I've been sitting on this quote for a couple of days now and still am not making a connection to writing. Speaking only for myself, who has been writing in some fashion for six decades and finding over that time my voice, or style or whatever it is has continued to evolve in response to my growth as a human and all the myriad sorts of stimuli out there I find myself responding to. Sometimes I find a groove or a track and it goes along pretty well and I feel satisfied, then, until the next time, which might be similar or might be something else. I do think I have an idiosyncratic vein of sorts along the lines George has mentioned, and I wander along that source tweaking this and that to get where I want. I have never experienced this process to be related or connected to a crisis. I get the point about crisis bringing out one's true colors, but writing is proactive, (perhaps conscious writing can avert crisis I don't know), and for me writing implies a mindfulness and engagement that can light us up when things go well. Writing grounds me to the human condition in my own peculiar way. I guess that's what art does. Anyway, I'm not used to writing about writing and am pretty challenged to say what I want here. Oh gosh, I hope I haven't reached a crisis.
I have never experienced this process to be related or connected to a crisis. I get the point about crisis bringing out one's true colors, but writing is proactive, (perhaps conscious writing can avert crisis I don't know), and for me writing implies a mindfulness and engagement that can light us up when things go well. Writing grounds me to the human condition in my own peculiar way. I guess that's what art does
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Crisis does not seem to come into this, I agree with this. Perhaps the word--to complicate matters (further)--which could apply is 'register.' From Abdulrazak Gurnah:
In a 2004 essay, “Writing and Place,” Gurnah notes, “I believe that writers come to writing through reading, that it is out of the process of accumulation and accretion, of echoes and repetition, that they fashion a register that enables them to write.”
Thanks for posting this Brian. Another writer to check out. The word "register" is intriguing. On first thought "register" sounds rather rigid, but maybe not?
I'm trying to understand what this quote means. So, is that when you are painting, and you reach a point of not knowing what to do (a crisis moment), that's when your true, individual style emerges? Is that it? Like, when push comes to shove and you've got to respond, your real self will step forward? I think that's it. Yes?
The way I explain it to my students at least (my interpretation) is that we have an innate "character" and innate impulses to react to stimuli (or problems in this case.) Some people panic and act rashly, some people act with cool detachment, some avoid until the last instant, others attack head-on and damn the torpedoes. I think what people call "style" is just our decision-making "habits". (what kinds of clothes we choose, what foods we like, etc.) I feel like I can look at my students behaviors and "foresee" what their mature work will look like, they just can't see it yet because they aren't yet able to draw and paint intuitively----I compare it to how one's handwriting evolves---at first it's copybook, but as you think less about the craft of making the actual letters correctly, and you focus more on what you are communicating, the "style" begins to emerge as your "mature" (adult) handwriting. (Patient, impatient, precise, careless, orderly, direct and plain, etc.)
Not sure if that helps, but that's how I think of "style" in the visual arts at least.
Thank you for this explanation. So style (in painting) is attached to temperament--the way one expresses themselves is tied up with who they are. That makes perfect sense to me. But can it be applied to writing? In writing, style is thought of as the manner in which something is expressed--the words chosen, the tone, the grammar, the rhythm. I think, however, a writer sometimes chooses a different style depending on audience or purpose. But maybe i am getting too caught up in the meaning of the word "style" here. It's a super interesting quote!
"the way one expresses themselves is tied up with who they are"
It seems to me that that is essential to what George is saying above. And so can (must) be applied to writing.
If we think of style as something to be "applied" (in another sense of the word) to a text like icing on a cake -- the facade that readers first come across -- I can only fear the result will be artificial (from artifice and not art).
Yes, thank you. Now that i read what I wrote, that quote can obviously apply to writing. But a writer can also apply a style on purpose--think of hard-boiled detective fiction. So I guess my point was that style may mean something semantically different when applied to writing.
Think of George's "style" in Sticks as opposed to Victory Lap. They are different. He has applied style differently in each. No? God, I am SO literal. (I was just about to write "sorry" but then I remembered the "sorry" conversation over on another site.)
PS in searching for that quote online so that I could perhaps see it in context, i could only find it attributed to Frank Auerbach--but the internet isn't always correct--maybe Auerbach is quoting Kitaj.
Replying to all of the above! While I don't consider myself anything more than an "amateur" in writing, I do think it applies to writing because I think our "style" is evident in almost everything we do, because it's just how we go about making any kind of decision. I was thinking of my father a few days ago, who passed away in 2020, and how---while I know I will never talk to him ever again---I know PRECISELY what he WOULD say about a given situation if he were here---that was his "style". :)
Mary, thank you for your sleuthing re: the quote, I always try to attribute correctly. I wish I could tell you where I picked it up, but it was at least 35 years ago back when I was in art school, so I have no idea where I saw it! Auerbach and Kitaj were definitely hanging out with each other so who knows . . .
Re: applying a style . . .
I do some pro bono illustration for a group a few times a year, and depending on the event, I'll often have fun with it: "this is my chance to do a "Blue Note Jazz Album cover" . . . or "My 60's James Bond Movie Poster". or "my Mucha poster!" I find it can be tremendous fun (and very educational!) to occasionally try to emulate an iconic style.
10 years ago or more, I read a book about the craftsmanship of writing sentences, where the author railed a bit about the fetish of short sentences, and demonstrated that one could write beautiful long sentences that were clear if well constructed. That semester, I wrote all of my required "peer evaluations" as a single sentence just for fun. :)
John - great that you brought in visual arts at the end of this reply to Mary g. I often find, in writers whose style or voice I admire, a pre verbal step. They are “seeing” the world in some idiosyncratic yet recognizable way and are able then to transfer that into a prose narrative that somehow maps that seeing. The ethnobotanist Wade Davis once put that his favorite fiction writers were like anthropologists from Mars. It’s seeing the world afresh - like a tag wiping a dirty window and the reader says, “yes, that’s how it is”. So here the opposite of voice is “cliche”.
