Every agent and publisher I talk to says that a distinctive voice is one of the absolute essentials for taking on a client or a book. Without an intriguing or captivating voice, any literary project is doomed to seem flat, however good the characters and plot.
And yet I’ve often noticed that language becomes inexplicably starchy when people move from the spoken to the written word. I see it most when teaching people whose usual diction is visceral and high-voltage (prisoners or excluded teenagers): their oral voice is slangy, exciting and earthy… but when they put their words on the page, their prose often becomes stale.
I suspect it’s because we all think that writing has to be recherché. In school, literature is put on a pedestal and we’re invariably taught that good writing equals long words and long sentences. So when we write we start using words that aren’t from our own palette at all. And if we read widely, it’s inevitable that – like adolescents experimenting with styles and personalities – we imitate our literary heroes and try to channel them.
It’s often extremely hard, underneath those twin weights of education and literary antecedents, to find our own voice. And that’s even before our vanity comes into play: we probably want to sound learned or cool, and so what we write is subtly inauthentic, not our own voice at all but what we wish it were.
There are two, opposing schools of thought about how to find voice (which I alluded to briefly in my last post regarding commandments for good writing). Many think that a literary voice must be the imposition of your character onto the page. It’s a school of thought summarised by Raymond Chandler: “the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he [or she] writes will always pay off. He [she!] can’t do it by trying, because the kind of style I am thinking about is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it.”*
Another, subtler school of thought suggests that voice can only be discovered by the opposite, by the erosion of personality: “remain invisible”, Elmore Leonard urges, because the alternative is a sort of verbal smugness: “if you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after…” Similarly, the novelist and poet, Adam Foulds, has written of the writer’s need to be “forgetful of yourself”, to find a sort of “rapt absorption”: “it is a kind of meditation, one that can procure bliss.”
I’m fascinated by this second option because when I’m trying to find the right words – be it in fiction, non-fiction or even just an email or letter – I don’t feel that I produce the words myself. I close my eyes, breath slowly and await the gift. And I know, from speaking to many other writers, that most feel that words emerge not thanks to them, but through them. Writing is a mysterious, even numinous, activity.
It intrigues me that the deepest thinkers on the subject suggest that voice actually emerges from the conflation of these two, opposing tendencies. The American novelist, Meg Rosoff, wrote an excellent piece about voice many years ago in which she said that it’s “an exchange of energy between the conscious and subconscious mind”. She likened the process to riding a horse in which the subconscious mind is the horse and the conscious mind the rider:
“The goal is a combination of strength, suppleness and softness. If the rider (conscious mind) is too strong, too stiff or unsympathetic, the horse becomes unresponsive and difficult to control, or resistant and dull. The object of dressage is to create an open, graceful exchange of understanding and energy between horse and rider.”
It reminds me of T.S.Eliot’s “East Coker”, where he talks of “what there is to conquer / By strength or submission”. It’s as if literary discovery requires both some kind of force (Chandler’s imposition of personality) and also a sort of surrender (Leonard’s invisibility / Foulds’ forgetfulness of self).
It can, as Foulds suggests, be blissful, but it can very often be painful too. Our voice is rarely as learned or as cool as we had hoped would be. Even if we’ve done away with vanity and learning and don’t care about such things, there’s always a sense that we come up short: Eliot spoke of each verbal sortie being only “a different kind of failure” or “a raid on the inarticulate”.
But perhaps the main reason it’s painful is that hearing our voice is like looking in the mirror (an experience that is rarely gratifying!). “Your writing voice”, says Rosoff, “is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.” It takes a pretty conceited person not to shudder at the thought of putting such things so clearly on the page.
There are all sorts of useful exercises we use in creative writing classes to help people find their own voice. A friend of mine asks students to replicate the form of Paul Farley’s poem, “I Ran All the Way Home”, in which each sentence starts “I remember…” and speaks of an intimate memory (the idea is taken from Joe Brainard’s autobiography). You can use “I come from…” as a prompt too, imitating Dean Atta’s poem.
One of my favourite ways to lead someone to hear their own voice is to ask them to compile a list of their family slang. Most families could fill a small dictionary with the weird neologisms and strange phrases they have used for years because of something misspoken or misunderstood, often by toddlers. (In my family we still call sparkling water “spikey water” since that’s what our two year old son once, eloquently, called it). I ask people to use all their dialects and idiolects, rather than remove them.
Often the most freeing exercise is to ask people to write as if no-one will ever read what’s put on the page. It’s like dancing in the dark: one can suddenly be daring or experimental when you think you’re completely alone because authenticity comes about when we’re not worried about being judged.
Obviously what we’re talking about here is discerning your own voice as a writer. There are, usually, many other voices in stories, but it’s only once you’ve seen how layered, contradictory and unique your own voice is that you start to be attuned to the timbre and tone of others’. It’s as if you can’t presume to write a different character’s voice until you’ve delved deeply into your own.
*One of my favourite ever defences of authorial voice. This is Chandler, writing to Edward Weeks, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, in January 1948:
“…would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads you proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have. I think your proof-reader is kindly attempting to steady me on my feet, but much as I appreciate the solicitude, I am really able to steer a fairly clear course, provided I get both sidewalks and the street between.”
I’ve mentioned it before, but… last call for my creative writing retreat (in Italian) at the end of July. It’s in Abruzzo, with a fine co-tutor (Francesco Trento), and as well as top teaching / tutoring / workshopping, there will be excellent food, fine wine, cool pool, great company etc.
https://www.comesiscriveunagrandestoria.it/residenza-di-scrittura-tobias-jones