I don't understand the big deal about narrative voice. Everyone's got a unique way of putting words on the page, just like everybody's got a unique fingerprint. I only follow two rules:
1. Sound like yourself. Sometimes it's fun to get caught up in a super theatrical voice and before you (*cough* read: I *cough*) know it, you've got a whole (condescending) manuscript that's painful to read.
But your own voice is effortlessly authentic, and you don't need a whole lot of WIZZBANG to make it special. Didn't you go to the assemblies in elementary school? You're a unique and beautiful snowflake. No need for improvement.
2. When the action heats up, cool the voice down, and vice versa. The juicier the action, the crisper the tone. Otherwise everything just gets really confusing or super boring/dry.
The harder you work at your narrative voice, I think, the worse it'll get. But I'm not so sure how to deal with character voices.
I try to differentiate them, and they all sound theatrical. I try to make them crisp and authentic, and they all sound alike. AAACK! And I used to think dialogue was my strength!
The dialogue is one reason I wanted to give a few manuscript pages to my friends. Last time my writers' group saw a piece (it was only about four pages long) the consensus was that the characters were hard to differentiate. Their suggestion was to give each character a out of this world physical trait, so they'd be easier to keep track of, but I knew the problem: though the characters were very different people, they both sounded alike.
In a long piece with a large(ish) cast of characters, it's tough to remember everyone's vocal tics and way of stringing words together. I made a cheat sheet, but.... I still don't feel that I've hit it right.
How does anybody else deal with this?
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