Thanks for the comment Stephen, I agree! Love the "Anthropologist from Mars" line---that's how I felt reading "The Good Earth" by Pearl Buck.
One additional aside---I worked as a book illustrator for years (children's books and bookjackets), and so I was often having to "interpret" a writer's prose for pictorial ideas. In working with many of them over the years, I came to think of what the writer did was not so much "seeing"(in a literal sense) , as "imagining" a situation---and their professional "skill" was being able to translate their imagination into words that evoked an equivalent emotional response in their readers. (The actual visuals they would describe to me would generally make terrible paintings.)
(On a humorous note, as a book illustrator, writers sometimes drive us crazy because they can write: "And thus, the Spanish Armada assailed the British fleet" . . . (9 words, 10 seconds of work equals a complex 70 hour painting that's going to be absolute hell . . .) or one of my personal experience:
Bruce Coville wrote into one of our books "It was the most amazing thing he had ever seen." . . . . . . . and then I had to try to paint THAT. Lol. (Good luck!)
Every time I read George’s answers to these questions, I feel like I’ve just had an incredible pep talk that makes me want to remedy my lazy writerly ways. The questions themselves are great, too.
There are plenty of examples, Nabokov is an extremely knowledgeable and inspiring teacher, and the book’s a great read.
For what it's worth, I think that the neutral quality in Tolstoy and the neutral quality in Chekhov are already there in Russian, although they're very distinctive: in Tolstoy, I see something similar to a thoroughly drawn architectural plan, whereas in Chekhov, the plan is sketched more hurriedly but spontaneously. Tolstoy reads like a clear winter day, Chekhov like a sunset in late autumn.
I have fond memories of cutting out sentences, whole paragraphs even, to be within the word limit I had defined at the outset. Suddenly two previously distant parts would come into contact and produce a new idea - something that had never occurred to me before.
This thing I did might be a very bad idea so please realize I’m speaking as a new writer. I realized recently that I was telling a story in a very specific voice that had a strong vibe somewhere between Dante and TS Eliot. Very not me. When I neutralized it the story became less interesting. I was going to find another story for it, but it kept insisting upon this one. So it’s now a character. I think it’s working but you never know?
Stephen King, in an introduction to Harlan Ellison's work, written markedly in Ellisons style, explained it with his grandmother's adage: "Milk always tastes like what's next to it in the fridge".
"My wife begins to scream and roll around on the floor, foaming, pulling her hair out in great clots, drumming her heels, crying out: "I WANT A DIVORCE! THIS MAN HAS CORRUPTED MY CHILDREN AND I WANT A FUCKING DIVORCE!"
My heart glows with the warmth of fulfillment (or maybe it's just acid indigestion). My mother's homilies have slipped into the minds of yet another generation, just as chemical waste has a way of seeping into the water table. I think: Ah-hah-hah-hah! Another triumph for us bog-cutters! Long live the Irish!
Another of this wonderful woman's wonderful sayings (I told you—I got a million of 'em; don't make me prove it) was "Milk always takes the flavor of what's next to it in the icebox." Not a very useful saying, you might think, but I suspect it's not only the reason I'm writing this introduction, but the reason I'm writing it the way I'm writing it.
Does it sound like Harlan wrote it?
It does?
That's because I just finished the admirable book which follows. For the last four days I have been, so to speak, sitting next to Harlan in the icebox. I am not copying his style; nothing as low as that. I have, rather, taken a brief impression of his style, the way that, when we were kids, we used to be able to take a brief impression of Beetle Bailey or Blondie from the Sunday funnies with a piece of Silly Putty (headline in the New York Times Book Review: KING OFFERS EERILY APT METAPHOR FOR HIS OWN MIND!!)."
I wonder whether anyone else has experienced an inner silence developing at the same time as more time is invested in writing? And the spread of that inner silence to the outside. Perhaps it is a way of clearing the ground so as to allow my voice to emerge one day ( hopefully )? The quietness also seems to have other benefits. New acquantainces seem to lean in wanting to connect. Even business pitches are becoming crispier. Maybe I making it all up.
One must have vacancy, be vacant, for something to appear, find a home. If the inn is full, so to speak, little new can arise. Fewer words at this point . . . Silent, by anagram, is to listen.
Another words, or set of words, for this may be 'inner peace.' So great that this is happening, and able to be put out here for others' benefit.
Yes, I've had this feeling, although it hasn't permeated everything. It's more contained to the moment and a bit of afterglow, but it's what I miss when I don't work for any length of time. I feel bad, just jangly and empty, but when i work well I feel like the time spent is a single moment that stretches forever.
“We want to be fully ourselves in our prose (unique, necessary, original). For me, this is not about ‘recreating my idea of who I wish I was’ but ‘blundering into some version of myself, through editing, that I greet with a startle of recognition.’” My words for this day! Thanks!
“… rather, I’d say that a person becomes a writer in that moment when she first realizes that meaning and language and ethos and understanding are all, really, the same thing: that we live more deeply when we consent to a deep, thoughtful relation to language.”
Right there with you. I think I need help understanding how ethos fits in, though. I tried looking it up, and it seems to mean so many different things in different contexts. What does ethos mean to you in this context?
This is all extremely excellent advice from George. I think ‘finding your voice’ takes self-acceptance. And George offers a really helpful line-level-revision tool for practicing that self-acceptance in small steps.
