Finding Your Voice – WN 011

This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 11: Finding Your Voice.

[Intro music.]

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and today I’m going to be talking about one of the more elusive elements of writing. That is your voice. When I talk about your voice and when I talk about finding your voice, I’m going to be talking about it in terms of development, rather than creation. That’s for a couple reasons.

The first reason is that you don’t need to create a voice. You have a voice that is 100% perfectly unique to you, and that is one of the gifts that you have as a writer. I believe that’s one of the reasons that you might be driven to write is to let your voice be heard. So, you have a voice. You may just not know what it looks like, or what it sounds like, or really how to wrangle that in with your story, and your characters, and your storytelling, and all of the different voices that come together in a story or a novel.

Secondly, I’m not going to be talking about creating a voice, in that all of a sudden it’s perfect, and developed, and polished, and wonderful, and unique, because it takes a long time to develop. So, you’re going to hear me use the word develop and find. There’s going to be a long and slow process associated with that, and that’s okay. Becoming a masterful writer, who is in control of their voice, and who has a unique voice that stands out among other writers, it’s difficult, and it’s hard, and it takes time. But once you develop it, then it will allow you to stand out and tell your story in a way that nobody else can tell it. I also want to be very careful that I don’t turn you off from writing just because you might not have your permanent, mature, designated voice as a writer with a capital W. Like I said, it takes time and practice. So, please don’t stop writing. In fact, keep on writing. This is actually part of the process.

I want to start off today’s podcast by really identifying what it means to have a voice as a writer. This is separate from the voices that might come out of different characters within your work, because even underneath a novel that is full of dialogue, and personalities, and conflict, and action, there is a storyteller’s voice that weaves everything together and that posits everything in a certain light, in a light that both shows us the way to read and directs us, but also presents a bit of bias, which gives us a way to interpret the story.

I love the idea of storytelling. That’s how stories were originally born. Back in the olden days, literacy rates were extremely low and not a lot of people could read, and so they relied on people to tell stories. A famous example of this is Homer, who used to recite the Iliad and the Odyssey and passed those stories down in what’s called an oral tradition. Really, it’s not the story itself that is important, or it is not the story itself often that we grab onto, that engages us. Often, it’s the way in which the story is told, and that way is the gateway to an author’s voice.

What I’d like to do is share with you some examples of writers who I think have very strong voices. I’d just like you to listen to the possibilities inherent within each voice as a storytelling tool. I hope this goes well. I didn’t rehearse this or anything. I actually don’t ever rehearse podcasts. I just kind of start talking and see what comes out. But I do have a little stack of books here next to my podcasting setup, and so I’m going to read just a few excerpts. You can hear the different writers’ voices. I have a selection of male and female, and that’s a whole nother podcast on its own, so I won’t go into gender politics. Wee! What I’m going to do is read these without telling you who the author is or what the story is until the very end. Also, you get bonus points if any of these sound familiar to you.

Number one. “Five hours New York jet lag, and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm. It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate, reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now. Not even food, as Damien’s new kitchen is as devoid of edible content at its designer’s display windows in Camden High Street. Very handsome, the upper cabinets faced in canary yellow laminate, the lower with lacquered, unstained apple-ply. Very clean and almost entirely empty, save for a carton containing two dry pucks of Weetabix and some loose packets of herbal tea.”

That was from Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson. You can tell that he has a very sort of dense cadence to his words, almost as though he’s rattling them off very quickly. He has a large vocabulary, and he likes to use it, which I really love. To me, his voice always seems fresh, because he’s always using words in new combinations that I have never seen before. He also tends to write science fiction, and you can hear a little bit of a futuristic, aggressive edge underneath his words.

Number two. “I love my work, and I don’t really hate Mondays. I hated this Monday morning though, because I had a hangover. I am not a heavy drinker. I know that’s what everybody says, but in my case, it’s true. I make it a rule not to overindulge in any fashion on a work night. There were reasons, not good reason, but reasons why I had broken the rule that Sunday. They have no bearing on this story, and they are nobody’s business but my own. Suffice to say that I was late to work and not happy to be there. If I had been in my normal sunny morning mood, I probably would not have overreacted when I saw what Gerda had done.”

That selection was from Trojan Gold, by Elizabeth Peters. It’s a mystery novel, and it’s … Oh, boy. This is going to test me. … the second in the series, in her Vicki Bliss mystery series, maybe the third. I should know this. But the voice, the narrator’s voice, is one that Elizabeth Peters uses a lot, and I think it’s very close to her natural voice. It’s very casual, a little sarcastic, a little biting, extremely self-aware. Peters breaks the fourth wall often and will address her readers. She also tends to be snarky and irreverent and is always looking to delight her readers with her word choice.

