage, are not unique to ranchers; they could come from many areas of life. The physical details in the scene that give credibility to the speaker and therefore the voice.

So, important to creating a sense of a unique character with a unique voice is to create realistic scenes.

Who’re You Talking To? Dramatic Situations
In Milton’s poem, the speaker (who is not necessarily the poet) is addressing a particular person. In this case, God. The poem is using the “second-person imperative” voice, a grammatical label for a command. The second-person-imperative always creates a dramatic opening. Call me Ishmael. Other examples that may come to mind include Dylan Thomas’s, “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night” and John Donne’s “Death, Be Not Proud.” The speaker in Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool,” on the other hand, is not necessarily addressing a particular person but anyone, the world in general, as if brashly flaunting his or her reckless style of living. We need to have in mind to whom the speaker is talking, so we can heighten the dramatic tension and increase the authenticity of the voice.

Many people in therapeutic situations are given an assignment of writing a letter to an important person with whom they’ve had some difficulty, even if they do not intend to send the letter. You can imagine how much more full of emotion such a letter would be than a simple account written about the relationship to no one in particular. When we know to whom our character or persona is speaking, the quality of the voice intensifies.

What’s She Getting At? Subject-Matter and Point of View
In “Musee des Beaux Arts,” W.H. Auden restates in elegant fashion the old saying, “Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone.” Listen to the voice that begins this poem:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

Point-of-view identifies a speaker’s orientation to the subject at hand, often the emotional perspective of the speaker, or the speaker’s opinion about the subject. Here, we immediately recognize a different kind of speaker than those we have heard above, one whose voice is meditative, not under the sway of any strong emotion. The voice is oriented reflectively toward its subject matter, the nature of suffering. We don’t know where the speaker is, how old the speaker is, or even who the speaker is. The poem offers us a mind and heart thinking through a problem. It’s the voice of philosophy.

Compare Gerard Manly Hopkins’s poem, “Pied Beauty,” in which the speaker celebrates the multi-colored, multi-faceted things of the world:

Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

The point of view here is of praising, which brings certain words, images, and tones of voice into the poem. The speaker seems so rapt with the beauty of things, that he’s happy just to enumerate them, one after another.

Another poem by Hopkins, one of his “dark sonnets”, No Worst There Is None Sonnet 65, a poem of despair, has a different point of view and thus creates a different voice:

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

This voice calls out to God, to the Virgin Mary, seeking help in his spiritual desolation. It is a cry full of emotion, unlike the almost emotionless philosophical musing of “Musee” and unlike the celebratory point of view of “Pied Beauty.”

Now let’s look at the opening of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem about the modern person’s tendency to obsessively self-analyze, rendering him or her hesitant and ineffective in taking action, in comparison to past ages when people, according to Eliot, could act more spontaneously, forcefully, and heroically. The world-weary tone is unmistakable.

Let us go then you and I
As the evening spreads out across the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.

The voice speaks to us, the reader, or perhaps to a companion that he is guiding through the streets. In the poem, Prufrock tries to get up the nerve to enter a parlor where women “come and go, talking of Michelangelo,” but he is never able to do so. The ugly, shocking metaphor here of the patient etherized upon the table reveals his own despair and paralysis, his debilitated psychological condition. In each of these cases, subject matter and point of view orients the voice in certain ways, brings particular words, images, turns of phrase into the poem.

Syntax: Simple and Complex
In the examples above, the syntax — the arrangement of words and phrases in sentences — varies with the voice. “We real cool” has simple, direct sentences, partly because under-educated speakers (“We / left school”) tend to speak more straightforwardly. Similarly, Milton’s sonnet, though sophisticated, is also spoken in straightforward speech. When issuing a command, we usually don’t have time for complicated sentence structures. “Drop the gun!” Auden’s meditation on suffering, however, spoken by a person not presently undergoing any suffering, has the leisure to speak in more complex, extended, measured sentences. A song of praise like Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” is happy to simply list things the speaker is in love with. “No Worst There Is None” cries out of a state of anguish and the syntax is full of short impassioned, emphatic bursts — cries, questions, laments, chilling descriptions. And world-weary Prufrock’s seems at pains to get even his long, educated sentences spoken at all. So voice can be felt at the level of the sentence and we need to be aware of the way our syntax reinforces the voice in our writing.

Getting’ Off the Couch: How to Do It
Creating authentic voice in our writing comes down to trusting and relying our ear, paying attention and noting the ways people talk, the scene around them, and the emotional center of a piece, and then as we write, paying attention at the level of language and syntax to see how we can use words and sentences to recreate the voice we hear in our heads, the one that brought us to the page in the first place.

Anne Lamott in her wonderful book, Bird by Bird, a book anyone who wants to be a writer should own, says she always carries an index card in her back pocket so she can jot down bits of speech she has heard on the bus or at the used car sales lot, as well as images or scenes that strike her. I carry one of those little moleskin notebooks that can also fit easily into a pocket.

I tell my writing students that the most important thing I want them to get out of my classes is that they learn to pay attention to their lives. Pay attention to the bus driver, the way people are talking at the next table in the restaurant, the plumber who comes to repair your drain, the riders at the rodeo. Find a novel written in the kind of vocabulary you want your speaker to have and raid it for words and expressions. And then take what you have seen in this world and give it life in your writing, give it a voice.