Friday, December 10, 2021

This Is Not the Life I Ordered: The Gift of Voice

 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.


Wednesday, December 8, 2021

This Is Not the Life I Ordered - Editing with Friends

 This Is Not the Life I Ordered - Editing with Friends

As a writer, I’ve been asked to read over, rewrite, offer an opinion, and downright completely write a lot of friends’ papers, press releases, legal briefs, cover letters, and so on. And even though I can’t call myself a professional editor quite yet, I’ve had the pleasure of editing a novel for a small independent publisher (that never published the novel) and, as an advertising copywriter, edited and revised countless brochure copy written by clients who should never be allowed to write at all. And then there’s editing my own work. I know Writer me pretty well and I think I know Editor me pretty well too. All have lended great experiences to me as a writer and as an aspiring editor. Yet, some of these situations work out better than others. Generally speaking, I approach these situations differently depending on the circumstances.


Some Smart People Can’t Write

A lot of exceptionally bright people have great ideas or stories but just aren’t great at putting them into words. When my friend became the University of Michigan’s second African-American homecoming queen in the school’s history she wanted to write a pitch to black media titles like Ebony and Jet about the experience in the hopes that they would do a story on her. This was a great story and for the market she wanted it hardly seemed like a hard sell. When I took a look at what she wrote I realized that she a) didn’t really know what a pitch was, and b) didn’t really know how to tell a story. As intelligent as she is (today she is an attorney), storytelling was not her thing. And, unlike the Harvard lawyer I once dated who actually used the word "worstly" in a legal brief he thankfully had me look over before sending (!!), with my homecoming queen friend, every sentence was grammatically correct. But the story was stiff, started way too early (her earliest memory in life) and didn’t resonate with the historical magnitude that her accomplishment deserved. I helped her realize what her story was and rewrote the pitch. Sadly, the magazines didn’t think it was enough of an event to do a story on my friend (I know, right???) but she was very happy with our attempt.


Lost In Space - There’s a Universe Between the Thought and the Page

I have a friend who is a successful advertising copywriter because she is an idea-generator and conceptualist. But her actual writing is not her strongest point. We have worked together many times over the years and, even though it remains largely unspoken, she is aware of her deficits in this area and looks to me as her sort of editorial big brother. I’ve written for her many times and, when I’m asked, I go over her work and try to nudge the genius out of her that works so well spoken but doesn’t always translate on the page. She’s also my writing partner in a script we sold and I love our sort of Lennon/McCartney relationship. We chat about each scene and I hunker down and write it. When she wants to write a scene and it’s not showing what it’s saying, so to speak, I gently try to bring it out of her. 


The Poseur/User


I have a former-friend who earned an actual living as a writer but could not write her way out of a Strand bookstore canvas bag. She was one of the biggest fake-it-til-you-make-it stories I’ve ever met. She was a contributing writer for Allure, the women’s beauty magazine published by Conde Nast and edited by Linda Wells. She started an online blog. I wrote all of her press releases, most of her content, and edited almost everything she submitted to both the magazine and her blog. We took three of The New School Creative Writing professor and memoirist Susan Shapiro’s writing workshops together that the author hosts in her home (bragging point: Shapiro liked me as a critic so much she asked me to come back for two more, free of charge!) Meanwhile, I was waiting tables because no magazine would hire me. But she looked the part. Very pretty, stylish, and every bit the walk-on character in an episode of Girls or Sex and the City, she looked in her Marc Jacobs baby doll dresses, shagged hair, and oversized Gucci aviator glasses what a style writer should look like. Me, not so much, apparently. So she got jobs that I wrote for her. Finally, one day she asked me how I liked something she wrote. I finally told her, “Robin, you can’t write. I mean, you just can’t. I don’t know where to begin. You just don’t see the world in an extraordinary enough way.” That sounds rough, but she knew it was true. It wasn’t long after she started asking me for too much help without enough (or any, often) compensation before I finally filed her under “Ex-Friend.”