I can so relate to this question! It's hard for me to believe, but I've been writing for almost 40 years now. (Jeez, you'd think i'd have more to show for it...). When i started writing, and for MANY YEARS after, I wrote in all sorts of voices that were not mine. Like the questioner, i wrote often in the voices of the writers I was reading. Oh, boy, did I write some terrible stuff in those voices. The voices in my stories were so completely embedded, that if I had tried George's method of micro-editing, I don't think I'd ever have finished a story. Those stories WERE those voices--but none of the voices were mine. It took me YEARS to finally find what I would call my own voice, the one I now write in, the one that seems to come most naturally to me. And i think the trick to me getting to this place was... those years. For me, there were no shortcuts. Just thousands of sentences, most of them really bad. Then, i don't know how it happened, but i think I had simply practiced enough. I could finally write like me. Now--I don't know if this is good or bad but--people who know me are always saying that when they've read my books, it felt that I was right there in the room, telling them those stories. Because the first person voice for both of them sounded just like I sound. (And they figured it was super easy for me to write them as well. As if....) So maybe that's a trick as well--write in your very own voice, the one you speak with. I've written plenty of stuff that is NOT first person, but which I also can recognize as "my voice." Again--it was the years of practice. Weirdly, the thing I'm working on now uses a slightly different voice, something that i've conjured from my depths. I don't think it's recognizable as "mary g." like my other work, but it's still me. I feel the voice emerging from me in a real way.
Is any of this helpful? My main message is that it takes practice. You start by imitating and having everyone else's voices in your head. And eventually, those voices go away and you are left alone with yourself. i really think this will happen for you if you let it.
Also, yes, of course you are a writer. You write poetry in the middle of the night! You have words pouring out of you! You are the very definition of a writer.
This is so valuable. Somehow the voice, or the tone and timbre (?) of the language, its register, must align with the reality of the person writing. It that alignment is not there, then it comes across as false, or invented, or unnatural. A good friend wrote in some indistinct Southern dialect, it was all over the place, with some gerunds getting an apostrophe, others not, odd turns of phrase--he was from upstate New York and hadn't hit the note.
Eudora Welty, on the other hand, she hits it every time, right?
Many hours, and finally something clicks. One of the problems I find with speculative fiction in particular are the disembodied voices. A future city, people following a climate disaster, etc.--the style is sort of not of this Earth. We have prose style and we have voice--style is perhaps the conscious part, the culprit the left, more controlling, side of the brain, and style is perhaps the right side, vague, ineffable, but suffusing all we write with its essence and sensibility.
I love what you said about Chekhov being able to “go anywhere and describe anything.” And then today I saw, on Maria Popova’s website, this list of Chekhov’s six tenets of a great story!
1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature
I like how through revising I find the story and how to tell it. What I want to work on now is to be, as George says, "fully ourselves in our prose (unique, necessary, original). For me, this is not about “recreating my idea of who I wish I was” but “blundering into some version of myself, through editing, that I greet with a startle of recognition.”
I'm coming to voice from a slightly different angle. In the historical fiction I've written (and still write) I have no narratorial persona or voice. Everything is told in the major characters' point-of-view, and to a considerable extent through interior monologue. The struggle is to find each protagonist's voice (spoken or in an approximation of thought). This can be made more difficult when the characters are historical and we have no line on exactly how people spoke conversationally, at least before, say the mid-18th century. And how much do we want to be / can we be historically authentic in spoken and "thought" language?
OK, I realize I'm branching off from the theme of this discussion and getting into something more appropriate to... well, a discussion of LITB :)
But just to say that I've learned (thanks to George and Story Club) that rewriting, close editing, are absolutely essential to the development of a character's voice (inner/outer). At the same time as the revelation of voice reveals the character (and the character influences back on the voice). And the character(s) make choices, and their choices make plot. And so on...
I tried to write in what I thought was a more historically accurate voice, but it sounded stilted. I read Emily Wilson say, in an interview, that she translated Homer's Odyssey and the Iliad in a more contemporary speech pattern, because the ancient storytellers were also speaking in the speech patterns prevalent at the time. Her opening sentence in the Odyssey is "Tell me about a complicated man." But she said she doesn't use contractions. Instead of writing It's, she would write It is and I have chosen to do that too. I never use contemporary slang and sometimes I choose words that might be less conventional in contemporary usage. Anyway, that's how I solved the problem. But maybe that sounds stilted too?
Someone who seems to have solved this problem is Hilary Mantel, who constructed convincing speech patterns for her characters which "sound right" but are not really the way people of the time probably spoke. That must (I suppose) be akin to the problem faced by SF and fantasy writers in their imagined worlds: how many neologisms can a reader take? Setting fiction in history is trickier because you can't just invent.
I try to avoid anachronisms, but when you check certain expressions, you may be surprised to learn that they've been on the record for centuries and might well have been used by your characters. But how will a reader take them? Will they jolt her out of the fictive dream?
Otherwise my character's speech and thought patterns are appropriate to their social class, level of education, etc. Or to their efforts to break free of those determinations. I use contractions because I mostly want fluid and rapid thought processes. My POV characters are in different ways low on the social scale and don't naturally use a ceremonious tone in speaking (unless obliged to by their situation, as servant, for example).
I’ve always thought of the writer’s authentic voice as something of a mystery. Or, magic. I can’t explain it. So this is a beautiful answer to this difficult question. In my experience, finding- or rather, asserting- your voice is a lot about trust. Surrendering, rather than controlling and manipulating. It’s easier said than done, I know.
George, if you see this and if you have time, I'm hoping that you can give your definitions of "voice" and "style," and how you see the difference between the two.
It seems to me that a writer may have several voices for fiction (a detective novel, a comedy, a romance all written by the same person), and maybe just one (usually) for non-fiction (like David Sedaris). So a writer's "Voice" may be work-dependent, right?
When you say a writer discovers their voice in revision, you're talking only about one particular piece of writing, right? Or are you saying the "writer's voice" emerges, time and again, through revision--always the same recognizable voice of a certain writer throughout their work?
