Had feedback that your narrative voice is dull, bland or generic?

Here's what to do about it.

Recently a writer-editor on Threads posted a version* of a problem which crops up a lot in the teaching-editing world. It usually goes something like this:

Help! I’ve said I’ll comment on a friend’s work-in-progress, and the premise is good and the plot convincing. But the narrative voice is dull, stiff, bland, generic - even a bit old-fashioned. I’m afraid it’s going to get between them and a literary agent and a publishing deal**. Can anyone advise?

Voice is the glue at the interface between the reader and the story, the ‘dark matter’, as Courttia Newland puts it, which holds the story together - so it’s hugely important. It’s also the thing that agents and editors always say they’re looking (or listening) for, not least because they find voice difficult to fix if it’s not working.

I don’t believe it is so hard to fix, but there’s no denying that problems can be hard to diagnose and therefore treat - which comes to the same thing.

Photo by Jukka Aalho on Unsplash

So if you’ve had feedback - or you want to give feedback - that it is mainly the voice of the story that’s dull, bland, uncompelling, stiff, or no-better-than-serviceable, it’s wise to look at it from several angles. Even if the feeder-back hasn’t been so specific, it’s not unknown for a rejection to cite the lack of narrative drive when the events are actually urgent and important, but the voice isn’t making the urgency and importance vivid enough. (If you feel the problems are more widespread, you might find the Fiction-Writer’s Pharmacopeoia is a good place to start diagnosing.)

Quick Fixes

If there’s not so very much wrong, it’s all just a bit dull, you could check for these:

• Too much is Told, not enough is Shown, or not in the right places.

• Too much Showing of details.

• Too much explaining.

• Too much time spent in the far-out psychic distances.

• Too much ‘office-speak’.

• Too much hesitating and qualifying.

Long-term Solutions

But if there’s a real problem - or if you’re serious about really transforming this story and your skills in general - then you need to stand a bit further back, and think more deeply.

Essentially, voice is the product of

• a) what you want to tell: story, plot, ideas, themes, the emotional journey you want the character to go on.

• b) how you want to tell it: the tone, the style, the feel, the emotional journey you want the reader to go on.

Merged, these two create a sense of the consciousness through which the events of the story are transmitted and perceived: ‘the narrator’.

Of course, we talk about narrators as internal/first person - the narrator is a character in the events of the story - or external/third person: the narrator stands outside the events of the story. But in terms of voice this is a difference of degree more than kind: what holds the human reader to the page is our sense of connection with the human-seeming, storytelling consciousness through which the narrative is emerging.

So working out what’s not working has to start with separating out the message (the story) from the medium (the words), and then working with each.

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What is the story you want to tell? What do you want the reader to feel as they read - and enjoy feeling enough to keep reading? A false-accusation-of-adultery story, after all, can be Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, The Winter’s Tale or a bedroom farce. An assassination story or #MeToo plot could each cast the story as anything from a comedy caper to a tragedy.

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How are you going to tell it? If your narrator is your main character, it may seem obvious how their personality shapes their storytelling, and you may only need the more straightforward editing tools above to make it more vivid and convincing.

But it’s still worth checking that you have, actually, developed the best and most fruitful ‘take’ on their story. And if your narrator isn’t a character, you will need to make some decisions from scratch.

Given how you want the reader to feel, what sort of storytelling voice would help them to do so? Lyrical? Chatty? Angry? Matter-of-fact-but-amused? Super-intense? Abrupt? Dreamy? Arguing against the common tide? Might they sound like someone’s best mate, slightly drunk, ’fessing all? Someone’s aunt finally, painfully, telling what happened to her in the war? An anxious, loving brother? A hate driven adult child?

Suggesting those last isn’t to imply that you must create and use a narrator who has a name and an existence - though even in third person that’s always a possibility. What I’m trying to capture is that any decision about what words to arrange in what order is the product of a human-seeming psyche***.

If you’re consciously working in a particular genre, of course, you’ll know what kind of voices readers love - but even within that there will be a range of tones and styles. And what you really don’t want is for the voice in genre fiction to be merely ‘generic’ in the basic sense: the standard-issue, lowest-common-denominator of what is needed to fulfil readers’ expectation.

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Why do you (or the narrator) want to tell it? It can really help to focus on why this narrator is telling this story. It’s most obvious in first person: why is this character telling their story? Why do they need it told?

But even an external narrator who isn’t (quite) you will benefit from you deciding what it is, really, that makes this story, for this narrator, urgent and important. And in that I am absolutely including the urgent and important need to make people laugh - or laugh and forgive - or laugh and weep. It helps to think like an actor ‘actioning’ the text, as they call it these days: assigning to each speech a verb which expresses what the speech is trying to make happen. What verb applies to your story? To explain? To persuade? To exculpate? To celebrate?

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Where is the narrator standing, in time and place, relative to the events of the story? This is, I would say, an essential question for internal narrators: is what happened yesterday, or a long time ago? How much perspective does the narrator have Now, on the Then of the story? It makes a big difference to how the story is told. (This is one reason that first person present tense can be very difficult to pull off: there is no gap between narrator and character.)

But it’s also well worth asking external narrators what their relationship to the story they’re telling is, because it can really shape and characterise the tone of their narrative. Adding a sense of the relationship of narrator to narrative is the kind of thing which can raise a perfectly competent novel into something really compelling.

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What to do next

Sometimes, making a firm decision about some of these questions enables you to change the voice fairly easily. In terms of process,

• To play with the new possibilities, and clarify your sense of the new voice, step sideways from the constraints of the novel/creative-non-fiction itself, and draft a short story or some offstage scenes from the novel.

• If you’re in the middle of a draft, going back to the beginning can bog you down in fine-tuning and fiddling. Instead, consider carrying on in the new voice, as if what’s behind you was written like that too - and only after you’ve reached the end go back and revise the earlier part.

• And if the change is really drastic, especially if it looks like it’ll have knock-on effects on the the structure and storytelling, it’s wise to starting afresh, with a new version, rather than trying to hacking the existing version into something which fits your new sense of the story.

And finally, if, as you play, the feel and style of the new narrative that you have in your head is not emerging on the page, then I’d suggest a pause while you develop your writing-muscles and perceptions. These will all help:

• keeping a writer’s notebook

• yoga for writers (‘stiff’ is a clue here)

• take a poetry course. (The Poetry School is good.)

• reading-like-a-writer: read beyond the standard-issue stuff of your genre (and I’m including ‘literary’ as a genre). And when you find the voice of a story compelling, stop and ask yourself what, exactly, makes it like that.

Good luck!

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* I would normally acknowledge the inspiration for this post by linking to the original, but it seems to have been taken down.

** One way of making sure these shortcomings don’t get between the book and a publishing deal is to self-publish it. But I don’t think anyone who reads the Itch would contemplate doing that without making the book the best it can possibly be - which this one, clearly, isn’t yet.

*** I’m including ChatGP and its ilk here: everything in their brains is the product of a human, as are the algorithms which pick what to put where.