Tonight, we explored voice. Like a fingerprint, singing voice, or signature, each person has a unique one. Likewise, each writer has a unique writing voice.
We looked at well-known writers’ definitions of voice:
Don Fry, American writer and scholar, says, “Voice is the sum of all the strategies used by the author to create the illusion that the writer is speaking directly to the reader from the page.”
William Strunk and E.B. White define voice as “the sounds his words make on paper” in The Elements of Style.
In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr writes, “Great memoir lives or dies based 100 percent on voice” and is created through tone (emotion, how the narrator feels about the subject), diction (word choice, vocabulary), and syntax (sentence length, structure).
We also discussed the child’s voice Zamora uses in Solito and what he does to create that voice.
I encourage you to listen to Javier Zamora read from Solito. If you don’t possess the audiobook, go to this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGAKE8NvSTc. He begins to read a short excerpt from chapter three at the 4:55-minute mark.
You may want to listen to the entire interview because it answers some questions we wondered about in the book study. He says he was born to two nineteen-year-old parents during the Salvadoran civil war, making his parents twenty-eight years old in 1999 when Solito is set. He also states that his father was a “devout leftist” who had to flee for his life, and his mother left because El Salvador was not a safe place for a woman to be. They left, thinking their stay in La USA would be a short one, just until the war ended.
Then, we tackled a short practice exercise.