First Sunday Q &A: Voice! Repeating Themes in Your Writing--How They Foster Your Unique Voice
Q: I’ve been reading for years about voice, both the voice of characters and the voice of the writer. I’d love any tips or suggestions about how I might develop my writer’s voice. I feel I have good skills for writing individual character voices but no clue as to how I might develop my personal narrative voice. I’ve written quite a lot, published some, but the whole issue of voice confuses me. Thank you.
A: Voice in writing is the signature tone that engages a reader. Yet how to nurture and develop your writing voice is one of the big mysteries writers face. Some imagine it’s a magical thing that just appears one day, after we’ve put in enough hours. It is magical, but like many things that have a magical quality, it can also be approached deliberately, and grown carefully, if you become aware of how it works.
I love reading certain writers for their voice. I’ve dissected books and essays and short stories to find out why the voice of these writers is so distinguishable.
To me, voice rides hand-in-hand with the prominent themes that emerge in our writing. So this post will discuss the elements in a writer’s voice and how to develop them.
The first, and most obvious, element of voice is the writer’s unique style of writing. The second is the repeating themes that show up in our work, over and over. The stuff we’re passionate about, that won’t leave us alone.
Let’s talk about writing style first.
Writing style
Do you know your writing style? Each of us has a certain way of using words. We favor terse or lyrical. We use words in minimalist or abundant ways. We are attracted to action or description.
We may spend more time with characters or with plot. Dialogue is heavily featured, or not.
Hundreds of elements go into developing our personal writing style. It evolves over years. It comes through reading and educating ourselves about what we love most in story. I find that when a writer begins to recognize and honor (develop) their particular writing style, they are less likely to try to unconsciously imitate others who they feel are more talented. They appreciate their own uniqueness, what only they can say.
A teacher once told me that “talent is your uniqueness developed.”
As we develop our unique writing style, we can also begin to pay attention to the substance of our writing, what’s meaningful to our life and how it shows up on the page.
Even the writer who covers a thousand different subjects shows his or her most significant substance threads. Think of Alice Munro’s fascination with ordinary people in a small community. Or Sherman Alexie and his poems about rez life.
We write our fascinations, our histories, our passions. And it’s often a very delightful treasure hunt to find them and make the more obvious.
Repeating themes
So many writers aren’t conscious of repeating themes in their work. Readers point them out before the writer notices—at least that’s happened to me. One reason certain kinds of reviews are helpful to knowing your own work (see my post on reviews) is that we can borrow the reader’s eyes to see our words in a fresh way.
How do you find these repeating themes in your work? First step is knowing what you’re fascinated with in your life and how it translates to your literature. But fascinations exist on many levels: I’m keen about gardening and dogs and cooking, but rarely do these show up in my novels or nonfiction.
I find it’s less a matter of personal passions, the things you love to read about and discuss and do, and more about secret interests you are almost unconscious of.
I don’t know why I have been pulled to aviation all my life. Or I didn’t until I was in the final stages of my novel about women pilots. An interviewer asked me, “What was the inspiration for this book?” I realized it was my mom, a pilot during World War II.
I’ve lived my life alongside the mystery of my mother, the pilot. She rarely talked about the two years she served in the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots. After the war, she got busy raising four kids and working full-time. Her flying history grew into a secret fascination for me. I wrote to discover more about her and how women get the strength to do such brave things.
My mother was also a painter, very amateur in her mind, but she encouraged me to be an artist when I was young, so I did. I studied art as a kid, I continued in college. As an adult, I often painted corridors, roads, pathways that stretched into the distance. No matter where we set up outside for a landscape painting class, I intuitively chose a view that included a trail or a half-hidden pathway; even a painting of the ocean included a zigzag of reflected light.
In my thirties and forties, I had serious bouts with cancer. I was fully recovered from both, according to the doctors, but the experiences of coming close to death vibrated in every cell of my body, vivid and visceral for decades after.
I painted a lot in those recovery years. And I realized the meaning of the repeating images: Roads that ran into the distance expressed my belief in the continuation of my life rather than a dead end. I could keep walking forward.
How meaningful this moment of realizing my own hidden language.
The freedom of flying came into my recently published novel, but so did the image of roads continuing into the distance. Both themes are about journeys, and although I hadn’t used these images consciously during the drafting and revising process, they wove into the story organically. My voice was present. And after I became aware of them, like the phenomenon of red cars showing up everywhere when you are considering one, I couldn’t stop seeing that voice in all my creative work.
Photo by Edge2Edge Media on Unsplash
i don’t know if there’s a limit to the number of themes a writer can express in their work. I only know that a third and fourth theme, which intersects with these two mentioned above, is emerging as my new novel, Last Bets, prepares for publication in 2024.
