bwheadshot2I’m a lot of different people — I’m a selfish urbanite looking for a fix in a dystopian near future, and a scared middle aged employee of a junkyard that is pretty sure something unnatural is out to get him, so too am I the drunken challenger to the greatest swordsmen who ever lived, and a confused animal given artificial intelligence. What I’m not — I hope — is just a guy clacking keys on a keyboard, because if you hear those keys click-clacking over what I’m really trying to say, then I’ve failed my job as a storyteller.

Flash is the perfect vehicle for experimentation, and specifically experimentation in voice, for several reasons. Firstly, it is a medium that lends itself well to play and risk-taking because it does not require a large investment of time. Did your slangy dialect flash turn out to be an impenetrable mess? No problem, bury it in the hard drive and bring it out on rainy days for a chuckle, after all you wrote it in less than an hour. Did the 1,000 word stream-of-consciousness story meant to evoke the internal dialog of a madman come across more like a lame derivative of every other story of its kind that you’ve ever read? Hardly a big deal, no one need read it, not even you — if it’s really that bad, hit the DELETE key and admire your own ruthlessness.

Beyond the potentially disposable nature of exercises in flash fiction, you also have the delicious constraints of the medium. Of course, we know that flash has to be tightly written and as concise as possible, ideally with every word chosen for effect. Operating under such limits it would be a shame to write plainly, at least in every case, when instead one can use language to evoke mood or construct character. This is the second reason why flash rewards experimentation in voice.

However, ‘voice’ can mean many things. There is an author’s voice, his style, which mostly means the way he uses words; his quirks of diction, syntax, and punctuation, and really almost anything else about his work that lends it a recognizable quality. This is essentially unconscious and hard to change or embellish — which is reason enough not to worry all that much about it.

Instead of voice I like to think of many different voices, those tricks of style that are as different from story to story as the characters, themes, and settings of each piece. Different because they are integral, indivisible parts of the story itself, whether they are the actual words of a first person tale or the differences in cadence and inflection in a third person narrative, there is no excuse not to bring a conscious mind to the creation of these voices. Especially, as I’ve said, in flash fiction where to fail to do so is to write without one of the most powerful tools in the writer’s arsenal.

How do you do it? Well, in one sense you just do. You get in the head of your characters, you let them speak through your fingers. Such voices are very often verbal, borrowing the rhythms of speech, the informal language, the jagged construction. I want to stress that this does not just apply to obvious cases like first person stories in which the character is narrating, and sometimes literally speaking his part, but also to those of third person (and second, too, if that’s you cup of chai latte). Third person stories can be every bit as influenced by voice, just so long as they do not become the actual words of another unintended character.

All of us have models that we draw upon when writing. These of course influence our authorial style without us even knowing it, but if we want to put on that second layer, our ‘many voices,’ consciously imitating these styles is a great way to achieve a better story. Whether we take Dickens or Hemingway, A Clockwork Orange or Beowulf, as our model, mimicking these sources can lend a dramatically different feel to our writing. While we cannot really change our fundamental authorial voice (at least, not so quickly or radically as would suit a story by story readjustment), we can pay attention to the effects of voice and deploy it as deliberately as we do character, setting, and plot.

And, while it sometimes may blow up in our faces, there is no more perfect way to play with this dangerous toy than to try it out in a piece of flash and see what happens.

Bill Ward is, most probably, a figment of his own imagination. His flash has appeared at Every Day Fiction, Murky Depths, and the anthologies Dead Souls and Northern Haunts, as well as The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008. He blogs about all things genre at www.billwardwriter.com.