The idea that writers can somehow "hear" the voice of their characters is a familiar one, as is the notion that characters seem to write themselves: that the author is merely a kind of conduit for voices that seem to have lives all of their own.
However, describing where that voice comes from, what it sounds like and how it feels to experience a character so intimately is a much more difficult – and more fascinating – matter, as a team of Durham University researchers have been discovering at the Edinburgh international book festival.
Contributors to the project have already written a series of blogs on those writers who have been able to talk about it, including Hilary Mantel, Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens.
More than 100 authors have now completed our questionnaire about how they experience their characters' voices, and we're currently conducting a series of in-depth interviews further exploring how they imagine, hear, listen to and converse with the voices of their characters or subjects.
Already our research is uncovering significant and surprising insights into a range of questions: What does inner voice actually "sound" like? What do writers do when they can no longer "tune in" to their inner voice? How do online comments infiltrate the inner voices of journalists? And what is like to hear your characters or subjects out loud?
It's been fascinating to learn about differences, for example, between the ways that novelists experience their primary and secondary characters. While writers have a sense of inhabiting the interior life of their protagonist and of looking out at the world through their eyes, they report that secondary characters tend to be experienced visually.
One particularly startling finding has been that many writers are unable to "see" the faces of their protagonists. The main character often registers as a blank – or, in one case, pixelated like a censored photograph.
It's also becoming clear that writers' engagement with their inner voice, and the role it plays within the literary-creative process, changes radically over the course of their careers.
Early on in their writing life, there may be little to distinguish the inner voice of the author from the voice of the character. Writers describing the formative years of a career have spoken of character formation as a case of "throwing" their voice, frequently tasking characters with voicing what they, the author, do not feel able to express. At this time, the inner voice tends to be experienced as integral, direct and personal; authors' engagement with the inner voice through writing may be inflected by a sense of distress or turmoil, and motivated by the need to negotiate their position in the world.
Over time, however, interviewees report that they have noticed transformations in the dialogism, empathic and imaginative qualities, and polyphony of the inner voice. These changes may be informed by many different registers of experience – both conscious and subconscious – as the inner voice begins to contain echoes of other voices harvested from life and literature.
Describing this transition as a "necessary" phase in their careers, writers have conceived of this process in therapeutic terms: affirming the more expansive, and sometimes escapist, qualities of the writing process in maturity, and of creating characters who are no longer versions of themselves.
• Jennifer Hodgson is a researcher working on the Writers' Inner Voices, which is part of the Hearing the Voice project at Durham University To take part in the survey as a reader, click here.
