Image ID: A Black, female-presenting person in a yellow shirt stands in profile before a teal background, speaking into a megaphone.
A strong voice allows writers to convey their artistic vision, playing with language, experimenting with style, and creating a work that is truly unique. It’s like a fingerprint, making the author’s work engaging and recognizable.
Consider the flowing, complex opening lines of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, in which the third-person narrator’s voice describes a family’s house as “spiteful” and “full of a baby’s venom,” chasing its inhabitants away:
“For years [they] put up with the spite in [their] own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old—as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the door-sill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once—the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time.”
In contrast, take a look at how Ernest Hemingway begins “Hills Like White Elephants,” using a straightforward, terse voice (with minimal punctuation) to set the scene for a short story that consists mostly of dialogue after the first paragraph:
“The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building.”
A strong and compelling authorial voice captivates readers, drawing them into the narrative, providing consistency throughout a manuscript whether an author is writing fiction or nonfiction. Author voice is at the heart of how we write; it allows for expression and creativity, going beyond the mere transmission of information and adding a layer of emotion, tone, and style that can enrich the experience of both writer and reader.
Amy Cecil Holm is Allegory Editing’s resident Copy Editor and Proofreader. As a copy editor and proofreader, Amy draws upon more than three decades of teaching college English to help authors polish their prose. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in creative writing and has worked as a journalist, technical writer, and educator. Amy has taught courses in English composition, literature, creative writing, journalistic writing, business writing, and developmental reading, among others. She has a keen understanding of grammar, punctuation, and diction and uses her careful attention to detail to help prepare manuscripts for submission and publication.