People in the comments seem to absolutely agree with you that voice comes through revision. I think voice begins in the first draft and then is fine-tuned in revision. The story IS the voice and vice versa. No?? It's all of a piece. Yes, you make it sharper, better, more effective while revising. But you start out with a voice from the first sentence, no?
(I think perhaps I am the kind of writer you describe who sounds (often) like themselves on the page and then revising is more for plot, word choice, tightening etc.--and not for discovering voice. So that may be where my confusion comes from.)
Hi Mary. Honestly, I think I use "voice" and "style" interchangeably. To me it's all about what the prose "sounds like." Maybe we could say that the voice of a piece emerges with revision, no matter what it is. This is true (for me) in everything I write: fiction, non-fiction, all of it. And yes: there's something there at the beginning and it gets tuned in. Sometimes, for me, though, there's a great distance between what I start with and what I end up with. That may be why I'm such a proponent of this method. Also, in terms of the structure and the ideas, my early drafts are all over the place and need the refining that comes with revision. Some people, I think, have minds that are just more linear and sensible.
I don't think I have the "same, recognizable" voice, no, from piece to piece - it's more like I carve out a sound and then refine that sound. Maybe there's some background thing that would make a person recognize that the same writer wrote, say, "Sparrow" and "Jon" but I'm not sure. I'm very happy to be someone who writes in many different voices - each of them refined into its specific self by the practices I am always yapping about.
Ah, this was the question about your self-concept of your own voice which I was hoping you’d answer, which emerged from the OH on 14th April, George. I see voice as largely led by the piece too, rather than a fixed idea of what it is, and was wondering (in a chat with someone else about sometimes recognisable voices) how you felt around your own. I also think voice and style are very synonymous in this way too. Good to hear your answer, as well as the main post with other detailed enlightenments.
Thanks for asking the question, Mary. Sorry - late to the party as I’ve been a bit overwhelmed by diverse life-tasks recently. But glad I checked back to read, as wouldn’t have wanted to miss George’s answer! :)
Thanks so much, George. I used to teach argumentative writing to undergrads and I think the definitions we used there have gotten in the way of my understanding what you're saying. (There is the voice of authority and then there is the particular style used in a particular piece of writing to shore up that authority.) So I'm happy to see that you use the term interchangeably--that clears up a lot of my confusion. As far as your own voice--yes, the voice in Sparrow is quite different from Jon, but still--to me--recognizably you. There is something there that just says "George," though I knew in advance of reading that you'd written both, so maybe i can't say that with total conviction. But pretty close! Again, i know your point here is to revise, revise, revise, and I think that is necessary whether a writer is more 'linear' thinking or not. Writing, as i don't have to tell you, happens in revision. And the voice emerges, stronger and stronger. Still, I think with enough practice and confidence, a person lets go of those imitative voices in the head and launches in with something that is there own. Thanks again. I think you know by now that I start losing my mind when I can't quite grasp something--particularly when everyone else seems to be having no trouble with a concept. Happy mother's day to Paula!
Yes, what it sounds like. Something knows, and it's in this quiet place, often, about which Nick was writing. (A humble contribution here.)
With revision, I almost always 'break' something which formed or coalesced originally, around the original spark. It's addition or deletion, but rarely, say, reworking a whole sentence.
Hi Mary, Here's my two cents, which is sort of not very valuable since George weighed in with like $50 worth (or $50 zillion), but I'm reminded of music and singing. We can probably all think of a favorite musician who has songs in many styles, vibes, feeling tones. But we recognize immediately that it's them. We know their voice(s) but not every song is the same nor do they evoke the same kind of feelings inside us. Maybe the song itself speaks to them and guides their adaptation. So perhaps we would say they are using a different voice or perhaps we would say it's a different style. But it's 'them'.
thanks, Kurt. In this whole thread, i've thought of 'style' as it is used in, say The Elements of Style, and not as something equal to "voice." So i've been having a different conversation from everyone else, i think. I do see what you're saying here and agree that a singer's voice can be very distinctive regardless of what they are singing.
This type of discussion blows me away (not to be flippant, however). This is where it's happening. That revision, the process described and emphasized over and over (but just enough) here, must be a constant effort, not only to refine, but to get closer to one's self, or the frequency of that narrative or specific spark of storytelling.
Revision. Re. Vision. Seeing anew, repeatedly.
I just wrote something, 5400 words, with a first-person voice, that of a pedant. Then I switched it around and rewrote, from the perspective of the person he was watching. Completely different words were attracted, different essences. Yet that 'background thing' of the instructor response below is there as well--somehow what runs through me accretes, like water dripping from a stalactite, in similar patterns.
Perhaps the development is to break these, not fall into 'staff writer syndrome.' (Which may have its merits, or at least uses, as well.)
When my art students ask me about "finding their style" I always share with them my favorite quote about it from the painter R.B. Kitaj:
"Style is not about having a program--it's simply how one behaves in a crisis."
--R.B. Kitaj
Love this - so true.
I've been sitting on this quote for a couple of days now and still am not making a connection to writing. Speaking only for myself, who has been writing in some fashion for six decades and finding over that time my voice, or style or whatever it is has continued to evolve in response to my growth as a human and all the myriad sorts of stimuli out there I find myself responding to. Sometimes I find a groove or a track and it goes along pretty well and I feel satisfied, then, until the next time, which might be similar or might be something else. I do think I have an idiosyncratic vein of sorts along the lines George has mentioned, and I wander along that source tweaking this and that to get where I want. I have never experienced this process to be related or connected to a crisis. I get the point about crisis bringing out one's true colors, but writing is proactive, (perhaps conscious writing can avert crisis I don't know), and for me writing implies a mindfulness and engagement that can light us up when things go well. Writing grounds me to the human condition in my own peculiar way. I guess that's what art does. Anyway, I'm not used to writing about writing and am pretty challenged to say what I want here. Oh gosh, I hope I haven't reached a crisis.
