Many years ago – this was college, in fact; my senior year – I was told by a friend of mine that I have “the gift of voice.” I had just won a first place award in the school’s fiction writing contest, the Hopwood Awards at the University of Michigan, and my friend Ben, who turned out to be a better reader than a friend, was telling me why he thought my stories won first place. I had never heard it put quite that way before – ‘the gift of voice’ – but I knew what he meant. It was a huge compliment. Since that time, I’ve been told by numerous other readers and colleagues a similar thing. “You write how you talk,” and “When I read your articles, I can hear you talking in my head,” are two common refrains. One of my English lit instructors used to tell me that I was “such a stylist,” which she meant as a compliment but made me self-conscious because I never want to seem like I’m trying to be jazzy or flashy. Yuck. But I don’t think that’s what she meant. More than anything else anyone can say about my stories, my novel, or my articles and essays, telling me that my writing has a natural “voice” is the most flattering of all. It speaks to authenticity and uniqueness and the highest form of literary artfulness to me.
It makes sense that this almost indefinable quality would be something I might have picked up early on, rather than tried to learn or force. My favorite novelists to read for pleasure during my college years were Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, Rick Moody, and Terry McMillan, all writers who have “the gift of voice” in spades. I also read a lot of style and culture magazines along with my weekly dose of the Sunday Times, all of these periodicals bursting with strong written voices from obscenely talented journalists. Anka Radakovich, the sex columnist at Details magazine in the early-to-mid 1990s, had a huge influence on me. Whipsmart, funny in that wry, deadpan kind way, and the epitome of downtown New York Cool at that moment in time (at least to my aspirational New Yorker mind), if anyone had the gift of voice it was her. Others include Kurt Andersen (New York), the young, pre-culturally beknighted Ta-Nehisi Coates in his Village Voice years, and the late greats Dominick Dunne and Christopher Hitchens (Vanity Fair). Somehow I must have either picked up that I should write with less formality and more conversational style, even when I’m writing formally. (It’s certainly a much more fun way to approach things.) Or perhaps I’m just one of those people for whom it is a gift, if we’re going to take my friends and instructors at their word and believe they weren’t just being nice.
What is voice? I don’t know. It’s something between perspective, cadence, style, rhythm. It’s almost like asking where a human’s soul is. If you ask a pastor you’ll get one answer. If you ask a neurologist you’ll get another. But if you ask what the soul is of a work of literature, it’s the voice.
How can an editor help refine a writer’s voice whose competency in that pivotal arena might be wanting? This is probably the most atmospheric, undefinable, and nebulous part of editing. It’s not like a line that an editor can pinpoint and say is too long or mixes metaphors. I think an editor has to think about what the writer is saying in general and try to wrestle the psychological and emotional pitch out of that content and turn it into its own visceral language. How does the writer talk in real life? Is this writer witty? Are they guarded and soft-spoken? Confident and brash? Do they speak in a cultural vernacular and “code-switch” for emphasis? Is there a way to imbue their writing with the quality of their spoken voice and personality that doesn’t read as forced or jazzy, just instinctive and natural. Authentic. As an editor, I would encourage a writer to write a scene the way they would speak it and try to find the difference between that experience and the mind-space they inhabit when they sit down to “write.” And then my writer and I could review both experiences together and either blend them or see which one works best. Both the coaching and modeling methods might be useful for this experiment, especially if, when it comes to the latter, the editor has a strong sense of what the writer’s voice actually is, and feels capable of bringing it to the surface for them in a passage example.
On the other end of the spectrum, a good writer can abuse the gift of voice and an editor may have to rein them in. If the voice overwhelms or distracts from or seems inappropriate in the context of the content, that’s not using your gift. Sadly, one big name writer that somehow turned into a parody of herself this way (in my opinion) is Maureen Dowd. I stopped reading her Times columns because her once authentic voice started to become self-parodying to me. Other readers I knew concurred. I often wondered, Could no one over there tell her to tone it down? Apparently not.
Mid-career output from my fiction heroes Bret Easton Ellis and Terry McMillan went voice overboard in their novels Glamorama and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, respectively. These were rock star writers, publishing tent poles whose editors for reasons unknown to me allowed their stars to publish these brash, phoned-in novels whose storylines were watered down by voice or so weak to begin with the writers may have felt an instinct to overcompensate by basically imitating themselves as forcefully as possible.
The final thing about voice to me is that it has to be yours and yours as you are at the time. Even if you can imitate Joan Didion better than Bret Easton Ellis ever did, or imitate your own writing voice just as well, if it’s not authentic it’s going to wear thin and read as false or self-parodying. And there’s nothing soulfully literary about any of that.
