I always get a bit edgy when I hear people talk about writers finding their voice because I believe the singular noun is inappropriate. We sell ourselves short to believe that we only have one voice and delude ourselves by believing that finding it is a one-time thing to be achieved and reminisced upon. We all have many voices—to paraphrase Walt Whitman from “Song of Myself,” we contain multitudes—and those voices change over time.
Even more importantly, our relationship with our voices changes too. The voice we encountered in our twenties (perhaps the golden age of “finding one’s voice”) may become one that we only occasionally drop into at fifty. The voice we find seemingly out of nowhere at forty may burrow back inside us and emerge again at sixty, when we have the maturity to understand it and use it. Because we have multiple voices and changing relationships with them, I propose that we think of our writerly voices as an ensemble: a collection of unique instruments that feature to varying degrees in everything we write, but vary in their roles and their relative weighting.
Let me start by talking about the multitudes. The voices we carry inside us can come from everywhere we’ve been, and even places we’ve imagined being. They can come from friends and family members who speak different languages. They can come from grandma or grandpa, who maybe had a connection with the Old Country and brought its rhythms to their speech. They can come from who we were at eleven and who we were at eighteen. They can even come from the people we wish we could become and the people we might have become but are glad we didn’t.
These latter two are important because they are possible, “what if” voices that we only embody in our imaginations, rather than hearing them consistently in the physical world. The way they enter into our creative minds is therefore different. Humans spend solid chunks of time talking to ourselves in private—in the shower, on our commute, or our mirrors—and we’re often trying on different personas. We rehearse what we might say to a boss, a family member, a potential love interest, or someone who has broken our hearts. This private, internal method of experimenting with a “what if” voice is similar to the way literary voices come to us—we simply try them on, and if they fit we keep on wearing them.
This brings me to an important point about our voices: even though they are constructed, it’s best not try to construct them consciously because the “trying on” is crucial. Too much awareness invites the conscious mind into a process that is best performed by the intuitive ear. We practice our literary voices until they feel right exactly as we practice our “what if” voices until they feel right. Once we’re accustomed to using them, they become voices that we can claim as our own no matter where in our lives they came from. Anyone who has rehearsed talking back to a bully and then successfully talked back to said bully has experienced this process. It is no different than walking around your city imaging how a fictional character might describe it, then sitting down to find that character’s voice on the page.
Conscious control of the voice can even become absurd. Rarely would you say something as abstract as “I’m going to use fewer syllables and avoid Latinate words when I talk to this bully so that I don’t appear pedantic.” Those decisions are more likely to happen subconsciously based on your emotional impressions of what you’ve heard in the past. Strategizing consciously is an open invitation to overthinking, and overthinking is an open invitation to failure. Trying on voices without giving them too much thought allows us to hear how voices work, refine them, or set them aside them if they don’t fit the moment.
So how does all this voice stuff work on the page? The best voice for any piece is the one that lets us write that piece freely, without looking over our shoulders and asking ourselves whether we’ve chosen the best option. When drafting, letting our voices out as intuitively and subconsciously as we let them in will allow us the greatest fluidity. This is why writing a first draft can be such a rush. We find a voice that lets us write and ride it as long as we can, like a surfer on a wave, and we don’t stop until the ride is done.
The revision process is a better time to call upon our conscious minds and examine the makeup of the vocal ensemble we’ve created. We can listen to our characters and narrators and decide how well the clothes we tried on in our first drafts worked out—and if we don’t like them, we can change them. If too many characters sound the same, or our several distinct narrators all have the same verbal tics, our conscious minds are excellent at ferreting that out. A great way to mitigate this is to read all of one voice—all Jane’s dialog or Joe’s narration—so that we get a handle on it as a living organism of its own, then move onto another voice and do the same. (Playwrights and screenwriters do this often.) In this way we can “push apart” our voices to consciously work against any tendency to make them all sound the same.
If we pay this kind of attention to our voices in revision, we may actually find that they vary through the course of the work—and this is okay because creative writing is not scholarly writing or journalism. We have zero obligation to make our writing sound the same from beginning to end, and it might be much less fun if we did. Writing, like music, is a polyphonic exercise. At various points in any piece, one element of our vocal ensemble is likely to step out and take a solo. This may lead to what seems like raggedness and inconsistency if we’re overly worried about consistency. Tension between voices is part of our linguistic heritage and one of our creative tools, so we shouldn’t be shy about using it. Judicious use of this tension can deepen our work and give it more texture.
In fact, it has been crucial to the history of language and literature. Tensions between formal and common voices, for instance, are significant in the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are credited with inventing modern Italian by writing in the “vulgar” language of the common people. In more modern times, author Zadie Smith has written brilliantly about such tensions in her essay “Speaking in Tongues,” in which she talks firsthand about “code switching”—juggling the voices of her London childhood with those she learned during her Cambridge education:
I didn’t quite see it as a straight swap, of this voice for that. My own childhood had been the story of this and that combined, of the synthesis of disparate things. It never occurred to me that I was leaving Willesden for Cambridge. I thought I was adding Cambridge to Willesden, this new way of talking to that old way. Adding a new kind of knowledge to a different kind I already had.
Human voices are complex, and Zadie Smith isn’t the only person who lives on the cusp of multiple voices. Most of us do—especially those who become writers. I think we pay too much attention to finding one big “authentic voice,” when we have many of them. We should be talking about voices from this perspective, since we inevitably are going to use more than one. I suspect when people talk about writers finding their voice, what they’re really talking about is finding permission to write—granting themselves the freedom to speak. This is incredibly important, and nobody becomes a writer without that moment of personal permission. When we give ourselves the freedom to speak, the doors to many voices open; with each of them come opportunities to discover the possibilities of our craft. We are all ensembles, even orchestras, and there are voices within us that we haven’t even imagined yet. We keep writing in hope of discovering more and more of them.
