Revel without a Pause/Hearing Voices

revelsbagsThis past Saturday, a number of MWA-NY members met to assemble the gift bags which will be given to all who attend our Winter Revels on December 2. Lots of swag—books and magazines, yes, but also a few surprises. With the gift bag, the food and drink, and the chance to congregate and indulge in convivial conversations, it’s safe to say that this year’s Revels will be a solstice celebration to remember. To the left of this blog post you’ll see where you can register to attend the soirée de mystère et de plaisir.

A little over a year ago, I was asked to write a piece for Trace Evidence, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine’s blog. The result was “Hearing Voices,” and you’ll find it below.

My thanks to Richie Narvaez for the pun that figures in the first half of this post’s title.

Hope to see you at the Revels!

* * *

As a playwright and a writer of fiction, I spend a lot of time alone in a room talking to myself. It’s only natural that the question of voice fascinates me.

When I talk about voice, I’m talking about two things, really: the voice of an author, and the voices of an author’s characters.

The first is a subtle combination of subject matter, language, experience, and perspective—the sum of all the choices a writer makes in the creation of a work. Those choices are as singular as fingerprints, and also serve as identification. It’s why Hammett doesn’t sound like Christie, and why Christie doesn’t sound like Highsmith. Another word for this is style, which Raymond Chandler once defined as “the projection of personality.”

A character’s voice is a lot like an author’s: it reflects the age, background, likes and dislikes of that character, and serves to distinguish one character from another. For me—and this is a result of years of working in the theater—the key to a character’s voice is sound.

When I’m moving words around at my desk, or contemplating notes scrawled in a Moleskine, or walking down the street with a head full of jangling story fragments, one of the things I’m doing is listening for the sound of the piece in question. Sound isn’t separate from sense, of course. The two are related. But “Call me Ishmael” creates a different effect than “Hey, it’s Ishmael. How are ya?”

Voice is what draws us to certain writers and characters. It’s the single most important factor in appreciating (or not appreciating) an author’s work.

An editor once cut some lines from one of Raymond Chandler’s stories because they didn’t advance the action. Chandler begged to differ. In his letters, he wrote how he believed that what readers really cared about was

the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain of his face and his mouth was half opened in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death.

We’re all aiming for that golden combination of language, psychological truth, and urgent circumstance that makes for great reading.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said that character is fate. Our fictional creations reveal their fates through the language they use. Voice is fate.

I’d better get back to mine.

It’s time again to start listening . . .

Joseph Goodrich

Joseph Goodrich is an Edgar Award-winning playwright and the editor of Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen, 1947-1950.

Scroll to Top