My Own Voice

I have a love/hate relationship with craft books and materials. I draw inspiration from them. I keep a quote from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird where I see it every day in order to combat my perfectionist tendencies: "Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance." I turn to them for specific advice. When I reached an impasse in my current WIP recently, I spent a couple of weeks working my way through exercises from the plot section of Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook. But I have also gone through times when I find reading books or articles on craft paralyzing, when the voices of the experts drown out my own voice and I write paragraphs only to trash them because they are “wrong” according to experts. For me, timing is key to whether the study of craft will be help or hindrance.

Someone recommended a book on voice a few weeks ago, and I read it at exactly the right moment for it to resonate deeply with me. In The Writer’s Voice, poet, essayist, and literary critic A. Alvarez writes about the writer finding her voice as a process. It begins, he suggests, with reading because it is creative reading that makes us aware of “the presence behind the words” and teaches us to distinguish between the false and the true. 

A vital part of finding our voices, according to Alvarez, is falling in love with the voices of others—sometimes promiscuously as we rush from book to book enraptured by the beauty, the power, the authenticity of the voices we hear in the pages we read, sometimes discriminatingly as we immerse ourselves in the work of a particular writer, certain that this is the voice of our true beloved, the one who knows answers to all our questions about who we should become as writers, questions that we cannot even articulate. 

I can remember periods of promiscuity, of reading great numbers of writers wildly and enthusiastically, finding in each new author a turn of phrase, a trick of characterization, a rhythm or cadence that I determined to emulate. I can also remember periods of faithful attention to a single writer, working my way through every poem or novel I could find, making copious notes, living with the sound of one voice falling on my inner ear by day and reverberating in my dreams at night. 

Imitation is proverbially the sincerest form of flattery, and writers have been flattering other writers by imitating them no doubt since creative uses of written language began. We learn skills by imitating, but no one wants her work to be labeled derivative or, even worse, to be accused of plagiarism. Alvarez uses a famous quotation from T. S. Eliot (“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”) to explain that good writers move beyond mere acquisition of skills (imitation) to incorporate other voices into our own in ways that preserve the integrity of both voices (stealing).

When I think about my own voice in these terms, I remember poems carefully crafted in my undergraduate days that a professor tactfully suggested were “too Dickinsonian.” I think even at nineteen, I knew he was right, but decades later and with far greater confidence that my poet’s voice is my own, I still hear echoes of Emily Dickinson in certain lines. The same thing is true of my romance fiction. I have found my voice although I can be hesitant to trust it. I no longer imitate, but when I read a passage I often hear the echoes. Occasionally a friend will read a few pages and remark, “That sounds like X.” I know then that my friend hears the echoes too. Reading Alvarez felt as if I were being given permission to stop worrying about these echoes and end my “anxiety of influence,” to borrow a lit crit term.

I think Barbara Samuel, who has long been my favored expert on voice, would agree with Alvarez. She recognizes the role creative reading plays in forming voice. She includes three questions about reading history on her voice worksheet:

• What are your top five favorite novels of all time? What was your
  favorite book when you were 12? Fourteen?

• Can you point to a writer or a book that made you want to be a writer? Who/What?

• What book do you most deeply wish you’d written? Why? What parts of it make you swoon? Characters? Voice? Plot?

We all know the importance of having a “fresh voice,” a “strong voice.” If we don’t, there are countless agent and editor interviews, blogs, and tweets to remind us. But writing that speaks practically and encouragingly to as-yet-unpublished writers about what voice is and how one discovers (or uncovers) one’s own fresh, strong voice is in scant supply. Alvarez and Samuel offer practicality and encouragement. I recommend Alvarez’s The Writer’s Voice with the caveat that he may be too academic for some tastes. I believe writers of literary or commercial fiction will find Samuel’s words inspiring and useful. 

Finally, in this reflection on voice, I share the closing lines of a favorite poem by a favorite poet in the hope that the journey she describes may be yours as well.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

From “TheJourney” by Mary Oliver

If you are a reader (and Alvarez says reading well is as much an art as writing well), are you aware of the “presence behind the words”? Which authors’ voices do you particularly love? If you are a writer, what are your thoughts on your voice? Which writers echo most loudly in your work?