Robot voice
Bland functionality
I am reading a novel at the minute which is written in the style that a lot of novels these days are written in. The style is basically a sort of hyper generic robot voice. It reads like:
Mary waited at the bar for Tom. When Tom arrived he sat on the stool beside her. He ordered a drink. He didn’t ask if she wanted anything. He could see she already had a drink.
And so on and so on and so on.
Sometimes, instead of close third person, a book written in robot voice may take the form of unemotive first person:
When I walked into the bar I looked at the menu. I saw a beer I liked. I ordered it and sat down to wait for Tom.
It doesn’t actually matter which specific book I am reading right now, I don’t think. So many are like this presently, and this one is not an especially bad version.
Maybe none of them are truly “bad”. When something is this bald it is hard to point to any element of it and say “that bit really doesn’t work”. There are sort of lumpy bits you will notice, but even the lumps have a muted, restrained quality. For example, whenever things are described this tends to be in highly cliched terms (people being “chilled to the bone”, ketchup looking “like blood” and the like) but the general absence of description means these cliches are used relatively sparsely, and so you couldn’t say “oh that book is full of cliches”, you’d have to say “yeah it’s a bit cliched in parts”.
In fact everything about “robot voice” is sparse. It puts me in mind of a great featureless plain, stretching out as far as the eye can see, with nothing sticking up out of it. No trees, no buildings, no people. Nothing which could be considered aesthetically objectionable, but nothing which could be considered aesthetically exciting either.
It’s a scene that doesn’t ask an opinion of you. There aren’t any brutalist buildings which you might think are ugly, or interestingly dressed people, or any number of other objects whose appeal is inherently subjective.
I think this style comes from MFA courses but I don’t really know. A lot of MFA books are written like this but some of them aren’t, and some non-MFA books are. But I do think the focus grouped feel of this writing, the sense that everything distinctive has been shaved off, or at least sanded down, seems to fit with what I understand of how MFA courses work.
The way I understand it, on an MFA everyone brings their writing to a group feedback session and then everyone else gives feedback on the writing, saying which bits they like and don’t like. To me it seems that this environment would, by design, essentially exert a gravitational pull on everyone’s work, dragging all of it in towards a bland middle ground.
And this does fit with my experience of reading “robot voice” writing. I don’t find it enjoyable or exciting to read, but it is functional, easy to read and, as I said, there isn’t anything overtly objectionable about it. The most you can say is that it’s bland or unoriginal.
There isn’t anything necessarily wrong with this. I’m sure lots of people like it. But I personally don’t read fiction wanting it to be functional or plain. The writing I love to read is writing only one person could or would have written. I find it boring when everything tends in the same direction.
I haven’t finished the particular book I am reading yet and I will because I never don’t finish books. But I looked up reviews while writing this anyway. I wasn’t surprised to find it described as stylish, beautifully written and so on. This is how “robot voice” always tends to be described, to the point were I am now a little suspicious of those words. But really I don’t think they fit at all.
To me style is defined by distinctiveness. A stylish person, say, is someone who doesn’t dress the same as everyone else. Maybe the extreme restraint of “robot voice” was singular at some point, but since almost everything is like this now, I just don’t think it makes sense to call it stylish any longer.
And I frankly don’t understand the use of the word beautiful in this context at all. Isn’t beauty supposed to provoke some kind of feeling in you? Isn’t beauty supposed to be rare or surprising?
I don’t even think beauty is the intent here; beauty is too subjective. Functionality, on the other hand, is something we can all understand and agree on the value of.
Till next time xxx