Voice: I’ve Gotta (not just) Be Me

by Chris Barton

If I had to pick one word to describe the voice I used in my first book, The Day-Glo Brothers—and I don’t; Bethany told me I could use 800-1,500—that word would be “unobtrusive.” In contrast to my smart-mouth aside in the previous sentence, the main function of my voice in that book was to stay out of the way and to not draw attention to itself.

There was already plenty going on in the manuscript for The Day-Glo Brothers without a conspicuous voice contributing to the clutter. I had to establish the contrasting characters of brothers Bob and Joe Switzer, get them from Montana to Berkeley to Cleveland, explain how regular light and color work, do the same for ultraviolet energy and fluorescence, add in some dancing skeletons and a mishap at a ketchup factory, and—lest I forget—chronicle the invention and practical application of an entirely new type of color.

In a picture book.

If I had to pick just one syllable to identify the voice I used to narrate that book and my new one, Shark Vs. Train, it would be “me.” The voice that readers get in both books, whether in a description of the Switzer brothers spying an apparently flaming billboard or in the question of whether Shark or Train would best the other in a piano recital, is pretty much my default setting for conveying unlikely information, startling developments, and improbable juxtapositions. It’s dry, wry, matter-of-fact, and prone to understatement. What works for me in my non-author life—say, warning my wife what our children are up to now—also works for me in my writing. That “Aw, shucks, nothing to get excited about” approach is my comfort zone.

I don’t plan to stay there.

Before I say anything more about what’s next for me, let me first make clear what I’ve got in mind when I say “voice.” Every story is being told by somebody, and the voice is the sum of all the qualities (word choice, rhythm, timing, sentence length, organization of ideas, and so forth) that would be present in the text even if the story or information conveyed by that particular teller was entirely different. Think of it this way: Barack Obama explaining how to change a tire would sound like Barack Obama explaining anything else a lot more than it would sound like Snoop Dogg explaining how to change a tire. And vice versa. Their message may be the same, but their voices are distinct.

I should also emphasize that I’m perfectly content with what I see as the sameness in the voice used for my first two books. As different as The Day-Glo Brothers and Shark Vs. Train are, they both needed the same calm, level-headed, dependable voice that more or less tells the reader, “Trust me and where I’m going with this.” There was plenty for me to work on in both of those manuscripts, both before and after editors got involved—cutting some of my 6,200 words from the former, adding something resembling logic to the latter—but the voice in each of the finished products was in place from the first sentence of the first draft, and it served me well.

It’s worth noting that of the manuscripts of mine that use that sort of voice, there are far more that haven’t sold than there are of those that have. While that’s not reason enough to stop using a particular voice, it did contribute to my openness to experimenting with voice. It helped make me receptive to alternatives that might better suit the stories I wanted to tell and the characters I wanted to bring to life, alternatives that might ultimately result in a more saleable book.

And so, when it comes to voice, my next two books are another story, and yet another. For Can I See Your I.D.? (Dial, 2011), a young adult collection profiling ten people who pretended to be someone they weren’t, the voice I use is as much a presence in each story as the person I’m writing about. That wasn’t an accident, but it also wasn’t something I had in mind at the outset of the project or deliberately worked to come up with.

As I remember it, I had stacks of research on two of my subjects, ideas for several other candidates, and not a single word written down. Then one night it occurred to me that maybe I could write these profiles in second person, the better to put the reader behind the mask of each masquerader. I tried it and liked the results, and although the editor who had first shown interest in the project was appalled, from then on, I couldn’t imagine not writing this book that way.

Getting the voice right has presented two opposing challenges. One is to have each profile put a different spin on the narration so that it doesn’t just sound like my usual self over and over, only in second person instead of third. A voice that will put a reader inside the head of a late-20th-century Hollywood faker is a little different from one that will allow that same reader to identify with a Georgia slave making a break for freedom. Some of the voices in the book are zippy, some are anguished, but each reflects—I hope—the subject’s personality, the circumstances of the deception depicted, and the time and place in which the profile is set.

The other challenge, though, has been to maintain some consistency throughout so that the profiles seem to belong together in the same book. For one subject, for instance, my original portrayal of her grammatical shortcomings was so jarring in comparison to the other subjects that I decided to instead look for other ways to convey the limits of her education. Sustaining any voice—let alone an unusual one, with these sorts of complex considerations—over the course of something many times longer than a picture book was harder than any writing I’d ever done before. I’m glad I gave it a shot.

I found a different challenge in the picture book biography that is my current project: voluminous source material that could support a manuscript long enough to make The Day-Glo Brothers look like a haiku. History shows that, when narrating as Chris Barton, I’m inclined to go long, but perhaps a different persona would be less likely to. I thought that trying my hand at a poetic voice might force me into a more concise approach to the story. And it did.

Will the voice I used for that just-purchased manuscript survive the editing and revising process? I don’t know, but in one sense, it doesn’t matter. That voice was a tool for zeroing in on the brevity, story arc, and narrative distance I needed in order to prove that this biography could work as a picture book. Having done that, I’m open to the possibility that there’s some other voice that would do an even better job of connecting the reader to the story, open to recasting the whole thing in a different voice. Maybe even in my own.

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