How voice shaped the construction of a novel

The Unheard came together in an unconventional way. The scenes and story emerged at the end once I’d written enough material to construct them. I realise that of all the possible ways it might have been written, it was perhaps determined early on when I focussed on the voices I wanted to use.

Writing and reading are physical experiences to me, a visceral thing. The books that remain with me are the ones where I feel changed by the writing, not usually by the story but the characters and the proximity we have to them. What marks these books out is the impact the words make, how far we can go with language, how some books are an invitation to go much further as a writer. When I read and write, I want to feel language come alive in the same way that we feel music inside us, the pulse of it is a physical thing, and that’s part of the delight and the rawness of it.

Character drives my writing. There are a number of voices in The Unheard and each one has a distinct style. I think of a voice as a rope that starts as a single strand and different elements can be woven in to make it as complex and full as it needs to be. Everything else follows from that. I wanted to minimise the distance between character and reader so the voices come from inside the characters’ heads, and we get to feel, hear and see the things they cannot share with anyone. The book is full of unheard things. 

As I wrote, I discovered the tensions in their lives, the way these characters found themselves caught between two worlds. The forces acting on them determined what they did and caused them to act against their better judgement. The stories emerged from this.

The focus of the book is a man called Tom Pullan who tries to soak up the pressures that threaten to overwhelm him. As is often the way in real life, it’s all-consuming, an act of strength that’s hugely overlooked and taken for granted. There’s a quiet desperation in keeping so much contained, and the novel is in some part a portrait of containment. To keep so much hidden is a lonely pursuit.

It’s left to the reader to judge how much he’s lost the balance of what’s real and what is pretence, how much he covers up, trying to be what he thinks he should be. The reader sees the public side and what goes on inside. The characters’ behaviour creates ripples that affect the people close to them.

His daughter sees the adults around her and makes a decision to connect to her desires and her will because she doesn’t want to become like them. In doing this, she’s sabotaging a future she says she wants but secretly believes she’s incapable of having. She goes against her better judgement to retain her wildness and terrible things happen, but that’s the magnificent and complicated thing about her.

I wrote in disconnected paragraphs, a couple of pages at most, but never scenes. I had little idea of the story. I was thinking more in terms of themes and how the develop throughout the book. Over time, I had all this writing about characters’ experiences and preoccupations, their thoughts and feelings. By the time I put the book together, there were hundreds of these writing fragments.

I used a cut-up technique to put the book together, a process that always seemed to be on the edge of working and not working. I laid the fragments on the floor where I could study them, and an order emerged with scenes and a trajectory. I could see the three sections of the book, the characters each with their own voice. The themes came through, inflected in different ways in the three sections, and I saw how the sections spoke to each other. The book fell into shape. All I had to do then was fill in gaps.

Being led by voice, I can see that there was an inevitability in the way the book came together. The voices, themes and stories fed off each other, as did the emotion in the language. It became what it was, a process where the writing led me, and went dead if I leaned on it too much to steer it towards a story. I’m sure the aspect of voice more than anything else made it impossible to be a different book written in a different way.

The Unheard by Anne Worthington is published by confingo (confingopublishing.uk)

Interested in exloring different ways to write your book? Read what author Jessie Greengrass says about creating a unique writing process.