I have never experienced this process to be related or connected to a crisis. I get the point about crisis bringing out one's true colors, but writing is proactive, (perhaps conscious writing can avert crisis I don't know), and for me writing implies a mindfulness and engagement that can light us up when things go well. Writing grounds me to the human condition in my own peculiar way. I guess that's what art does
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Crisis does not seem to come into this, I agree with this. Perhaps the word--to complicate matters (further)--which could apply is 'register.' From Abdulrazak Gurnah:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-impact-of-abdulrazak-gurnahs-nobel-prize
In a 2004 essay, “Writing and Place,” Gurnah notes, “I believe that writers come to writing through reading, that it is out of the process of accumulation and accretion, of echoes and repetition, that they fashion a register that enables them to write.”
Thanks for posting this Brian. Another writer to check out. The word "register" is intriguing. On first thought "register" sounds rather rigid, but maybe not?
I'm trying to understand what this quote means. So, is that when you are painting, and you reach a point of not knowing what to do (a crisis moment), that's when your true, individual style emerges? Is that it? Like, when push comes to shove and you've got to respond, your real self will step forward? I think that's it. Yes?
Hi Mary,
The way I explain it to my students at least (my interpretation) is that we have an innate "character" and innate impulses to react to stimuli (or problems in this case.) Some people panic and act rashly, some people act with cool detachment, some avoid until the last instant, others attack head-on and damn the torpedoes. I think what people call "style" is just our decision-making "habits". (what kinds of clothes we choose, what foods we like, etc.) I feel like I can look at my students behaviors and "foresee" what their mature work will look like, they just can't see it yet because they aren't yet able to draw and paint intuitively----I compare it to how one's handwriting evolves---at first it's copybook, but as you think less about the craft of making the actual letters correctly, and you focus more on what you are communicating, the "style" begins to emerge as your "mature" (adult) handwriting. (Patient, impatient, precise, careless, orderly, direct and plain, etc.)
Not sure if that helps, but that's how I think of "style" in the visual arts at least.
Thank you for this explanation. So style (in painting) is attached to temperament--the way one expresses themselves is tied up with who they are. That makes perfect sense to me. But can it be applied to writing? In writing, style is thought of as the manner in which something is expressed--the words chosen, the tone, the grammar, the rhythm. I think, however, a writer sometimes chooses a different style depending on audience or purpose. But maybe i am getting too caught up in the meaning of the word "style" here. It's a super interesting quote!
"the way one expresses themselves is tied up with who they are"
It seems to me that that is essential to what George is saying above. And so can (must) be applied to writing.
If we think of style as something to be "applied" (in another sense of the word) to a text like icing on a cake -- the facade that readers first come across -- I can only fear the result will be artificial (from artifice and not art).
Yes, thank you. Now that i read what I wrote, that quote can obviously apply to writing. But a writer can also apply a style on purpose--think of hard-boiled detective fiction. So I guess my point was that style may mean something semantically different when applied to writing.
Think of George's "style" in Sticks as opposed to Victory Lap. They are different. He has applied style differently in each. No? God, I am SO literal. (I was just about to write "sorry" but then I remembered the "sorry" conversation over on another site.)
PS in searching for that quote online so that I could perhaps see it in context, i could only find it attributed to Frank Auerbach--but the internet isn't always correct--maybe Auerbach is quoting Kitaj.
Replying to all of the above! While I don't consider myself anything more than an "amateur" in writing, I do think it applies to writing because I think our "style" is evident in almost everything we do, because it's just how we go about making any kind of decision. I was thinking of my father a few days ago, who passed away in 2020, and how---while I know I will never talk to him ever again---I know PRECISELY what he WOULD say about a given situation if he were here---that was his "style". :)
Mary, thank you for your sleuthing re: the quote, I always try to attribute correctly. I wish I could tell you where I picked it up, but it was at least 35 years ago back when I was in art school, so I have no idea where I saw it! Auerbach and Kitaj were definitely hanging out with each other so who knows . . .
Re: applying a style . . .
I do some pro bono illustration for a group a few times a year, and depending on the event, I'll often have fun with it: "this is my chance to do a "Blue Note Jazz Album cover" . . . or "My 60's James Bond Movie Poster". or "my Mucha poster!" I find it can be tremendous fun (and very educational!) to occasionally try to emulate an iconic style.
10 years ago or more, I read a book about the craftsmanship of writing sentences, where the author railed a bit about the fetish of short sentences, and demonstrated that one could write beautiful long sentences that were clear if well constructed. That semester, I wrote all of my required "peer evaluations" as a single sentence just for fun. :)
Your own unique personality^^
John - great that you brought in visual arts at the end of this reply to Mary g. I often find, in writers whose style or voice I admire, a pre verbal step. They are “seeing” the world in some idiosyncratic yet recognizable way and are able then to transfer that into a prose narrative that somehow maps that seeing. The ethnobotanist Wade Davis once put that his favorite fiction writers were like anthropologists from Mars. It’s seeing the world afresh - like a tag wiping a dirty window and the reader says, “yes, that’s how it is”. So here the opposite of voice is “cliche”.
Thanks for the comment Stephen, I agree! Love the "Anthropologist from Mars" line---that's how I felt reading "The Good Earth" by Pearl Buck.
One additional aside---I worked as a book illustrator for years (children's books and bookjackets), and so I was often having to "interpret" a writer's prose for pictorial ideas. In working with many of them over the years, I came to think of what the writer did was not so much "seeing"(in a literal sense) , as "imagining" a situation---and their professional "skill" was being able to translate their imagination into words that evoked an equivalent emotional response in their readers. (The actual visuals they would describe to me would generally make terrible paintings.)
