Customer Reviews

Voice & Style (Elements of Fiction Writing)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I've read all the books in the Elements of Fiction Writing series and this is how I'd rank them.

"Scene & Structure" "Characters & Viewpoint" "Beginnings, Middles & Ends"

The above three books are invaluable -- must reads. They are the best of the series, in my opinion, and are packed with good information on every page. Well-done.

"Conflict, Action & Suspense" "Description" "Plot" "Manuscript Submission" "Setting"

The above five books are good, solid reads. Again, they contain good information and cover the subject decently.

"Voice & Style" "Dialogue"

To me, the last two books need to be rewritten. They are by far the weakest of the series. Both suffer from an annoying style, particularly Dialogue, and both are very skimpy on real information. Neither one is very helpful.

This is the order in which I'd recommend reading them.

I tried to read this book with an open mind, and it's clearly a book only an English lit teacher could love.

Given the book's target audience - beginning writers - it falls far short of being helpful to them. What the book SHOULD do and doesn't is present the broad concepts and principles, and then if the author chooses to "instruct by example" as Payne does, then provide examples that support and illustrate those concepts and principles.

Instead each chapter jumps into a seemingly endless stream of analysis of fiction works, attempting to instruct by way of example with no real "how-to's." The overwhelming problems - besides a tendency toward pedantic wordiness - are that the snippets used are too short and the analyses too specific to be useful to the target audience of this book: beginning writers looking for the broader principles to apply to their own writing.

Each chapter is followed by exercises. However, the exercises are not presented with the goals for each ("WHY am I doing this") or any way of analyzing or learning from the results after doing them ("WHAT worked when I did this"). Beginning writers could finish this book feeling as I did - somewhat confused and very much like I wasted my time.

I would highly recommend "Finding Your Writer's Voice" by Thaisa Frank and Dorothy Wall instead.

Dr. Johnny Payne's text VOICE AND STYLE is an excellent tool for helping fiction writers develop their own individual creative voice. Payne accomplishes this by taking the larger term known as "Style" and breaking it down into identifiable and practicable elements. These elements include but are not limited to Habits of Speech, Authority and Voice, Atmosphere and Tone, and Voice in Dialogue. His approach is analytical and thought-provoking but never boring. Using this "nuts and bolts" approach, he walks the reader through each subject using personal anecdotes and examples of his own creative process. Payne also draws on the wisdom and varied styles of many modern and time-proven authors from Barthelme and Cisneros through James, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. Dr. Payne believes that the techniques of fiction writing can be taught and he includes creative excercises at the end of each chapter that are designed to allow the practicing writer to apply specific elements to her or his own personal writing style. In a sense, Dr. Payne's text teaches writers by allowing them to discover and improve on what they already know. In the end, the student feels led along the creative path rather than pushed down it. The result is a highly effective and entertaining text that most writing students will want to keep and refer back to often.

In my humble opinion, this is the poorest in the series of Writer's Digest Books. The author's style is rambling and cryptic. It is often hard to understand his point. He delivers endless analysis of other author's works, but completely fails to either describe his subject matter well, or to teach a new author how to learn voice and style techniqiues. He may be a good teacher in the classroom, but he certainly does not know how to write a book that can teach. Compare this book with PLOT or CONFLICT, ACTION & SUSPENSE and you will see the difference. For the most part, the Writer's Digest Book series is excellent, but I give two thumbs down to Payne's book.

In "Voice and Style," Payne shows how to use the dramatic voice in dialogue to make the story more interesting by adding emotion. I loved his use of the Wizard of Oz example with "Dorothy from Kansas" to show how you " . . . don't have to look any further than your own backyard for a diphtong" with even the Wizard "after trying his hand and failing at Emerald- speak, turns out to be `an old Kansas man . . .'" himself. Though the reader will learn that Payne is from Kentucky and his wife (who claims she does not have an accent) is from Indiana, they spent years in Chicago while he taught at Northwestern University, which is what likely gave their young daughter a Chicago accent. He writes: "Above all, you have to cultivate an ear for the dialect of your own kind . . . [without] lay[ing] it on too thick." Payne also shows how to use the "right words in the right place" among various people in the story's community to create memorable characters. He discusses the authorial voice, which is how the author makes the story meaningful through defining the subject and message of the story. Payne explains how the "objects of thought must be set in motion, and voice provides that motion." Payne offers excellent examples, such as: Fitzgerald's, The Great Gatsby, with the neighbor Nick Carroway as narrator, and Nabokov's Lolita, with the step father/pedophile lover, Humbert Humbert as narrator. Finally, the last section of Payne's book shows how to allow the "various voices to operate as one." I give him an A+.

Johnny Payne's book is a wonderful creative writing tool for both teaching and learning on your own, complete with indepth analysis--all presented in a very accessible style. (Although I could have done without the personal stories about the wife, etc.) Use this book and follow the exercises, and your writing will improve.

Within scant minutes of starting into Johnny Payne's treatment of Voice and Style, I have had to add the book to the pile of items being returned to the library. Why? In a 4-page discussion of Voice and Irony, Payne analyzes the technique he himself used in a novella entitled, The Ambassador's Son. The discussion might be germane were it not that Payne apparently did not do adequate research for the original work. For instance, he describes a Mr. Featherson as the "Peruvian ambassador." However, Mr. Featherson is not at all "Peruvian"-the last name alone would suggest otherwise-but an American in a foreign culture. Perhaps Payne intends Mr. Featherson to be the American ambassador to Peru?
Furthermore, it doesn't sound as though Payne has met many ambassadors. He describes how Mr. Featherson blatantly ignored health warnings about the dangers of eating shellfish and invited his son to try some at a local restaurant. That would be ludicrous: foreign service families take cholera warnings very seriously, and Peru is notorious for a high cholera rate.
Mr. Featherson displays other non-ambassadorial behavior as well, including sloppy deportment in a restaurant and excessive drinking: in reality, American emissaries and their families are extremely conscious of their public behavior because of its potential to reflect poorly on the US. After all, they serve their country, not as Payne seems to think, to impose American culture on a foreign environment (that was the old colonial agenda), but to facilitate exchange and communication.
In short, Payne undermines the very topic he is trying to illuminate: authority. To have authority one has to know what one is talking about, and if one doesn't know, one had better research!