Number three. “‘Take my cab and tell him to hurry. He may for you. He doesn’t like me very much. Can I,” said Lord Peter, looking at himself in the 18th century mirror over the mantelpiece, ‘can I have the heart to fluster Thipps further, that’s very difficult to say quickly, by appearing in a top hat and frock coat? I think not. 10 to one he will overlook my trousers and mistake me for the undertaker. I gray suit I fancy, neat, but not gaudy, with a hat to tone suits my other self better. Exit the amateur of first editions. New motif introduced by solo bassoon. Enter Sherlock Holmes disguised as a walking gentleman. There goes Bunter, invaluable fellow. Never offers to do his job when you’ve told him to do something else.'”

This selection is from Whose Body?, by Dorothy Sayers. It’s the first book in her Lord Peter Wimsey mystery book series. It’s, perhaps obviously, about a British nobleman. Dorothy Sayers is very well known for her dialogue, and her taste for language, and that beautiful, rhythmic, uninterrupted flow. The whole book reads like that. It’s a little exhausting, but also extremely delightful. But you can hear there it’s almost a machine gun consistency to the voice. It’s desperate almost. It needs to get all of these words out. It’s also very funny, and quick, and clever, and witty, and full of wordplay. She does this consistently.

All right. One more, and then I’ll stop. Number four. “All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it, and even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within and the music enters, what we mainly hear or hear corroborated are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it, as it hits the air. What is evoked in him then is of another order, more terrible, because it has no words, and triumphant too for that same reason. His triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.”

That is a selection from Sonny’s Blues, which is a short story by one of my favorite writers, James Baldwin, in the collection Going To Meet The Man. If you’re interested in reading any of these books/stories, I will be linking to all of them within the show notes. Baldwin’s voice has a very poetic and lyric flow to it. He’s talking about jazz music, and he does a beautiful job of evoking the feeling of listening to jazz. There’s tension. There’s triumph. It grows, and swells, and dies down, and then grows again. He has such a powerful voice and a strong vocabulary, and he knows how to use it.

All four of these writers have successfully crafted a narrative voice that is completely unique to them. In fact, today, if I read a work of speculative fiction, I’m bound to say, “Oh. This sounds a little bit like William Gibson.” Or if I read a powerful essay, I might think, “Huh. I wonder if this was inspired by James Baldwin.” I can also tell when I am reading a mystery if it has been inspired by Dorothy Sayers or Elizabeth Peters. You can tell.

I want to talk about developing your voice as a writer. As I said, you’re born with one. If you have a personality, you have a voice. If you don’t have a personality, you still have a voice. It might be flat and lacking personality, but either way, you have a voice. So, yay. That part’s done and over with, and that’s super easy. But obviously we’re not done yet. This voice that we begin with, it’s made up of all of the things that make up who we are, and what we have learned, and what we have absorbed from the world. It’s often unconsciously crafted.

What I’m thinking about here is in third grade I had a diary. It was a pale, blue, hard bound volume. I was super excited, because it was fancy. It had a little combination lock on the front, and so I felt very safe being myself within the pages of this diary, sharing my third grade secrets with its pages. Now, if I go back and read what I wrote in third grade, what I find is a very ham-fisted approach at relaying the events of my day. Most of the sentences begin with I or another subject, so it’s not very eloquent or especially well written, but even so, you can see my sense of humor creeping through.

For whatever reason, when I was … How old are you in third grade, like eight or nine? … I was really sarcastic and cynical. I don’t know why. I was happy. You know? But you can just feel the eye rolling and the attempt to just let out all these jokes that I kept in my head all day. I was an introvert, and I didn’t have a lot of friends, and so I saved I guess my sense of humor for my diary and for my future self. But that ham-fisted, self-centered, weirdly sarcastic nine-year-old’s voice, that was my voice. I believe that while immature, it was perhaps the purest version of my voice that I have been able to capture since. I’ll explain more about that in a minute.

As we progress through school, we get our natural writing voice sort of pushed through this machine, where it is hammered into submission by rules of grammar, rules of politeness in society. It’s sort of hemmed in by the subjects that we are allowed to write about. This was all true when I was in school, so maybe things are different now, but we weren’t ever exactly encouraged to just write whatever we wanted. We always had to write essays or themes on certain subjects that were assigned to us, and all of the sentences had to have a subject, an action verb, prepositional phrase, if that’s what we were studying. You were by no means allowed to end a sentence in a preposition, or forget a period at the end, or decapitalize a word that should be capitalized, or capitalize a word that should be decapitalized. There was no beginning a subject with a conjunction, and there was absolutely no free verse.

