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| How I Got Interested in Voice |
| For a long time I had a sense there was something you could call "voice" which was important in writing, but in the last few years I've been impelled to try to think the matter out more fully. What started this round of thinking was teaching a course in autobiography in which I required students to write 15 pages a week. It didn't have to be any particular kind of writing, it could be freewriting, babbling, incoherent. I didn't enforce any definition of autobiographical writing. I didn't grade it. I didn't even think that I would read it: 15 pages a week from 20 students was too much. I had set up the students in pairs where they were supposed to read each other's writing in full each week and then give me only a few pages to read. But these pairs broke down and that left me getting a student's notebook every other week and trying to read 30 pages in it. I found myself reading quickly and intermittently. My standards for reading became fairly selfish: if I was enjoying the words, I kept on; if not, I tended to start skipping. (Students weren't required, by the way, to show me everything-they could signify sections they wanted to keep private.) For a long time I had a sense there was something you could call "voice" which was important in writing, but in the last few years I've been impelled to try to think the matter out more fully. What started this round of thinking was teaching a course in autobiography in which I required students to write 15 pages a week. It didn't have to be any particular kind of writing, it could be freewriting, babbling, incoherent. I didn't enforce any definition of autobiographical writing. I didn't grade it. I didn't even think that I would read it: 15 pages a week from 20 students was too much. I had set up the students in pairs where they were supposed to read each other's writing in full each week and then give me only a few pages to read. But these pairs broke down and that left me getting a student's notebook every other week and trying to read 30 pages in it. I found myself reading quickly and intermittently. My standards for reading became fairly selfish: if I was enjoying the words, I kept on; if not, I tended to start skipping. (Students weren't required, by the way, to show me everything-they could signify sections they wanted to keep private.) But gradually, a new and mysterious standard began to emerge. That writing was most fun and rewarding to read that somehow felt most "real." It had what I am now calling voice. At the time I said things like, "It felt real, it had a kind of resonance, it somehow rang true." Sometimes these passages were short -- a phrase or a sentence in length -- a kind of parenthetical aside or a digression in the middle of something else. Sometimes the passages were much longer. Sometimes it was a particular thought that had greater conviction, sometimes it was a particular feeling -- an angry, happy, sarcastic, or even self-pitying observation -- that somehow rang truer than its surroundings. Sometimes these passages with voice seemed good by other standards, sometimes they were not good writing at all. Sometimes they were bursts of sincerity, but not always. Sometimes I couldn't identify anything special about these passages in style or content. It was just that they seemed to jump out at me as though suddenly the writer had switched to a fresh typewriter ribbon. On some days these passages jumped out at me very clearly: it's as though I could hear a gear being engaged and disengaged. On other days I had no sense of where there was voice and where not: it all seemed alike. I could use all my other standards for writing, but as for realness or resonance or voice I couldn't tell one passage from another. I began to mark these passages with a line in the margin, and I simply told students that these passages seemed to me to have strength, resonance, power. I said I liked reading them and that something special seemed to be going on. I usually asked whether they also felt something special. Often the students recognized that these passages represented a particular kind of writing for them -- they could remember a particular feeling or sensation they had as they wrote them. Sometimes not. Often students were surprised at my choices since these passages didn't always feel to them like their best writing. I didn't give any reactions to passages that seemed to lack voice. For the most part I gave only positive feedback. Criticism would have worked against my goals for this course: to get students to write a great deal, to have confidence in their ability to produce writing at will, and to produce in one term such a large pile of autobiographical writing that they wouldn't be able to keep themselves from coming back sometime later to work on it. A few students seemed to know exactly what I was talking about and value the feedback and want more. A few, at the other end, were very bothered and seemed to use my feedback to prevent themselves from ever doing this kind of writing again. It's as though I'd found a leak and they promptly plugged it. For most students, however, it was as though I'd planted a seed. They didn't necessarily accept these passages as good writing. I didn't ask them to. I pressed them simply to accept the fact that such passages really did have power for me as one reader. As a result, students seemed to mull the matter over in their minds. They wondered about it as they wrote. They wondered what passages I would pick out next time. Some of them began to get a feel for when they were doing it and when not. They developed a sense of internal cues. In this process I feel I am giving students permission -- indeed an invitation -- to move in a direction they've never been invited to move in before. To the extent that they do -- that is, to the extent that they begin to listen to my feedback and try to produce some more of what I praise -- I think I see a lot of things begin to happen in their writing. Students begin to like writing more, to write about things that are more important to them, and thus to feel a greater connection between their writing and themselves. I think this process leads not just to learning, but to growth or development. Searching for more voice starts them on a journey -- a path toward new thoughts, feelings, memories and new modes of seeing and writing. But it is not clear either to the student or to me where the path will lead. Here are some of the things that seem to happen when students accept even tentatively the invitation to work on voice. First of all, the process affects subject matter. For some students it means writing more about the incidents or observations that were in the marked passages. For others it means exploring those same feelings: perhaps angry feelings, perhaps depressed feelings, perhaps a particular area of their lives. For others it means exploring certain trains of thought. When I give this same kind of feedback in courses that emphasize expository writing, the process often leads students to writing that is autobiographical or self-exploratory though not always. But as they explore these areas, characteristically