(On a humorous note, as a book illustrator, writers sometimes drive us crazy because they can write: "And thus, the Spanish Armada assailed the British fleet" . . . (9 words, 10 seconds of work equals a complex 70 hour painting that's going to be absolute hell . . .) or one of my personal experience:
Bruce Coville wrote into one of our books "It was the most amazing thing he had ever seen." . . . . . . . and then I had to try to paint THAT. Lol. (Good luck!)
:)
So many layers. Handwriting, letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, essays/chapters/books.
I just love to skat..^^
Transcends the words, goes straight to the music.
okay, thank you!
Love this!!
Every time I read George’s answers to these questions, I feel like I’ve just had an incredible pep talk that makes me want to remedy my lazy writerly ways. The questions themselves are great, too.
Same!
For those who wish to know more about Tolstoy and Chekhov in their original Russian voices, a good first step is to read Nabokov's "Lectures on Russian Literature" – https://www.amazon.com/Lectures-Russian-Literature-Vladimir-Nabokov/dp/0156027763.
There are plenty of examples, Nabokov is an extremely knowledgeable and inspiring teacher, and the book’s a great read.
For what it's worth, I think that the neutral quality in Tolstoy and the neutral quality in Chekhov are already there in Russian, although they're very distinctive: in Tolstoy, I see something similar to a thoroughly drawn architectural plan, whereas in Chekhov, the plan is sketched more hurriedly but spontaneously. Tolstoy reads like a clear winter day, Chekhov like a sunset in late autumn.
Thanks for the book suggestion, Portia! I was vaguely aware of it, but now based on your recommendation I have ordered it on Amazon.
I have fond memories of cutting out sentences, whole paragraphs even, to be within the word limit I had defined at the outset. Suddenly two previously distant parts would come into contact and produce a new idea - something that had never occurred to me before.
Thanks, George.
This thing I did might be a very bad idea so please realize I’m speaking as a new writer. I realized recently that I was telling a story in a very specific voice that had a strong vibe somewhere between Dante and TS Eliot. Very not me. When I neutralized it the story became less interesting. I was going to find another story for it, but it kept insisting upon this one. So it’s now a character. I think it’s working but you never know?
Yes!
Love this!
Stephen King, in an introduction to Harlan Ellison's work, written markedly in Ellisons style, explained it with his grandmother's adage: "Milk always tastes like what's next to it in the fridge".
"My wife begins to scream and roll around on the floor, foaming, pulling her hair out in great clots, drumming her heels, crying out: "I WANT A DIVORCE! THIS MAN HAS CORRUPTED MY CHILDREN AND I WANT A FUCKING DIVORCE!"
My heart glows with the warmth of fulfillment (or maybe it's just acid indigestion). My mother's homilies have slipped into the minds of yet another generation, just as chemical waste has a way of seeping into the water table. I think: Ah-hah-hah-hah! Another triumph for us bog-cutters! Long live the Irish!
Another of this wonderful woman's wonderful sayings (I told you—I got a million of 'em; don't make me prove it) was "Milk always takes the flavor of what's next to it in the icebox." Not a very useful saying, you might think, but I suspect it's not only the reason I'm writing this introduction, but the reason I'm writing it the way I'm writing it.
Does it sound like Harlan wrote it?
It does?
That's because I just finished the admirable book which follows. For the last four days I have been, so to speak, sitting next to Harlan in the icebox. I am not copying his style; nothing as low as that. I have, rather, taken a brief impression of his style, the way that, when we were kids, we used to be able to take a brief impression of Beetle Bailey or Blondie from the Sunday funnies with a piece of Silly Putty (headline in the New York Times Book Review: KING OFFERS EERILY APT METAPHOR FOR HIS OWN MIND!!)."
Wow, I’m slightly obsessed by Harlan Ellison, I knew of no such book or introduction. My old screenwriting teacher loved him too
The full intro can be found online I only used an excerpt
Stalking the nightmare is the book
http://www.baen.com/Chapters/ERBAEN0077/ERBAEN0077.htm
I wonder whether anyone else has experienced an inner silence developing at the same time as more time is invested in writing? And the spread of that inner silence to the outside. Perhaps it is a way of clearing the ground so as to allow my voice to emerge one day ( hopefully )? The quietness also seems to have other benefits. New acquantainces seem to lean in wanting to connect. Even business pitches are becoming crispier. Maybe I making it all up.
I know this feeling you're describing, Nick, yes.
Hi Nick, yes. It’s a kind of meditative state, isn’t it? That can bring the world knocking, just from the different, I suppose ‘vibes’ you send out.
One must have vacancy, be vacant, for something to appear, find a home. If the inn is full, so to speak, little new can arise. Fewer words at this point . . . Silent, by anagram, is to listen.
Another words, or set of words, for this may be 'inner peace.' So great that this is happening, and able to be put out here for others' benefit.
Yes, I've had this feeling, although it hasn't permeated everything. It's more contained to the moment and a bit of afterglow, but it's what I miss when I don't work for any length of time. I feel bad, just jangly and empty, but when i work well I feel like the time spent is a single moment that stretches forever.
“We want to be fully ourselves in our prose (unique, necessary, original). For me, this is not about ‘recreating my idea of who I wish I was’ but ‘blundering into some version of myself, through editing, that I greet with a startle of recognition.’” My words for this day! Thanks!
“… rather, I’d say that a person becomes a writer in that moment when she first realizes that meaning and language and ethos and understanding are all, really, the same thing: that we live more deeply when we consent to a deep, thoughtful relation to language.”
Love this so much.
Same here. It feels also something like consenting to live in the world and be a real person in lieu of being an automaton.
Right there with you. I think I need help understanding how ethos fits in, though. I tried looking it up, and it seems to mean so many different things in different contexts. What does ethos mean to you in this context?
I'd say (to be simple) fundamental values.