Last Bets is about an artist, a portrait painter, with a special talent: she sees the future of the people she paints. It’s gotten her in trouble in her career because not every subject wants to see more than what they present to the world. When her estranged husband suddenly dies, leaving her massive debts, she must resurrect her life and her finances. She escapes to a Caribbean island to complete a portrait of a wealthy man who lives there. But instead, she gets drawn into the murky underworld of high-stakes gambling. This woman’s father made use of her paranormal talent as a child to cheat and win big at backgammon tournaments. Now the artist is tempted to use her talents to recover her financial life, because the island she’s chosen is home to the largest tournament in the Caribbean.
I’m so not a gambler. It holds no interest for me. I am fascinated with people and how they present one reality and live another. And I love exploring why some people risk big and others don’t.
I visited this particular island long ago, and I watched a young man lose his yacht in two hours during a high-stakes backgammon tournament. We sat outside in a kind of lanai near the ocean, it was hot and windy, and I couldn’t believe what I’d just witnessed. “It happens all the time,” he told me. Evidently backgammon is not just a family game like cribbage or cards; professional gamblers love it because it can only be won with skill, not luck.
Here was juice for a novel. I loved exploring the repeating themes of risk, what we show the world, and the idea of second chances. Can we heal the past, become someone new, reclaim ownership of our life?
Starting a list of repeating themes
As Last Bets gets closer to its release date in April, I’ll be working on how to express the meaning of it, the themes that fascinate me. I began a list of themes that repeat from A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue. Here’s what I came up with, so far.
Both are intense, fast-moving stories.
Both explore women’s relationships, from family and love relationships to women’s friendships and mentorships.
In A Woman’s Guide, three women of three generations become a found family, moving beyond their biological ties. In Last Bets, two lost women, one in her thirties and the other a teenager, create a family on this isolated island.
Both show the escape and danger of high-risk adventure: flying and Search & Rescue operations, scuba diving and ocean sailing. One is about the air, the other underwater—perhaps metaphors for supra-conscious and subconscious parts of ourselves?
Both take place in communities isolated from the world because of weather—a cabin in a blizzard, an island in a hurricane. Limited environments.
Both show how women get damaged through betrayal by men—fathers, lovers, or husbands. How so many carry a handicap from the past they must overcome. How they don’t see themselves clearly because of the betrayals they’ve experienced.
A new relationship/friendship with another woman gives each a clear mirror to themselves. They become heroes in their own way, reaching out to save another woman unexpectedly.
This list took months to compile, inner searching, journaling, talking with my closest writing buddies, and asking good questions. It developed that conversation between my life and my art, and it showed me what matters most and how I might talk about it.
When in the writing process to use repeating themes
i want to end this week’s post with a warning.
When writers begin to recognize repeating themes, it becomes tempting to insert them artificially in scenes, to present moments of meaning, to tell the reader the significance.
I advise against anything that takes you out of organic conversation, especially in early drafts. Drafting is like taking dictation from the Muse, following the storyline and seeing where it leads. The inner story, the meaning and change in that meaning, unravels gradually and to force it does the story no good.
Even during revision, when you might get even more of a glimpse of what your book is really about, it is still dangerous to insert theme. Added messages of meaning are still too obvious; they’ll feel, to the reader, like commercial breaks.
Better to wait. Wait for the point when you can give the book a good rest and come back to it with new eyes. Usually, for me, this is when it’s with beta readers or my agent.
After Last Bets manuscript was out of my hands, I was able to read it almost as if I hadn’t written it at all—have you experienced that with your own writing? It’s a marvelous feeling, to be a bit in awe of how the story works. Repeating themes began to emerge. I saw how many scenes already contained them—they’d evolved organically, subconsciously, as I drafted and revised.
I realize now that all my books require characters to face themselves in some way. I think this is a requisite of good character writing, but because of my fascination with that dichotomy between who we are and how we present ourselves, between reality and fantasy, I push it. A few months ago I finally found my epigraph for Last Bets, the quote at the beginning of the book. It’s from an old Joni Mitchell song: “Something truthful in the sea, your lies will find you.”
A good repeating theme.
If you’re curious about pursuing this, consider your body of work, any writing you’ve done. Take time to write about any recurring images. You’ll have obvious ones, the messages and values you want to convey to the world, but the harder task is to notice the subtler ones, themes that arise without your conscious knowing but feel so right, so integral to who you are and what means the most to you, your writing will feel like some kind of personal manifesto without the soapbox speech.
These are the most important themes to the reader as well, because they speak to the heart instead of the head.
What’s a theme or topic you’re fascinated with personally, which appears in your writing?