the students come upon more memories, more feelings, more thoughts -- often new ones. It is not infrequent for a student to say "I've started writing about a part of my life I haven't thought about in years. I'm remembering new things." My invitation also tends to lead to experimentation: swings of style and mood and mode. It sometimes feels to the student as though I have simply invited bad writing since-for some students especially -- I find resonance in passages where the writing stops being careful and starts coming apart. Subsequent experiments by the students, then, sometimes lead to writing in which I find neither quality nor voice -- merely excessive, dramatized, even hysterical words with no power at all. But I have an intuition that these experiments are appropriate and useful no matter what the results and so I don't find it hard to refrain from giving negative feedback. I just keep looking for passages that have power. When a student says "What about this?" and points to a passage that obviously reflects deep feeling and great excitement at the time of writing but seems completely lacking in power or voice to me, I say I didn't feel power or resonance in it, perhaps even that I didn't like it, but emphasize again that this seems to be a mysterious and subjective business. In a given case I may feel certain that the passage lacks quality or power, but on principle I don't believe that any one person's judgment about voice is trustworthy. My feedback on voice often has yet another effect. Students often come to feel a need to withdraw from writing for an audience. That is, some of the students are quite skilled already and like to write stories, essays, or poems for an audience. But as they explore power in these often new areas of writing, they sometimes don't want to share their writing with anyone -- often not even with me. What made these writers skilled was their superior control: the ability to produce just the effect they wanted upon readers. Now they need privacy for experimenting with what is, in effect, an invitation to relinquish control. Though some of the new memories may be painful, my invitation usually leads to more pleasure in writing. It's as though the person has a sense of simply making more noise in putting a pencil to paper. It reminds me of a child who gets a loud new toy and just delights in the din. Also of my own sensations when, as I worked on viola bowing exercises, there were brief, round, fat, resonant sounds; brief sheddings of tension in the muscles of my arm and shoulder. I would immediately try to recapture the sound and fail, but over the weeks these interludes of resonance would come more frequently and finally I could usually do it at will and make the instrument and my body resonate together. Then there was a great pleasure just in bowing and bowing -- even if it was just one or two notes -- to make the roundest, loudest, most ringing sound possible. Similarly, there is a yoga "sound-box" exercise in which you chant a vowel and try to achieve a ringing sound by learning to let the head and chest area resonate. At first, students can only get this power or voice in the kinds of passages where it first appeared: certain moods, certain memories, certain trains of thought. But, gradually, over weeks and months, if they experiment and try to let this power declare itself and see where it might lead them, it transfers to or becomes available in other areas of writing. For example, perhaps there was a peculiar resonance in passages that were angry or self-pitying -- or in descriptions of certain kinds of places. But then, gradually, as the writer does more and more of this particular kind of writing, she gets better at feeling and using this power, and so very slowly the resonance comes to characterize a few more kinds of writing. If at first students could only do it with passages of autobiographical writing that explored certain kinds of incidents, then gradually they could get it in other kinds of incidents, and gradually even in expository writing. For some students, voice came first in certain kinds of expository writing. It is this experience in the last few years that has impelled me to try to work out a fuller theory of voice. For the power I am seeking, some people use words like authenticity or authority. Many people call it sincerity, but I think that's misleading because this power can be present when the writing is not really sincere and absent when the writing is sincere. I like to call this power juice. The metaphor comes to me again and again, I suppose, because I'm trying to get at something mysterious and hard to define. "Juice" combines the qualities of magic potion, mother's milk, and electricity. Sometimes I fear I will never be clear about what I mean by voice. Certainly I have waxed incoherent on many occasions. One teacher I admire, Ellen Nold, heard me struggling unsuccessfully to explain myself to a meeting of writing teachers at Stanford University. She wrote me: The voice phenomenon cannot well be discussed in rationalistic terms; every time you tried to define the conditions of it arising, you failed hopelessly. Why not just give up? Why not confront Voice for what it is? What is it? That's the question Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism are built around. The very question is a Zen koan. We all know, as Persig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance points out, that Quality exists, and we can agree pretty well what writing has Quality and what does not. Quality is the same as Voice is the same as Tao is the same as Self is the same as Atman-Brahman is the same as . . . When I speak with Voice, It's loud because It speaks directly to your Ear, not just to your ear, which is constantly distracted by other voices. . . . You teach writing by pointing out to students when your Ear hears and asking them to do more of That. The rationalists tear their hair out. Can that be teaching? Where is the content? The technique? What is this Voice? Where can I buy an Ear? How do I know that my Ear is like your Ear? Most teachers have ears, but their Ears are covered. Because they have never thought that Voice is the province of the public school, even if they valued It, they wouldn't ask for It. You ask for It. You tell others that It's there to be sensed and asked for. . . . Don't try to explain it to rationalistic people in rationalistic terms! It is something that ultimately cannot be explained to anyone who hasn't heard. And those who have heard will forgive you for the inadequacy of your words. But I cannot resist trying to work this thing out more fully and rationally. For one thing I want to be able to explain it to more people -- even to people who haven't heard it. Besides, I needed to figure out if voice was the right word. Voice, in writing, implies words that capture the sound of an individual on the page. But though that seems central to what I'm fishing for, sometimes I found passages with this sound -- yes, these words had been breathed into -- yet the words somehow lacked the deeper power and resonance that had gradually become the object of my quest. |
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