21.10 Voice Revision

Voice revision is the stage of the novel revision process concerned with the distinctive manner of expression running through a manuscript, both the narrator's or narration's overall voice and the individual voices of characters as expressed through dialogue and, in close point-of-view narration, through internal thought, examining whether that expression is consistent, distinctive, and effectively suited to the story being told.

What Voice Refers To

Voice describes the particular qualities of language, word choice, sentence rhythm, tone, and habitual patterns of expression, that give a piece of writing its distinctive character, independent of the events or information it conveys. A novel typically has an overarching narrative voice, shaped by choices such as point of view, narrative distance, and register, and it frequently also has distinct voices belonging to individual characters, expressed through their dialogue and, in narration closely tied to a character's perspective, through the style in which their thoughts and perceptions are rendered.

Voice is distinguished from plot, structure, and pacing in that it concerns how the manuscript's content is expressed rather than what that content is. Two manuscripts can share an identical sequence of events and still differ substantially in effect due to differences in voice, and a single manuscript can suffer from inconsistent or poorly calibrated voice even when its underlying plot, structure, and characterization are otherwise sound.

Core Concerns of Voice Revision

Consistency of Narrative Voice

This stage examines whether the manuscript's overall narrative voice, its characteristic diction, sentence construction, tone, and level of narrative distance from the events being described, remains stable across the manuscript, or whether it shifts unintentionally, becoming markedly more or less formal, more or less descriptive, or more or less intimate with the characters at different points without a narrative reason for the change.

Distinctiveness of Character Voices

Voice revision assesses whether each significant character's dialogue, and in close point-of-view narration their internal thought, is distinguishable from the other characters', reflecting their individual background, personality, and manner of thinking, rather than each character sounding like a variation of the same underlying authorial voice.

Calibration to Point of View

In manuscripts using a close or limited point of view, this stage examines whether the narration's vocabulary, syntax, and range of reference are consistent with what the point-of-view character would plausibly think, notice, and express, since narration that uses language or knowledge inconsistent with the point-of-view character's established background or awareness can undermine the intended intimacy or credibility of that perspective.

Voice Development Across a Long Manuscript

Because a manuscript is drafted over an extended period, during which a writer's command of a character's or narrator's voice commonly develops and sharpens, voice revision addresses the gap that can arise between how a voice is rendered early in the manuscript, when the writer's grasp of it was less fully formed, and how it is rendered later, once that grasp had matured, bringing earlier material into alignment with the more fully realized voice established by the end of drafting.

Appropriateness to Tone and Genre

This stage considers whether the manuscript's voice, taken as a whole, suits the tone and effect the story is aiming for, whether a voice intended to convey gravity is undercut by an inconsistent register, or whether a voice intended to convey humor or lightness is weighed down by passages that do not match that intended effect.

Common Techniques

Reading Dialogue Aloud or in Isolation

Extracting a character's dialogue from the surrounding narration and reading it in isolation, aloud or otherwise, makes it easier to judge whether that character's manner of speech is distinctive and consistent across the manuscript, without the surrounding prose obscuring the comparison.

Voice Comparison Across the Manuscript

Comparing passages of narration or a given character's dialogue from early and late portions of the manuscript directly against each other is a targeted way of identifying the kind of gradual voice drift that can accumulate over a long drafting process but that may not be obvious when the manuscript is read straight through in sequence.

Attribution Testing

Removing dialogue tags and attempting to identify which character is speaking based on the content and style of the dialogue alone tests whether character voices are sufficiently distinct to be recognizable without relying on explicit attribution, a useful diagnostic for manuscripts with several major characters whose dialogue must be individually identifiable.

Relationship to the Broader Revision Process

Voice revision sits close to line-level revision in scale, since it concerns specific word choice, sentence rhythm, and diction, but it is distinguished from general line-level polish by its focus on consistency and distinctiveness of expression across the manuscript as a whole, rather than on the correctness or quality of any individual sentence considered in isolation. It is typically addressed after developmental, structural, plot, and character revision, since a character's established personality and arc, determined at those earlier stages, are what a consistent and distinctive voice is meant to express, and it is often undertaken in close conjunction with, or immediately preceding, line-level revision, since both stages operate at the level of specific wording and are frequently addressed together during a close, sentence-by-sentence pass through the manuscript.