Voice - James Scott Bell
A straightforward method based in acting techniques for distinguishing the voice of your writing with actionable steps and lots of examples.
What: A straightforward method based in acting techniques for distinguishing the voice of your charactes and writing with actionable steps and lots of examples.
Tone: Straightforward, matter of fact, confident.
Who: James Scott Bell is a bestselling writer of thrillers and the author of multiple books on writing and was the fiction columnist for Writer's Digest for many years.
Read it When: You want to make your characters sound unique on the page. You think your writing sounds bland. You feel your writing lacks emotional depth.
% on Topic: High but about half the book is examples
Keywords: Voice, Character, Copy like a Writer
Voice is my current bete noir. My white whale. My keys at the bottom of a storm drain. I’m in novel revision mode, and that has made me hyper aware of how voice affects text. But I’ve been struggling with how to get from identifying the aspects I want to actually implement that in the text. Find writing problem, read writing book. It’s worked so far.
James Scott Bell was recommended to me by the almighty algorithm, while searching for a different voice book. A former lawyer and writer of thrillers, he also has a number of popular writing books including Just Write, Conflict & Suspense, and The Art of War for Writers. He’s also been a writing instructor for a number of years and this shines through in his easy distillation of a complex subject.
Voice jumps straight to the point with a simple diagram for what Bell calls his CAP method for dynamic voice. He puts it into a simple formula “Characters, background, and language filtered through the Author's heart and rendered with craft on the Page = voice.” [Bolding here is mine]
He first walks you through creating memorable characters including setting a “dominant impression” (he cites Swain for this) , setting up their appearance and background, including what media/music/popculture is important to them which is a question I haven’t seen before but seems very useful. He also says to set what they “yearn for” (ie their character goals) and a life altering event in their past. Finally he suggests writing a character “voice” journal in the first person of your main character for several pages to lock-in their voice and explore their opinions and background.
The author section is all about connecting your own experiences and emotions with what is happening on the page. Here he suggests a technique from acting teacher Uta Hagon called “substitution” where you identify your own emotional experiences and translate those to the character’s needs and then magnify them. He suggests finding five key emotions and two life events for each main character, and connecting those to your own emotional life events to give you gateways to the character’s emotional states.
Page is his step for actually writing the story and for this he emphasises the need to actually feel the emotions when you are writing. Here Bell suggests another acting technique called the psychological gesture, finding a physical position and/or expression that captures the emotion for you and taking that position with your body to induce the emotion within you. From personal experience, feels weird the first time you do it, but works wonders for really feeling an emotion physically and then getting those descriptions down for your characters.
The middle third of the book he goes a little deeper on specific topics and includes a lot of exercises for each. He continues to talk about different types of voice from obtrusive to “voiceless” with examples across different pov’s and genres. He also emphasises the need to “write with joy” and to “get the blood flowing” - he has several exercises for each.
Finally he ends the book with dozens of examples of voice in different areas and genres. He starts with learning to vary your voice and voice in description, metaphor, and poetry. He then goes into a section on “creative copying” where he encourage the physical copying of other writers to learn their rhythm and metaphor (a technique also suggested by Roy Peter Clark in X-ray reading, and in my Master Study technique). He ends the book with dozens of examples of voice in different genres to compare and copy on your own.
This is a very short book if you exclude all the collected examples. You can basically get his major points in the first 30 pages or so. That makes it a nice quick read, and something that is easy to go back to. However its real value is in the actual execution of the exercises and techniques, which will take much longer than the reading. I also won’t discount the value of the collection of examples, which certainly saves some time in searching through dozens of books. Overall this is a quick read with depth that will only really benefit you if you are going to put in the work.
