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Selling ‘unstoppable voices’ to the highest bidder

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In the Festival of Books’ Sunday panel “Unstoppable Voices,” moderated by author Susan Straight, the voices were not, as billed, unstoppable. Rather, they were frequently interrupted by laughter.

Jane Smiley, Mona Simpson, Maile Meloy and Marianne Wiggins joked about how to create characters with strong voices, and they often used a number of automotive metaphors. “Finding the voice is like getting the car in gear,” Meloy said. Wiggins talked about how it was necessary to get the “key in the ignition.” Whatever trope used, they all agreed on the difficulty of creating an authentic voice. But Meloy argued that the difficulty in creating voice, far from being an obstacle, was actually an indicator of the worthiness of the story.

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Simpson dispelled the rumor that there’s some mystery behind creating voice. “I just hear it,” she said. “I’ve never written a voice that I haven’t in some way heard.” She listed a number of ways in which she tries to define how a particular character speaks: grammatical mistakes, avoided words, syntax distortions and idiomatic expressions. If a writer can authentically re-create how a character speaks, it is like “getting to a person’s soul,” she said.

Sometimes voice wasn’t created in the cauldron of imagination but appropriated from real-life characters. While describing her latest book, “Private Life,” Jane Smiley mentioned that she auctioned off the rights to appear in this novel. She did not keep the money, but donated it to a charity for horses.

The man who won the auction was a Ukrainian banker who said he gained and lost one fortune after another, so Smiley wrote him into her next novel, drawing from what she knew of him to create his voice. Instead of having a minor role, as originally intended, he ballooned into a fairly major character (Smiley joked he owes the charity more money now).

All Wiggins wanted to know was how she could sell product placement — or person placement — for her next novel. Since Wiggins has a character named Marianne Wiggins, Straight wondered whether Wiggins had collected the fees for that person placement.

The discussion segued into novel classifications. Since women dominated the panel, they discussed the divide between the big “social novel” and the “domestic novel,” and how women often are pigeonholed in the domestic-novel genre. Most of the panelists attacked the very division between the social and domestic novel. Wiggins asked whether ‘Madame Bovary’ or ‘Anna Karenina’ counted as domestic novels, implying that the system of categorization breaks down in the face of specific books.
Simpson said that good novels include both categories: “If a domestic novel is good enough, it is political. And if a political or social novel is good enough, it includes the everyday activities traditionally belonging to the domestic.” Meloy insisted that whatever label is affixed to the novel, it’s always about what happens between two people.

In the end, Straight returned to a discussion about voice. She offered a litmus test for a successful voice: “Will it keep you up at night?”

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—John Matthew Fox writes for BookFox.

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