Writing Voices

With a mini-rant about prompts

Since there are no obvious images to include with this post I’m including some random ones. This is a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of the moon, completed by my grown child recently. It took them weeks.

This post is a response to a prompt. Let’s write about finding your voice, my colleagues suggested. We are in a monthly writers’ group and this is an experiment in sharing pieces on the same topic. I balked, silently. (Most of my balking is silent.) I don’t like prompts. I think they are stupid and boring, though this one is at least open-ended enough to write almost anything. To write about resistance itself—or evade the question.

I don’t really use prompts as a writing teacher either, although I design assignments and “exercises.” But the assignments are aimed at the specific skills I was hired to teach and the exercises are aimed at advancing the assignments. I don’t really see the point (for me!) of doing random prompts simply for the sake of “inspiration.” I’m not sure I believe in inspiration, to be honest. I mean, as something to pursue. You either want to write something or you don’t. You either have to write something or you don’t. I’m not sure I can defend or explain my logic any better than that. But that’s just me…if you enjoy writing from prompts or find them useful, go write ahead!

But to honor this prompt, and my writing group colleagues, these are my most common voices, I think.

Teacher

Perhaps prompts are just opportunities. This one gives me an opportunity to reflect on my Substack voice, which I’m still working on. Sometimes I have been teacherly, analyzing my own drafts and suggesting exercises for readers to try out themselves. (This is evasive. What is the difference between a prompt and an exercise, hmm?)

Daughter

Sometimes I am daughterly, focusing on my father’s art and artifacts, and my relationship to him. I don’t think that that voice is sustainable over the long term though. As hard as I work (and it is a wonderful challenge) to make that interesting to strangers, it will eventually get boring for them. It gets boring for me too. (Here, I am hedging: what is a daughterly voice, exactly?)

Critic

Sometimes I write as a critic, of books I’ve read or, more often, as a viewer of art. This is frankly my default voice. I can judge and critique in my sleep, though I am best when I have some research to deploy. I am writing a short review of the Julia Margaret Cameron exhibit I wrote about in my last post right now, toggling between this screen and that one. That is probably my core voice here and elsewhere, the one I can sustain the best over time.

The voice you develop— or choose—must be authentic, obviously, or it won’t “take” with readers for long and you won’t be able to pull it off for long either. Ideally, I’d like my criticism to focus on what we teachers in NYU’s Expository Writing Program called “moments of exhilaration.” The term comes from Matthew Goulish’s essay “Criticism,” part of his collection 39 Microlectures, which resists the fault-finding of most reviews. Instead of complaining, he suggests, why not look for what works and what sparks feelings in you, as reader? If you start there, then you can use research and close reading to back up your emotional response. As a teacher, especially, that is a more productive way to encourage students and create a supportive community. Goulish’s own voice is peppered with simple questions and analogies: he compares criticism to glass, windows, and rain.

Of course despite these best intentions, I often get judgey anyway, and not constructively. I am cranky this week—from the heat wave blistering New York City, from the news in the world, from my disappointment at not getting the Trio House award (I’m burying this news in the middle of the middle). I can’t run outdoors (too hot); I’m trying to cut down on sugar (with difficulty, so blame blame blame). It’s hard not to be negative as a “critic.” It’s hard to manage one’s inner critic.

But if my own voice is a source of insecurity, discovering other distinctive new voices is a source of delight and surprise. Where do they come from? How do you identify them? Some of the vivid voices from novels I read recently and admired include:

• Judith Newcomb Stiles’s novel Hush Little Fire. Judith is a member of my Cape Cod writing group and published this novel in May. There is a treat in reading about local places I know well but my main delight in reading her book was in the vividness of her wide cast of characters. Using multiple points of view, Judith lets us into each of their heads—especially the women of various ages and classes in a small town. As a sample, here are the novel’s first lines, by its main character, Mary: “Alone in my bedroom, I played this game.” Do you know where this is going? You don’t. “Light a candle and run a finger through the flame without getting burned.” Now do you know? No. You can see that the fire in the title is already both a central image and an event, not a metaphor. But can you tell Mary is a ceramicist? The rest of the first page will be about pottery-making and kilns. And those sentences, rhythmic and unapologetic, have set a tone, a voice.

• Here’s another. Dorothy Sayers’s strong voice in Gaudy Night (1935) is partly historical: she speaks the language of early women scholars at Oxford. Sayers’s opening is actually an Author’s Note: “It would be impossible to deny that the City and University of Oxford (in aetemum floreant) do actually exist, and contain a number of colleges and other buildings, some of which are mentioned by name in this book.” How Austenian this reads! The formal diction vying with the wry admission. And the Latin! (There will be a lot of Latin in this book.) Compare this then to the actual first sentence of her novel, below an epigraph from Sir Philip Sidney: “Harriet Vane sat at her writing-table and stared out into Mecklenburg Square.” After all that annotation, context, and erudition we end up somewhere quite ordinary. Yet by the end of the page we’ll be back under Oxford’s dreamy spires. I read and loved this novel as an adolescent, crazy for English detective novels, and just re-read it in preparation for

  Ann Kennedy Smith
  ’s 20th-Century Book Club discussion, starting soon.

Apropos of nothing, an old brass mail chute from a prewar apartment building on the Upper West Side. I grew up with these but most have been replaced. They are beautiful objects!

Looking back, what have I done with this prompt here? I avoided the part about “finding” altogether. Perhaps “finding” was more about “recognizing” all along. I didn’t really write about my resistance, after mentioning it. Yet this ramble has helped me consider the idea of voice, even if it hasn’t quite demonstrated or advanced my own. It makes it obvious that we all already have many voices; they aren’t good or bad, or strong or weak, though I’ve slipped into judgment myself, throughout. The trick is getting the voice onto the page, really. Or letting, not getting. The real challenge is allowing yourself to sound like yourself when you write.

Thanks to my esteemed writers’ group,

Clyde Watson

,

andrea pyenson

,

Jama Shelton

, and

Judith Newcomb Stiles

, unique voices all!, for their models and camaraderie in this process. Hearing their voices helps me hear my own, somehow. I hope this takeaway carries over to the other review I’m writing, giving me permission to use my own voice there too. What about you? How do you hear, or cultivate, your own voice? How do you feel about prompts? :) :(