Thanks John
Hi Erik. I think in this particular context, ethos refers to a person's belief system. But maybe someone else will weigh in.
Thanks Mary
This is all extremely excellent advice from George. I think ‘finding your voice’ takes self-acceptance. And George offers a really helpful line-level-revision tool for practicing that self-acceptance in small steps.
I can so relate to this question! It's hard for me to believe, but I've been writing for almost 40 years now. (Jeez, you'd think i'd have more to show for it...). When i started writing, and for MANY YEARS after, I wrote in all sorts of voices that were not mine. Like the questioner, i wrote often in the voices of the writers I was reading. Oh, boy, did I write some terrible stuff in those voices. The voices in my stories were so completely embedded, that if I had tried George's method of micro-editing, I don't think I'd ever have finished a story. Those stories WERE those voices--but none of the voices were mine. It took me YEARS to finally find what I would call my own voice, the one I now write in, the one that seems to come most naturally to me. And i think the trick to me getting to this place was... those years. For me, there were no shortcuts. Just thousands of sentences, most of them really bad. Then, i don't know how it happened, but i think I had simply practiced enough. I could finally write like me. Now--I don't know if this is good or bad but--people who know me are always saying that when they've read my books, it felt that I was right there in the room, telling them those stories. Because the first person voice for both of them sounded just like I sound. (And they figured it was super easy for me to write them as well. As if....) So maybe that's a trick as well--write in your very own voice, the one you speak with. I've written plenty of stuff that is NOT first person, but which I also can recognize as "my voice." Again--it was the years of practice. Weirdly, the thing I'm working on now uses a slightly different voice, something that i've conjured from my depths. I don't think it's recognizable as "mary g." like my other work, but it's still me. I feel the voice emerging from me in a real way.
Is any of this helpful? My main message is that it takes practice. You start by imitating and having everyone else's voices in your head. And eventually, those voices go away and you are left alone with yourself. i really think this will happen for you if you let it.
Also, yes, of course you are a writer. You write poetry in the middle of the night! You have words pouring out of you! You are the very definition of a writer.
This is so valuable. Somehow the voice, or the tone and timbre (?) of the language, its register, must align with the reality of the person writing. It that alignment is not there, then it comes across as false, or invented, or unnatural. A good friend wrote in some indistinct Southern dialect, it was all over the place, with some gerunds getting an apostrophe, others not, odd turns of phrase--he was from upstate New York and hadn't hit the note.
Eudora Welty, on the other hand, she hits it every time, right?
Many hours, and finally something clicks. One of the problems I find with speculative fiction in particular are the disembodied voices. A future city, people following a climate disaster, etc.--the style is sort of not of this Earth. We have prose style and we have voice--style is perhaps the conscious part, the culprit the left, more controlling, side of the brain, and style is perhaps the right side, vague, ineffable, but suffusing all we write with its essence and sensibility.
Exactly right
Thanks, J.D. A!
I love what you said about Chekhov being able to “go anywhere and describe anything.” And then today I saw, on Maria Popova’s website, this list of Chekhov’s six tenets of a great story!
1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature
2. Total objectivity
3. Truthful descriptions of persons and objects
4. Extreme brevity
5. Audacity and originality: flee the stereotype
6. Compassion
Oh thats great thanks
I like how through revising I find the story and how to tell it. What I want to work on now is to be, as George says, "fully ourselves in our prose (unique, necessary, original). For me, this is not about “recreating my idea of who I wish I was” but “blundering into some version of myself, through editing, that I greet with a startle of recognition.”
Yes, I think this is also true of life too- that we’re on a journey to become more fully ourselves.
I'm coming to voice from a slightly different angle. In the historical fiction I've written (and still write) I have no narratorial persona or voice. Everything is told in the major characters' point-of-view, and to a considerable extent through interior monologue. The struggle is to find each protagonist's voice (spoken or in an approximation of thought). This can be made more difficult when the characters are historical and we have no line on exactly how people spoke conversationally, at least before, say the mid-18th century. And how much do we want to be / can we be historically authentic in spoken and "thought" language?
OK, I realize I'm branching off from the theme of this discussion and getting into something more appropriate to... well, a discussion of LITB :)
But just to say that I've learned (thanks to George and Story Club) that rewriting, close editing, are absolutely essential to the development of a character's voice (inner/outer). At the same time as the revelation of voice reveals the character (and the character influences back on the voice). And the character(s) make choices, and their choices make plot. And so on...
I tried to write in what I thought was a more historically accurate voice, but it sounded stilted. I read Emily Wilson say, in an interview, that she translated Homer's Odyssey and the Iliad in a more contemporary speech pattern, because the ancient storytellers were also speaking in the speech patterns prevalent at the time. Her opening sentence in the Odyssey is "Tell me about a complicated man." But she said she doesn't use contractions. Instead of writing It's, she would write It is and I have chosen to do that too. I never use contemporary slang and sometimes I choose words that might be less conventional in contemporary usage. Anyway, that's how I solved the problem. But maybe that sounds stilted too?
Thanks for the interesting question, Joan!
Someone who seems to have solved this problem is Hilary Mantel, who constructed convincing speech patterns for her characters which "sound right" but are not really the way people of the time probably spoke. That must (I suppose) be akin to the problem faced by SF and fantasy writers in their imagined worlds: how many neologisms can a reader take? Setting fiction in history is trickier because you can't just invent.
I try to avoid anachronisms, but when you check certain expressions, you may be surprised to learn that they've been on the record for centuries and might well have been used by your characters. But how will a reader take them? Will they jolt her out of the fictive dream?
Otherwise my character's speech and thought patterns are appropriate to their social class, level of education, etc. Or to their efforts to break free of those determinations. I use contractions because I mostly want fluid and rapid thought processes. My POV characters are in different ways low on the social scale and don't naturally use a ceremonious tone in speaking (unless obliged to by their situation, as servant, for example).
