I used to work with an editor who liked to tell me that if he didn’t see my name on a story I’d written, he couldn’t tell it was I who’d written it. It wasn’t clear to me he meant this as a compliment.
I rarely talk to my editors about the nitty-gritty of writing; this matter of a writer’s voice, for instance, which is what my old editor seemed to be talking about. Maybe it seems esoteric to them. Or irrelevant. Though it’s a subject—voice—I think about a lot, while writing a novel that may contain 100,000 words and may require 100,000 choices be made so the book both “sounds” the way I want it to and yet extends the limits of that sound so as to hold all I want the book to hold.
What I think my editor may have assumed—and why what he said wasn’t a compliment to my genius—was that in his view any accomplished writer of fiction should have a unique and consistent voice which is detectable in everything she or he writes; and that this unique voice is integral to any story or a novel’s excellence. Think “Carver Country.” Though Carver himself didn’t think he lived only in that country, and spent the last precious years of his life successfully breaking through its frontiers.
But when my editor would say this to me about my stories and novels, what I thought was “This is not a detriment, it’s great!” I certainly never thought Rock Springs needed to sound like The Sportswriter, which didn’t need to sound like A Multitude of Sins (three books I’d written). I didn’t want everything I wrote to sound the same. The raw material I had access to and from which I make stories—memories, random or conscripted vocabulary, news items, others’ memories, and much more—was far too heterodox to fit into one voice.
In any case, don’t we all, writers and civilians alike, address the world through a variety of voices? When we talk to our priest, our spouse, our shrink (if we need one). The plumber. The police. Which is to say we achieve personal communicability and authority over what we’re saying by use of differing word choices, differing tones of voice, sentence length, emphases and cadence—depending on whom we’re addressing (our audience), and what subjects we’re trying to make believable or at least not disbelievable.
I have to say, of course, that I’ve long been aware I don’t always sound the same to myself. I’m a natural mimic, as many writers are. When I’m in the South—where I grew up and now live—I hear my speech to be different (word choices, contractions, dialect, access to humor, general rhetoric) from my speech during the quarter-century I lived in New England. I like to believe we’re all that way to a degree. Different voices inhabit us. Although I also know many people whose voices seem resolutely the same each time I hear them. My great friend Edward, the bankruptcy court judge, for instance. How he sounds never varies in my hearing—though Edward may not hear himself so uniformly. It’s a tricky business, voice. Maybe it is esoteric.
And of course there are people—let’s call them authenticists—scolds who believe that if one doesn’t always sound the same, have the same voice, advertise the same human qualities no matter what, that you (I) lack an essential self, a character, an Emersonian central “mass,” indicating I’m not, I guess, real. That kind of stern authenticity was never available to me. Lucky I’m a novelist. Or maybe it’s why I’m one. Truthfully, though, I don’t believe in all this “character” business. I think we largely invent ourselves—not unlike how we invent characters we write down on the page. If I do have a “centrality,” though, it’s represented by the sum of every single thing I’ve ever done, said, thought, but also not done, said, and thought. Which can’t really be assayed by the mere exponent of how I sound. My voice.
Misunderstandings about voice certainly propel a lot of writerly mischief and befuddlement among those trying earnestly to develop and devise their voice. When I used to teach literature to young writers at Columbia, many of my students were deviled by trying to find—or worse, by not finding—their mature writer’s voice. Everything they wrote sounded, to me and to them, different from one story to the next, as if writing fiction was a kind of dizzying, dismaying merry-go-round they got onto and off of at unplanned moments, always on a different horse. I tried to tell them that in these stories they were just hearing all the ways they could sound, and that over time they’d figure out which voice or combinations of voices would fit the most important things they wanted to write.
In those latter teaching days—I’ll turn this matter loose in a moment—there was also trepidation expressed within the student cadre bearing upon which and whose voice they were permitted to write in or use or “appropriate.” Everyone purportedly has an authentic voice—this theory went—and one must not usurp or mimic or transgress upon another’s. Or, I don’t know what would happen; the sky would fall, maybe. And neither was it clear who the authority figures were. This “stay in your lane” proscription wasn’t really about voice or aesthetics or art. It was an injunction of a rawly coercive and political nature, having to do with who puts whose foot on whose neck—or writing hand—and was never a proscription anyone with a brain took seriously. We all get to write anything we want, using whatever persona or dialect or register, or about whichever subject matter, we choose. In other words, we can and should write in whatever voice we can generate. All the proscribers can do is talk bad about us and not read what we write—all the while writing the stuff we should be writing. Of course, we have to admit they can always kill us, too.
I’ve always thought, romantically, that voice was the complex music of any fiction’s intelligence and authority; not a static feature, not a lane the story has to stay in; but the acquisitive, expanding, arrogating, experimental, inventive and seeking spirit of a story’s artifice, which is persistently trying to make disparate things (words, moods, sentiments, ideas, themes, subjects) fit together into a narrative unity they might conventionally have been thought not to fit into—and in so doing invent the new, and increase the sum of what it’s possible to think. I sometimes suspect, though I might be wrong, that we readers sense this music, this voice, most distinctly and alluringly when the story is leaning on us most strenuously—fabricating, persuading, enforcing its provisional authority so as to seem authentic, thereby enticing us to read all the way to the story’s end. Not every striving word choice will fit, of course, not every sound will chromatically harmonize and extend the voice thrillingly. These we, or our editor, can tweeze out. But looked at this way—my way—all authority and authenticity, all the enchantments of a story’s voice, just as in dance, in photography, in film and sculpture, arise not from some semi-sacred central mass, but from the outside in: from unplanned impulse, from luck, sometimes—okay—from design and application, but always from trying this and trying that. From hit or miss. It’s how artifice works, and is not so different from how we make life be life.
Richard Ford is the author of The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Canada, Between Them, and many other works of fiction and nonfiction.
