The Voice(s) In My Head

Recently, the wonderful Agent Kristin of PubRants posed the question of whether writers could have different voices for different genres. My first instinct was to say "no." I tend to gravitate toward certain authors because I enjoy their voices even more than I do their plots, and when I react really badly to a piece of writing, when I put down a book before I finish the first chapter, it's because I don't like the voice (or because the grammar and/or spelling are so atrocious the book is simply unreadable).

So if I don't like an author's voice in one book, do I have to keep trying her other books, at least her books in other genres, to see whether I might like those better?

Well, maybe.

The reason this has come to mind is that, as I mentioned some posts back, I recently enrolled in a writing class. It's not the nuts-and-bolts kind of class, more a free-your-mind kind of class. But the homework for this week was to write a short short story. Not quite flash fiction, but really, really short. I don't think mine's as much as story as scene but I am not good at short so it will have to do.

Story or scene, the voice in the piece I will bring to class tonight is completely different from anything else I've ever written. I'll post a couple of sentences of it here, along with a couple sentences that are the closest I can find to the same thing in my current work-in-progress. Both are very rough. Both links go to .pdf files containing the whole scenes from which the excerpts are taken.

1 (short short).

I had cried at our parting. Tear of loss, tears of self-pity. I resist the urge to cry again. Tears of sorrow, this time, tears of frustration at what might have been.

- He got what he deserved. He should have stuck with the one he loved, not left her for the one who made sense.

She is angry for me, and I appreciate it, but she does not understand. We are what we are and he made the only choice he could. I don’t hate him. I never have.

When we leave, I will kiss his stubbled cheek and clasp his softening body to my own and wonder if he ever mourns the long-gone pieces of his soul.

2. (work-in-progress)

Moisture, increasingly salty as I approached the ocean, collected on my face. The fog thickened until I felt as if I were swimming, unable to see more than a few feet in any direction. No cars passed; I was the only one crazy enough to seek out the beach. Preoccupied with thoughts of Cheryl, I forgot Iris’ warning, stepped on a rock and slid, landing sharply on my butt and sending a shock up my spine. My unintended seat was large and flat so, removing my sneakers and socks, I propped my feet on the rock below mine and listened to the crash of the waves. My eyes stung and at first I blamed the salt hanging heavy in the air; then I felt the tears sliding down my skin.

Neither particularly sad or in pain, I wasn’t so much crying as leaking, but I couldn’t seem to stop.

Now, neither of these is great literature. As I said, they're rough (particularly the second one). But they are--at least to me--widely, and wildly, different from each other. Both are first person narratives, but that's about the extent of the similarity. Some of the difference in voice is, without a doubt, the result of the necessity in a longer piece to have action, to have plot. And there are conventions associated with different genres. I couldn't put dialogue in italics in a novel, but quotation marks seemed too harsh, too interruptive, for the scene I wanted to write for the short.

So I guess I'd have to say (and not for the first time) that I was wrong. Writers can have different voices. It's possible, even, that different genres necessitate different voices.

What do you think?