On finding one's true voice...

...by messing with what's already there.

So, I’m going to return to our usual pattern: Office Hours on Thursdays, for all subscribers, and then close readings of stories and/or detailed craft advice on Sundays, for paid subscribers only.

Next Sunday (May 12), I’ll have some further thoughts on the idea that a “problem” in a work-in-progress can actually be the story asserting its will/trying to lead you to a higher version of it.  Specifically, I’ll be pulling back the curtain a little on this idea as it relates to the writing of Lincoln in the Bardo.

For those of you who are free subscribers, I also wanted to let you know that, back there behind the paywall, you’ll have access to all previous Story Club posts, going back over two years now, including deep dives into classic stories by Hemingway, Chekhov, Katherine Anne Porter, James Baldwin, Tille Olsen – and many more.  As well as a few stories of mine, and lots of slightly more technical craft advice than I tend to offer here, and even, sometimes, exclusive content from the road and/or early info on tour dates.

Please do join us back there if you feel inclined.

Now, for our question of the week.

Q.

Dear George, 

Thank you for Story Club, I’m learning a lot about reading, about writing, and other things. I came to Story Club as a reader (because I love your work), but I have never been a writer. Circumstances forced me into a situation where I had to do a lot of writing, and that writing was seen and read by a lot of people, both who knew me and didn’t. And people said to me ‘I didn’t know you were a writer’ and I didn’t either. I wake up in the middle of the night and have words pouring out of me that have to be written down. Sometimes they are poems, sometimes they are descriptions of places or people, real, imaginary, or some combination of those. Because of this I have made some stabs at daytime writing, something more like what might lead to a story, but herein lies my question:  I’m a prolific reader, reading a lot of books, as well as articles, and other things and listen to audiobooks as well, and I’m finding that whatever I’m writing appears to be ‘in the style of’ whichever writer is foremost in my mind, especially if it’s something I really like. As a person I’m a parrot and a mimic and can copy accents and things, and frequently do this without being aware of it which can be quite embarrassing. Anyway, is this ‘copycat’ writing, sort of like copying masterworks in painting? Where you learn things about language, structure, story, and something that eventually will lead you to find your own voice?  I don’t feel like I have a voice, or really any idea of what I want to write, I just can’t seem to help myself. Thanks for any advice you can give, and all you have already given which has led me to this question.

Most sincerely, 

Not a writer, but maybe could be one day

A.

I’ve talked about this issue of creative mimicry a little here.

But your question got me thinking about voice.

We sometimes think of voice as a natural thing – what comes out of us easily and is somehow imbued with something that is intrinsically “us.”

And then we’re frustrated when what we type…isn’t that. 

It’s a particularly fraught thing, I think, when someone who adores and lives by language feels that there is, in her writing, no trace of the “real” her. 

I found it almost maddening when I was in my twenties and my writing sounded like it could have been done by anyone, and seemed to have nothing to do with my love for language or my deep desire to sound new and urgent and…unique.

I think there are some writers who really do have a natural voice, without much effort.  These people might just have a strong personality, or a powerful/idiosyncratic view of things, and their rewriting amounts to a (mere) cleaning up the text to more fully reflect that core personality.  I’m not sure about this – I’m sort of positing that such people exist (though none of the writers I know and admire fall into this category, exactly – they all (ALL) rewrite like crazy).¹

In any event, this is what I thought voice was about when I was younger.  I just had to….sing, authentically. 

But when I did, I sounded strangely like every other young writer “singing.”  All excess, no taste, lots of traces of the writers I admired – but not much of “me” in there, after all.

And, of course, there’s a trap in this way of thinking about voice: when I couldn’t find any such voice, I assumed it was a defect in me – a lack of a discernible, iconic personality.   And that really hurt, to be convinced, by my prose, that there was nothing special about me.

What a depressing dead end: “I’m an insufficient person, with no distinctive qualities.  And that’s why I sound like everyone else, and yet, like no one.”

Well, now I see it another way:

Some of us revise to find a distinctive person within us (to create that person, to liberate him/her), and we do this by purifying our prose a line at a time.  That is: voice emerges through revision.  We don’t know it, we find it.  We dig through the rubble of our normal, workaday, typed-up language and, choice by choice, find a voice (or, you know: a voice results), and that voice might surprise us – we maybe haven’t heard it before.  (And yet, somehow, we recognize it.)

In this way, we’ve revealed something about ourselves, to ourselves.  

It’s not the case that we’re aiming for a voice and then hitting it; we’re goofing around (we cut this, we add that) and are suddenly pleased at the sound that results.  This found voice may not be what we expected, but may feel undeniable, new: distinctive or or odd enough to compel readerly interest.  What sometimes happens, wonderfully, is that we feel (for better or worse) that only we could have made that particular sound on the page AND that it’s not a random sound – we’ve imbued it with a special kind of “us-infused” meaning.

Anyway, that’s the dream.

What’s happening in our minds as we edit in this mode? Well, we’re seeking a certain quality. Maybe speed, or truth, or rhythm, or music. Maybe we’re seeking to squeeze all the b.s. and commonality out of our sentences.  Maybe we’re trying to keep the reader breathless in our lee, so she has to struggle to keep up. (And each of us will be seeking a different quality, and we don’t need to name it. We just have to seek it. And, when we blunder into it, we’ll feel it. And we’ll feel, uh, not it.)

So: we don’t have to know in advance the effect we’re trying to produce.  Better we don’t know.  We are trying to treat our prose as changeable, temporary, proposed – as a means to an end (but we don’t know what that end is).

