Narrative Voice | The Closeness of the Words

Whenever a sentence flows across the page with verve and punch and spice, there’s something behind the narrative voice that’s akin to magic.

Narrative Voice - Three streetlights with a sky background in Naples in black and white.

Naples 2016

Whenever a sentence flows across the page with verve and punch and spice, whenever a reader feels propelled forward at a faster rate, there’s something behind the words that’s akin to magic. Whenever it works just right the writer’s words become the reader’s thoughts. This is rare, usually a surprise, and almost always an elusive goal. What seems to happen is that the speed of words matches the speed of thought, so each line feels rewarding, conclusive, like the satisfying snap of a puzzle piece.

And there’s also an unstated intimacy to a narrative voice. If sentences are going to inhabit a reader’s thoughts, the writer needs to sit close and whisper, so it’s not accidental that many writers agonize over elements such as voice and tone and perspective. How you write something very quickly becomes just as important as what you write if you don’t want your book chucked aside.

A good principle is that you want to nudge your seat as close as possible to the reader. There’s plenty of highfalutin terms and contemporary spins on the language to accomplish this goal, but let’s jump back more than two hundred years and look at a few lines:

Her report was highly favourable. Sir William had been delighted with him. He was quite young, wonderfully handsome, extremely agreeable, and to crown the whole, he meant to be at the next assembly with a large party.

There’s nothing too complex here: we’re describing a character and we learn some new details. But a simple question comes up—one that I’ve asked before—who is speaking? Look closely at the third sentence. It’s not written in the first person, yet we’re inhabiting the internal thoughts of a character. Jane Austen wrote these sentences in Pride and Prejudice although the description isn’t hers; without any real bluster, she’s put us inside a character’s mind and the character has done the describing.

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Mrs. John Dashwood did not at all approve of what her husband intended to do for his sisters. To take three thousand pounds from the fortune of their dear little boy would be impoverishing him to the most dreadful degree. She begged him to think again on the subject. How could he answer it to himself to rob his child, and his only child too, of so large a sum?

Now this excerpt comes from an early chapter in Sense and Sensibility. We’re still technically in the third person, but we’re, once again, trapped inside a character’s head the entire time—subtly, absent our awareness. The second and fourth sentences are the most explicit, especially the latter with its question mark, a challenge which comes from the character rather than the writer.

She saw it with concern; for what could a silent man of five and thirty hope, when opposed to a very lively one of five and twenty?

One goal of a novel is to create that intimacy. To bring the reader closer to the characters. For the reader to inhabit the characters. But the lesson about intimacy is applicable to any form of writing, as writing, better than any other art, has the potential to close the gap between creator and audience. A writer is much closer to a reader than, for instance, a violinist is to a listener, or a painter is to a viewer. Of course violinists and painters do have many advantages which writers lack. But the strength of good writing, and what writers should stress, is that closeness.