This is the beginning of where we were told what was good and what was bad. I’m not saying that all grammatical and spelling rules are evil and tyrannical and everything, because consistent spelling and grammar rules exist so that we can communicate with each other more easily and fluidly. That’s why standards exist. But there was very little room in the classroom for experimentation in our language and our writing. I remember art class I could do whatever I wanted. She’s like, “We’re going to make a mask today,” and you’re like, “Okay,” and you just glued feathers all over it and whatever. Glitter. All right. Lots of glitter. You do what you want. But our writing education, and again, this is just my own experience, is very frigid and was focused on creating sleek, polished, factory approved sentences that really said very little about who we are.

This is where in my diaries my voice begins to fade. So, we get older, and we enter high school, and we’ve sort of decided that we either love English class or we hate English class, and we can’t be bothered with it, with producing these factory model sentences in factory model paragraphs, while citing our sources and using appropriate indentation and one inch margins all the way around. Our writing is judged by its literary worth. During this time, we read, often in chronological segments and geographical segments, different works of literature. If you were anything like me, you read a lot on your own. So, in addition to the school approved Shakespeare, and Chaucer, and Thomas Hardy, I was supplementing my school reading, which if I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, I did not care a whole lot for. I was much more interested in the books that I found on my own at the library.

High school was when I discovered Elizabeth Peters, and William Gibson, and Frank Herbert, who wrote Dune. Oh, and I loved to read. I would get in trouble at school for reading books that I wasn’t supposed to be reading. I would get in trouble at home for sneaking books under the dining room table as we ate together. I would get in trouble for staying up too late reading under the covers with a flashlight, which would then have dead batteries, which frustrated my mother to no end. But what I was doing, I was building sort of my own very diverse library of voices, sort of like a sampler or a mixed tape of all of these different writers, and I was learning what I enjoyed about some and what made them different from others.

What I found was when I did my own creative writing at home, outside of the journal, when I was creating my own stories, what I was doing was sort of cherry picking voices that I liked and emulating them. This is part of that search to find who you are. It’s like when you’re an infant and you begin to talk, and what you do is you repeat syllables that your caretaker is saying over and over again. You sort of parrot them back. That’s the beginning to finding your own words and finding your own voice. That’s why I always say it is so important to read as a writer and to read a variety of different things, so that you don’t end up just emulating one author, that you get a nice library built up, and that you understand how different voices can tell different stories in different ways.

After high school, I went to college, and that just screwed me over entirely. That’s not what you were expecting me to say. You were expecting me maybe to say that, “Oh, and that was where I found my true freedom as a writer, and I was able to explore my own voice,” but that was not true. And it’s okay if you didn’t go to college. You don’t have to have done that to relate to this. But when I was in college, I was in a very intense writing program, and it was wonderful, so don’t get me wrong. I learned so much, but what I learned was how to create a certain type of story. I was in this very intense writers circle, and we moved through four years of college sort of together-sh.

What we always did was try to not only impress each other, which is I think what a lot of writers still do, even after college, but we were trying to impress the professor, and we were trying to produce work that would evoke this response of, “You should submit that to a literary journal.” We all had our heads filled with the wonder of submitting a story to a literary journal, which we were told was the key to becoming a real writer. In order to submit to a literary journal, you had to be a literary writer. So, what I did for four years in college is I didn’t write science fiction. I didn’t write adventures. I didn’t even write poetry.

If you’re ambitious and driven, like I was, you want to be doing what’s right. We had been told throughout school, and high school, and now college that there was a right and a wrong way to do things. There was successful writing and there was failure writing. The successful writing that was called out was work by T.C. Boyle, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, and so I spent four years of college trying to cram my voice into a T.C. Boyle, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever shaped mold. Everything that I wrote during my college years felt dry, and lifeless, and forced.

I want to be clear. It wasn’t because I was trying to emulate these famous writers, because after all, that is how we learn, but rather because I was overcompensating, because I was afraid of being labeled a hack. We all know what a hack is. It’s the writer who is looked down upon, because they have the audacity to create something just for the sheer pleasure of creating it. I know that Stephen King is often held up as sort of the god of the hack writers, but you know what? He writes what he wants to write, and he gets paid for it, and people love his books. He has legions of fans. Sure, he might not be the next John Cheever, but that doesn’t mean that his writing is worth any less.