I sometimes, when editing, feel myself thinking: “Hmm, let’s see what I can make of this.”

The point is, maybe, that we’re not worrying about “finding a voice.” But we will be finding a voice, by the process of making lots of small choices as we go, of the optometric variety (“Do I like this better?  Or this?”)

I don’t want to make this sound more radical than it is. It might just begin with basic sentence hygiene - taking the trouble to exert your will on every sentence. It’s amazing how much the sound and feel of a sentence can be affected by a few thoughtful edits; how much the speed and intelligence of a paragraph can be improved by the omission of a single not-necessarily-bad-but-also-not-entirely-needed sentence; how the spark that occurs in that little gap between two sentences can be increased by a consideration of the way they abut one another. 

Voice might be seen as: that which occurs when we allow ourselves to make these small choices, again and again, within the same text, over a surprisingly long duration of time.

Now, dear questioner, you ask specifically if mimicking other voices can help us find our own. I think the answer is a big YES. 

First, people who eventually have a distinctive voice will tend to have a good ear.  And, so, the first thing that person will do is to inhabit the voice of some writer they admire.  This is completely natural, even admirable (not everyone can do this, by the way).

How might this help us find our own voice?

Well, eventually, we get sick of the mimicry. 

We get sick of it because we start to feel that it is keeping us from telling our own truths.

Let’s say there’s a circle that describes “all of the things that can be said in the voice of another writer.”  And then there’s another circle that describes “all the stuff that you uniquely know and hold dear because of the life you’ve lived and the trouble you’ve seen and the scrapes you’ve been in and the choices you’ve made and who you’ve loved and your own limitations and gifts and tendencies and freakish obsessions and so on.” 

When we’re imitating someone, those two circles may intersect just a tiny bit – or they may not intersect at all. 

The assumed voice is prohibiting from being ourselves – from bringing “our stuff” to bear.  (Imagine wearing someone else’s ill-fitting clothes and trying to feel like yourself.)

When I was in my Hemingway phase, there was no way for the things I was learning about life (many of which had to do with love and class and financial struggle) to get into my stories; his diction (or my version of his diction) was preventing this.  (To sound like him, I had to leave me behind.)

So, I guess the advice might be: Go ahead and imitate until it’s no longer tolerable for you to do so – until the extent to which your stuff isn’t getting into your stories starts to grate on you, even sicken you.

And then: indulge that feeling of aversion.

How do we “indulge that feeling of aversion?” One way: edit the imitation right out of your prose. 

Where do you sound like (Writer X)? 

Well…stop doing that. 

One one level, this is technical work - you see that, just here, you are sounding too much like Hemingway (or Grace Paley, or David Foster Wallace, or, or, or), and you resolve not to do that.

How? By asking yourself: What about that Hemingway sentence doesn’t hold true for me? What I you know, that isn’t reflected in the “mindset” of that sentence? How might I get more of my (my sensibility, my truth) into that sentence? What, specifically, would I cut or reword? What would I feel inclined to add?

Where does (per you) the falseness reside in that sentence, relative to your deep, internalized sense of the world?

Whatever the answer, that’s “you” answering. After you make the change, there’s going to be incrementally more you in there.

That’s one pathway to a more authentic voice.

We might even imagine an exercise where we edit someone else’s text until it sounds something like us: take a swath of someone else’s prose, that you don’t like very much, put it into Word and, every day, mess with it a little, to taste. Keep doing this for a month.

At the end, compare it to the original; odds are, you’ll pick up at least a little hint of what is essential about you.

A cautionary word: when I say “your stuff,” I don’t mean “your special topic” or “your worldview” or “your declared emotional/psychological/ political interests.”  No: “your stuff” has something to do with that magical meeting of style and substance that sneaks up on us by way of the many choices we make in our editing. 

It’s “wit,” maybe, or “personality.” It’s the way your prose hits a reader at-speed and charms her. 

But, as you revise, there’s no need to aim for what I’m calling “your stuff.”  You’ll find it and/or it will find you.  (As in that old definition of pornography, you’ll “know it when you see it.”)

That is: you’ll make a change, for reasons you may not be able to articulate, and then get that “Ah, yes, that’s better,” feeling.

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.”

But finally – there are writers who don’t have an identifiable, reliable, “personal,” voice.  I sometimes think this might be the highest attainment of all – that God-like tone I hear in Chekhov or Tolstoy (at least in translation), that seems able to go anywhere and describe anything.  I certainly can’t do it – I have to subsume myself in a personality to get my prose to compel.

It would be interesting, if there are readers of Russian out there (and I know there are) to hear about what these writers sound like in Russian.  But to my ear, in English translations, there’s a neutral quality that is very hard to accomplish. 

Of course, in the ultimate sense, this neutral quality, too, is “voice” – the product of a lot of work and care and living and, yes, choosing.

I wish you the best, dear “Not a writer, but maybe could be one day.”  If you are thinking this lucidly and precisely about these issues, I’d say you already are a writer, for sure.

Being a writer isn’t about what one has or hasn’t accomplished (or may or may not eventually accomplish), but, 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.

And it sounds like you’re already there.  😊

Finally: a reminder that the WordTheatre® performances of several of my stories (“Sticks,” “My Chivalric Fiasco,” “Sparrow,” and “Victory Lap” are available, until June 1, via this link. (When prompted, enter the password "WT2024.")

1. But there are certain writers who, when I hear them speaking extemporaneously, they sound like themselves on the page. They have a pronounced and interesting personality and then they write from that place. At least sonically. Maybe revision, for this type of writer, involves discovering plot and so on (?)