Voice

Voice is the personality your prose transmits to the reader; it encapsulates and flavors your attitude to the subject, the characters you cast in your stories, and the types and intensity of the situations you are portraying.

Without this inherent attitude, your prose could not hope to carry an effect beyond the simple meaning of the particular words in particular sentences.   Look. Look. Look.  See Dick.  See Jane.  See Dick and Jane run and split infinitives.  With such nuance as cynicism, skepticism, doubt, and mockery enter the stage wearing their dancing shoes, lifting their tropes as though they were ballerinas.

Voice determines your choice of characters, situations, and outcome, allowing the possibility to explore the parallels you encounter in two or more seemingly divergent points of view, noting with exquisite precision and irony the point at which their agendas part company.

In general, it you were to take on high-mindedness, you would chose individuals from professions, positions of entitlement, or intellectuals.  By degree and design, you would challenge such individuals with problems bearing some moral consequence that would break, tempt, or bewilder them, relying on the subtext to somehow issue a true bill of indictment against them.  The result would be your disclosure, commensurate with the thrust of your voice; it would be your dramatic exposure of "them."

Each of this triad--character, situation, and outcome--are in effect armatures about which you wrap the details of their doing, mindful as you wrap that their doing may also be their undoing.  And quite possibly your own.  What better way to change your mind or position or taste than to write your way into it or out of it?

A Writer's Guide to Boredom

If the book you are reading begins to displease you, you can skip ahead, hopeful of finding a more engaging foothold, or you can set the book aside, never to return.  If a film you are watching in a theater begins to turn your sensitivities as though you had eaten the wrong taco at the wrong restaurant, you can get up and leave.  Similarly you can switch the channel on your TV, seek another CD for a more enjoyable musical experience, bail out of a play or lecture at an intermission, toss a magazine aside or even not renew your subscription when renewal time comes about.  You could, if you were a student, drop a class when it became apparent to you that the instructor was monotonous in presentation or brought a particular bias to the presentation that caused you to wait for another instructor to act as your guide.

These ventures all have the common thread of an escape hatch.  You are escaping from disinterest or lack of engagement.  You are escaping from boredom.  By extrapolation, boredom is the product of circumstances that force you to remain in the vicinity of an exposure to dramatic, statistical, or artistic material that by its very nature causes you to wish to avoid.  Boredom is being trapped in a situation where you are being presented with some form of information you wish no exposure to.

The presentiment of boredom arrives with an ominous cadence of inner responses being triggered in you, causing you to estimate a level at which your tolerance will erupt.  Boredom is the realization that you must endure even more information you do not wish to inflict on your sensory receptors.  If, you tell yourself, I have to read one more page, hear one more sentence, endure one more scene, I will do something that allows me to expel the pent-up resentment that has been building within me.

You would think that a writer would use the process of writing to construct dramatic situations that cause the exact opposite of boredom, which is to say empathy, involvement, concern, care.  You would think that one of the writer's earliest motivations was to create emotional and imaginary landscapes he or she was unable to find anywhere else and thus satisfy an inner craving for transportation away from the drabness of the quotidian and into the excited tingle of another world.  You would think so and in an approach that has still not entirely given way to skepticism or cynicism, you approach new books with the belief that they are tickets to another universe, a fraught universe, a universe that causes your skin to tingle, your mind to roar with anticipation, your feelings to perform arpeggios and glissandos on your spinal column.

But we are of course not all tuned to the same responsive key nor do we have interests shared by great swaths of humankind.  Your interests can and do bore others, which has made you aware of the great tool of voicing by which it becomes possible to interest individuals with the information you are eager to provide rather than bore or distract them.

Spending time in a condition of boredom is a humbling experience for a writer, one possibly lost in the sheer exuberance of escaping the atmosphere of boredom.  Your own biggest fear is that of boring those you wish for some reason or complexity or reasons to interest.   The sense that you are boring such an individual is worse than a hundred rejection slips because you have become alert to the multiplicity of reasons for the rejection slip that have nothing to do with boredom.

It becomes so easy to generalize:  The key to effective storytelling is to begin with an irresistible sentence, followed by another, and then another, after which you will have built sufficient momentum to cause whoever shall read them to urge you to continue.  At this point you will have experienced the seeming magic of power by putting into play the great dramatic maxim, "Never take the reader where the reader wants to go."  Yeah, right.

Well, actually, it is right.  Withhold.  When you present the reader with more information and/or philosophy than the reader wants to know, you have brought them right back to the point at hand, which is to say you have put them not in care's way or harm's way but in the way of boredom.

set-up

set-up--a strategy for initiating a dramatic event; a means of introducing a character with a particular attitude, skill, or defect into a story; establishing a set of circumstances either beneficial or hostile to a character's goals and welfare.

Characters rarely go where they should or take up with individuals who are likely associates or lovers; persons in real life may do such things to a significant degree, but not in drama or fiction. Set-up is the generic name for an elaborate foreshadowing or dramatic description of a physical or emotional landscape; set-up is background that will be of interest to the reader (because the reader can begin to see the complications and inherent traps for the characters.

Set-up is dramatic, situational, tense if not suspenseful. A high-energy character wanting to take her boyfriend home to meet parents and relatives is such a set-up, the very mention of it causes the reader to envision older brothers who have no sense of humor and who shake hands as though they mean to hurt fingers of anyone unlucky enough to shake hands with them. Set-up is nearly concept, bordering on wanting to be story, certainly an added energy to one or more scenes. Set-up legitimatizes consequences, a warning that the protagonist either should have known better or had no choice.

Set-up is analogous to setting a trap for a major character, allowing the reader to see how he or she behaves, how he or she is regarded by others. Neil Simon claims not to have known on a conscious level what the consequences of having a character named Felix Unger would be, nevertheless having such a character with such a name allows Simon to cause Felix Unger to leave a scolding note for his roommate, signed with his initials, FU, thus another way in which Felix Unger worked as a set-up.