So, what happened to me was I got so wrapped up in trying to be T.C. Boyle, and Raymond Carver, and Flannery O’Connor, and John Cheever that I 100% completely lost myself. There was no longer a Sarah Werner voice in my writing. When I lost what I loved, when I lost the sort of stories that I wanted to tell, when I lost my sort of sarcastic, cynical, flippant tone, I didn’t enjoy the writing. I had become the factory, and my writing was lifeless and dull. What I did next was after graduation, I got really frustrated with writing, because it wasn’t fun anymore. It didn’t bring me joy. It wasn’t filling my soul with, I don’t know, those wonderful, good feelings, and it sucked. As much as I tried to sound like T.C. Boyle, et cetera, I couldn’t. I couldn’t be them. I was constantly falling short of being these writers, and so for years I stopped writing, and it made me sick.

What brought me back, and this is going to be me showing my true nerd colors, what brought me back was seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD. Without going into everything that I love about that very cheesy show from the 90s … And yes, it is cheesy, and it is from the 90s, but it’s fun, and it’s well written. The dialogue is well crafted. It has a lot of heart. It has adventure. It has possibility. It has magic and wonder. It has awesome 90s outfits. And it reminded me of everything that I had loved from the books that I had read in high school. It reminded me of how fun it was to dig into an Elizabeth Peters novel and to just ride along with that author’s voice. And so I started reading again. I picked up my old favorites. I picked up new books that were not written by John Cheever or Raymond Carver.

I decided that if I could produce stuff that was fun to read and that brought meaning to people and made them smile and enjoy life a little bit more, that I was maybe okay with being a hack. Very slowly I began regressing. Very slowly I began to, as Yoda said, unlearn what I had learned. I peeled back these false layers that I had gained, and instead of focusing on being what I had been instructed was great, I shifted my focus to being real. There’s so much anxiety that comes with the pressure to be a literary genius, but genius doesn’t only emulate. Genius innovates. I was not able to begin innovating again, creating new things that I loved and really could put my heart into, until I had begin to take that backward journey back away from literature with a capital L.

When I started to back away from needing and wanting to impress people with how smart my writing could be or whatever clever symbolism I could sneak in, I had missed a very crucial step in my voice development process in college. That was the step where you break away from emulation, when you break free and you’re able to let out that you again, that third grade diary you, the you that is, yes, now older, and wiser, and hopefully slightly more well read, with an understanding of the mechanics of language and the power of storytelling, when you let yourself be real.

I received a really lovely letter this week. It was a hand written letter from Allison [Audall 00:27:42] about her own work life writing balance. I promise I didn’t plan it this way, but she had a question for me about finding, and developing, and losing her voice as a creative writer. Allison is a nurse, and in her day to day occupation, she writes scripts. I’m not even going to pretend to know what nurses write, but suffice to say it’s all very important, and if even one mistake is made, it can hurt a patient. So, through her job, Allison has had to learn to be very careful and precise in her writing. This has bled over into her creative writing as well, to the point where she struggles not to be a perfectionist, not to read everything over 8 million times to ensure that it is flawless before moving on. She wants to know, how do you make that work? How do you shift gears from something learned to something creative?

I’m going to disappoint you by saying I don’t have an answer down pat that will work for everyone. Honestly, I think that you need to be a constant reader, so you need to constantly read creative works, probably more so … Well, I don’t want to say more so than the average writer, because we should all be reading a lot, but do make an intentional effort to read a lot and to read varied things and to read books of varying quality. That helps me sometimes when I am in a perfectionist mood is to read something that’s not super great, that’s not award winning or amazingly crafted, just to remind myself that, yeah, you can still get published if you’re not T.C. Boyle or Raymond Carver.

But what I can tell you is that I struggle with this myself. I’ve talked about my job before, and what I do is I’m a content strategist for a website development company. What I do is I help people craft messaging for their websites, and I help make sure that the content on a website, so the words, and images, and video, and really anything that the website is built to hold information-wise, is structured well and conducive to a fluid user journey throughout the website. But along with that, I also have to look at the voice, and tone, and web appropriateness of the content.

If you’ve ever had to write for a newspaper, it’s kind of similar. You’re writing at essentially a fifth to seventh grade reading level. You’re axing the jargon. You’re breaking up sentences that perhaps in print could have been joined by a semi-colon and a however into two separate sentences. You’re breaking down multi-sentence paragraphs into one sentence paragraphs. You’re using bullet points where a fluid paragraph might have been before. You’re using lots of headings, so that the user can skim and easily find the information they’re looking for. You get the picture. What I do every day at my job is kind of the opposite of what I like to do when I write creatively, which is to sit back, and close my eyes, and picture something, and describe it, and breathe life into it, and not care if my sentences are more than 10 words or if my paragraphs are more than one sentence.

