Red Széll

But you create the voice of the book, and the best prose...

is invisible.

You forget that you're reading prose.

You are so immersed in the story.

And the prose has actually done the job of immersing you.

It has made you believe in the story without necessarily feeling that you're having to do battle with the words.

Exactly.

And I think there really needs to be a consistency of voice to the prose throughout the book.

I've noticed narrators struggle in the past when that consistency isn't there because they've got into their rhythm and then they're wrong footed by something that just actually sounds like it should be from another book.

And I know there was a trope a few years ago where you would have multiple narrators reading books with multiple points of view in them.

I read a book that had 11 different narrators for 11 different chapters because each was giving a different point of view.

Now, that works, but it was clearly taken as a view that it's going to be easier for each narrator just to adopt a voice rather than read the book in a different voice for each narrator.

And my wife, funnily enough, read the same book and I went, how did you find that book?

And she said, bitty, difficult to get into.

Because it didn't have a unified voice.

I'm always rather struck by Ernest Hemingway, who famously wrote plain prose.

It's so lean, it's so sparse, but actually, The Old Man and the Sea is laden with words about fishing.

His book about bullfighting, you learn a lot about bullfighting.

So he makes those additional words, those descriptive words count.

They really earn their place.