From Syracuse…

…with love.

Please forgive this disruption of our usual routine; I’m going to do a short, two-part Office Hours today, simply because I’ve been teaching my lovely Syracuse students all weekend and have fallen a little behind. (On everything.)

Q1.

Okay, so the (excellent) reader commentary on “The Child” and voice has got me thinking. My question is: can we (or should we) “hear” our own voice when writing?

Obviously when reading, we hear the voice of the writer…because it’s different from our own voice. I can clearly hear my favorite writers(Jennifer Egan, Graham Greene, Elmore Leonard) because I’m familiar with them and recognize their voices. But I can’t “hear” my own voice on the page. My voice feels like the absence of voice…except when I’m consciously imitating someone else’s voice. Like you’ve noted with Hemingway, I spent a lot of time climbing up Elmore Leonard Mountain, and yeah, that felt great for a while because it sounded like Elmore Leonard—sounded, to my mind, like “real” writing, sou…