What I want to tell you is that, yes, my job has had an effect on my writing. It is a little more Hemingway-esque than it had been before, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We are writers, and our job is to translate life into our work. A lot of times our work, our job, has a huge influence on who we are as people, and that comes through in our writing. You can either keep reading creatively and just really be conscious of your career voice slipping through, or you can embrace it a little bit and let that become part of your voice as a writer. Allison, while I probably haven’t answered your question to your satisfaction, I hope I have at least addressed it and let you know that it is valid and that it is something that a lot of people struggle with. I really wish you the absolute best of luck in your creative endeavors.

And anyone else who’s listening, if you have advice for Allison, I encourage you to go to the show notes for this episode, episode 11, at SarahWerner.com, S-A-R-A-H W-E-R-N-E-R .com, and leave your thoughts in the comments. Do you have trouble separating your 8:00 to 5:00 work/job self from your creative self, and does that in any way sort of change your voice? Has it changed you as a creative writer. I would absolutely love to hear what you have to say about that.

Oh my gosh. I just realized I forgot to talk about the book of the week. This week, I read Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. This seems to be one of those books that everybody either loves or hates, probably because the expectations that they have of it going in. The Magicians sort of works on two conceits, first of all that the Harry Potter world is real, and secondly, that the Narnia world is also real, or at least accessible to the Harry Potter-esque students. This book is about a high school graduate, and so it’s a little different than Harry Potter, in that the main characters in this novel, the students at the Hogwarts-like school, are actually college students, so they get five years at what’s called Brakebills, which is the Hogwarts equivalent.

This book is not so much a narrative as it is a series of vignettes about what happens when you give modern, college-aged students access to limitless magical power. I need to tell you, this is not for the 13 and under crowd. This is definitely an R-rated book. If that’s not your thing, maybe stay away from it, but if it is, I think I would suggest that you read it. It is not Harry Potter. A lot of reviewers I think have been upset that this book does not treat magic with the sort of wide-eyed, naïve wonder that the Harry Potter books do. Instead, you get modern/post modern I guess teenagers who are kind of jaded, and cynical, and somewhat emotionally cold and exhausted. Grossman does a beautiful job of sort of teasing out what it means to be a young adult in our current society. The characters are real and believable, not necessarily always likable, but always real and believable.

The result of this novel is this sort of weird mish-mash of the naïve and the profane, the cheerful and the filthy, the wondrous and the cynical. It talks about what happens when we take magic for granted, when we take wonderful things for granted, and how after a while even magic can lose its magic, and that it’s up to us to hold tight to the beautiful possibilities that life affords us. I try to keep these reviews as spoiler free as possible, but I would certainly read this book just to see the character development. It’s very masterfully done.

Grossman has this very … he has a very light touch when it comes to weaving the story together, so at times the different chapters, which are kind of their own short stories in and of themselves, they often seem disjointed, but they’re not. They’re poignant, and everything comes together in the end, not as neatly wrapped up as the Harry Potter books, because this is, after all, a somewhat cynical, post modern work. But I found it immensely readable, and immensely enjoyable, and rare, in that it constantly surprised me. I’ve talked before, I think in episode number 4 of the Write Now Podcast, about how much I love it when books surprise me. I’m such a surprise junky, and so this book had plenty of that. Anyway, check out The Magicians, by Lev Grossman.

I would like to thank several wonderful people for helping to make today’s episode possible. First of all, to my Patreon supporters, Shawn Lock, and Rebecca Warner, and all the rest of you wonderful, lovely people. Thank you so much. Your generosity helps me to cover the costs of podcasting, so that I am not consistently losing money. Thank you. I want to thank Allison for her question, and I want to thank you for listening. It means so much that you gave up part of your day to listen to me ramble about writing. So, thank you so much. If you would like to sort of keep in contact between podcast episodes, you can do a couple things. You can follow me on the social media venue of your choice, be it Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest. I don’t know. I’m on like all of them maybe. Yeah. So, follow me. There’s different sorts of updates on each sort of social media.

Also, I send out email newsletters sometimes. If you would like to receive those, I promise I do not spam intentionally, you can just go to my website, SarahWerner.com, and go to my contact page, where you can sign up to be on my email mailing list. If you have any questions that you would like me to answer on the show, I also encourage you, once again, to go to the contact page on SarahWerner.com and fill out the little form there. Alternately, you can email me at hello@sarahwerner.com. Thank you, again, for listening today.

Remember, you cannot create your voice overnight. It takes years of work, and building, and sometimes unbuilding, and sorting through the need to impress, and having the courage to reveal what’s really real about yourself. Do that and you will have a strong voice that can tell a powerful story, a story that only you can tell. This has been the 11th episode of the Write Now Podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day.

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