Role Play

My screenwriting partner has another business and the website is constantly updated. This usually involves calling me. I know her company and her mind very well and what she’ll like and not like so writing together is like performing a duet. It’s even more collaborative than when we are working on the script because on the website I literally write while she talks. And then we review and revise it together.


Me, Myself, and I


Editing my own work is a little like role-play: I have to pretend I didn’t write the piece and be as objective as possible when reviewing my own work. It can be a little meta, which is why I like to put some space between the drafting and revision stages, or I risk not noticing things because I’m still being Writer me and Editor me isn’t ready yet. Of course, one can only edit oneself so much. I find it hard to cut things. I skew toward long sentences and that’s usually the first thing I try to reign in. And, as a MS in Publishing candidate, the more I learn about the intricacies of grammar the more I wince at some of the things I’ve written in the past that could have been a little tighter in that department. But overall, I find editing my work the most satisfying part of the writing process. You have a body of work you created and now you’re perfecting it. It’s a nice feeling.




Friday, December 3, 2021

This Is Not the Life I Ordered - Making Friends After 40



I still have a lot of friends from my youth and young adulthood, but it took the pandemic to make me realize how limited my everyday circle of contemporary friends is. Before the pandemic, I'd work, go to the gym, go out to eat, and go to the bar, all of it alone, and just hang out with the people I met or knew there. I liked having acquaintances but I didn't really feel like I needed new friends. After all, so many had become disappointments. Some old friends just naturally grow apart. And in my mid-20s to early 30s, I became friends with people I had certain lifestyle details, musical taste, and career choices in common. But so many of those people became disappointments, as they lost control of their lives from drugs and alcohol issues or went the other extreme, becoming grotesques of their own successes or fame in ways that promoted their prior insecurities to even more relief than before they hit it big. There was even a point when I realized early in adulthood that the more I had in common with someone demographically, culturally, or stylistically, the less well we got along. I often wondered, Were people that complicated? Or was I? Some people let me down when I was down. Some friends didn't want to see me feel good about myself, preferring a certain self-effacing version of myself. Friendship is great, it's "chosen family," as we say today. But just like the other kind of family, it's rife with envy, abusiveness, co-dependence, and gossip. Being burned by friends is so much worse than being hurt by a blood relative because you actually chose this person to be in your life. At some point I must have decided that more people meant more problems so I started cutting folks. And I grew pickier about my associations as I got older and generally preferred to roll alone. I started liking people best from a distance, or when they were new and still trying to be liked.  I avoided cliques and to this day can't be friends with anyone in one. Two besties are cool, but cliques and squads after a certain age still equally frighten and amuse me. (I mean, You're a 40 year old man, why are you in the Spice Girls?) So I liked my "friends for a night" or "friends at the bar" compartmentalized from my "gym friends" or "work friends." My favorite self-deprecating joke was, "I make great first impressions but it goes downhill from there," to keep people at a distance. (There is also a bit of truth to that -- close up, I have some very large pores.)  I sort of stopped liking and trusting people. Now in my 40s, I'm wondering how to be friendlier. I realize that being alone, as a choice, is very different from being involuntarily isolated. But knowing what a difficult person I am to be friends with -- I'm moody, sensitive, impatient, temperamental, type-A, possibly uptight, I tend to occasionally drink too much, I get bored too easily, I'm a bit of a racist and a snob and overall misanthropic grump and, given the opportunity, I will absolutely schtup your boyfriend -- means working on me first before I even try to make new friends. Because I don't ever want to experience the level of maddening isolation I went through over the last 20 months ever again. After spending 14.5 months before being vaccinated in complete solitude (except for seeing one person one time), I'm shocked that I'm still sane. So. If anyone's interested in being part of my new friends campaign, you've been warned. I'm fun, I'm funny, but I'm complicated!