Yes, what becomes true to each of our voices all comes down to the words we choose to use, and creating uncommon worlds offers us more choices.
I’ve always thought of the writer’s authentic voice as something of a mystery. Or, magic. I can’t explain it. So this is a beautiful answer to this difficult question. In my experience, finding- or rather, asserting- your voice is a lot about trust. Surrendering, rather than controlling and manipulating. It’s easier said than done, I know.
George, if you see this and if you have time, I'm hoping that you can give your definitions of "voice" and "style," and how you see the difference between the two.
It seems to me that a writer may have several voices for fiction (a detective novel, a comedy, a romance all written by the same person), and maybe just one (usually) for non-fiction (like David Sedaris). So a writer's "Voice" may be work-dependent, right?
When you say a writer discovers their voice in revision, you're talking only about one particular piece of writing, right? Or are you saying the "writer's voice" emerges, time and again, through revision--always the same recognizable voice of a certain writer throughout their work?
People in the comments seem to absolutely agree with you that voice comes through revision. I think voice begins in the first draft and then is fine-tuned in revision. The story IS the voice and vice versa. No?? It's all of a piece. Yes, you make it sharper, better, more effective while revising. But you start out with a voice from the first sentence, no?
(I think perhaps I am the kind of writer you describe who sounds (often) like themselves on the page and then revising is more for plot, word choice, tightening etc.--and not for discovering voice. So that may be where my confusion comes from.)
Hi Mary. Honestly, I think I use "voice" and "style" interchangeably. To me it's all about what the prose "sounds like." Maybe we could say that the voice of a piece emerges with revision, no matter what it is. This is true (for me) in everything I write: fiction, non-fiction, all of it. And yes: there's something there at the beginning and it gets tuned in. Sometimes, for me, though, there's a great distance between what I start with and what I end up with. That may be why I'm such a proponent of this method. Also, in terms of the structure and the ideas, my early drafts are all over the place and need the refining that comes with revision. Some people, I think, have minds that are just more linear and sensible.
I don't think I have the "same, recognizable" voice, no, from piece to piece - it's more like I carve out a sound and then refine that sound. Maybe there's some background thing that would make a person recognize that the same writer wrote, say, "Sparrow" and "Jon" but I'm not sure. I'm very happy to be someone who writes in many different voices - each of them refined into its specific self by the practices I am always yapping about.
Ah, this was the question about your self-concept of your own voice which I was hoping you’d answer, which emerged from the OH on 14th April, George. I see voice as largely led by the piece too, rather than a fixed idea of what it is, and was wondering (in a chat with someone else about sometimes recognisable voices) how you felt around your own. I also think voice and style are very synonymous in this way too. Good to hear your answer, as well as the main post with other detailed enlightenments.
Thanks for asking the question, Mary. Sorry - late to the party as I’ve been a bit overwhelmed by diverse life-tasks recently. But glad I checked back to read, as wouldn’t have wanted to miss George’s answer! :)
Thanks so much, George. I used to teach argumentative writing to undergrads and I think the definitions we used there have gotten in the way of my understanding what you're saying. (There is the voice of authority and then there is the particular style used in a particular piece of writing to shore up that authority.) So I'm happy to see that you use the term interchangeably--that clears up a lot of my confusion. As far as your own voice--yes, the voice in Sparrow is quite different from Jon, but still--to me--recognizably you. There is something there that just says "George," though I knew in advance of reading that you'd written both, so maybe i can't say that with total conviction. But pretty close! Again, i know your point here is to revise, revise, revise, and I think that is necessary whether a writer is more 'linear' thinking or not. Writing, as i don't have to tell you, happens in revision. And the voice emerges, stronger and stronger. Still, I think with enough practice and confidence, a person lets go of those imitative voices in the head and launches in with something that is there own. Thanks again. I think you know by now that I start losing my mind when I can't quite grasp something--particularly when everyone else seems to be having no trouble with a concept. Happy mother's day to Paula!
Yes, what it sounds like. Something knows, and it's in this quiet place, often, about which Nick was writing. (A humble contribution here.)
With revision, I almost always 'break' something which formed or coalesced originally, around the original spark. It's addition or deletion, but rarely, say, reworking a whole sentence.
Hi Mary, Here's my two cents, which is sort of not very valuable since George weighed in with like $50 worth (or $50 zillion), but I'm reminded of music and singing. We can probably all think of a favorite musician who has songs in many styles, vibes, feeling tones. But we recognize immediately that it's them. We know their voice(s) but not every song is the same nor do they evoke the same kind of feelings inside us. Maybe the song itself speaks to them and guides their adaptation. So perhaps we would say they are using a different voice or perhaps we would say it's a different style. But it's 'them'.
thanks, Kurt. In this whole thread, i've thought of 'style' as it is used in, say The Elements of Style, and not as something equal to "voice." So i've been having a different conversation from everyone else, i think. I do see what you're saying here and agree that a singer's voice can be very distinctive regardless of what they are singing.
This type of discussion blows me away (not to be flippant, however). This is where it's happening. That revision, the process described and emphasized over and over (but just enough) here, must be a constant effort, not only to refine, but to get closer to one's self, or the frequency of that narrative or specific spark of storytelling.
Revision. Re. Vision. Seeing anew, repeatedly.
I just wrote something, 5400 words, with a first-person voice, that of a pedant. Then I switched it around and rewrote, from the perspective of the person he was watching. Completely different words were attracted, different essences. Yet that 'background thing' of the instructor response below is there as well--somehow what runs through me accretes, like water dripping from a stalactite, in similar patterns.
Perhaps the development is to break these, not fall into 'staff writer syndrome.' (Which may have its merits, or at least uses, as well.)
In writing, as in life..."voice emerges through revision. We don’t know it, we find it."