Why I Can't Teach Voice (And Neither Can You)
As I wind toward the close of my craft series this year, I’m taking a swing at narrative voice. Like lyricism, voice is part technique and part mystery. I can break down the mechanics of it and obsess over other writers’ sentences, but there’s no explaining the “how” of voice. The reader can recognize it and the writer can channel it, but the origin is as elusive as love.
Claiming your voice requires surrender, the way an expert actor learns to become a character rather than methodically following stage cues. In that sense voice can only be taught by suggestion. I can lead you to the honey, but you have to taste it yourself.
“The voice is the fingerprint on the page,” Mark Slouka said in a recent interview. “It’s the thing that makes a particular person’s writing unique, recognizable.”
Voice is like the signature sound that distinguishes breakout bands from the hacks who never make it past the garage.
Take U2, for instance. What made that group stand alone in the crowd? There’s more to it than this, but if you listen to the opening bars of “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” you can hear a brightness in the treble notes that gets duplicated in the melody. There’s a yearning in that sound, but not the frustrated kind you hear in metal and grunge. It’s an open-eyed innocence, even optimism.
A more skilled musician might have better words for what happens at the end of that chorus, but where a metal or grunge refrain always ends on a down note, a U2 song always comes back up at the end. Just a subtle shift toward uplift. Immortal youth. You’d recognize that sound anywhere.
Just so, voice is the invisible watermark in a text that would allow us to recognize its author in an anonymized stack. It’s the apex of craft. All the little decisions with metaphors, verbs, images, even concision, add up to voice.
When I last taught my Personal Essay course (was it really four years ago?), I broke voice down into tone, diction, and syntax.
The mood or aura beneath the words is tone. There’s no mistaking the difference between earnestness and irony, between the comic and the lyrical.1
Diction (word choice) affects tone. But it’s still a discrete set of choices. David Sedaris frequently juxtaposes a polite word like “bum” with the more vulgar “ass” for comic effect, other times heightening absurdity with just the right verb. If you don’t find that amusing, you won’t like Sedaris. If it strikes your funny bone, you won’t be able to get enough of his voice.
I loved James Herriott as a child, and it’s been a delight to revisit his work. His writing holds up in part because he is precise with his words. Take, for instance, this excerpt from the opening chapter of All Creatures Great and Small.
They didn’t say anything about this in the books, I thought, as the snow blew in through the gaping doorway and settled on my naked back.
I lay face down on the cobbled floor in a pool of nameless muck, my arm deep inside the straining cow, my feet scrabbling for a toe hold between the stones. I was stripped to the waist and the snow mingled with the dirt and the dried blood on my body. I could see nothing outside the circle of flickering light thrown by the smoky oil lamp which the farmer held over me.
No, there wasn’t a word in the books about searching for your ropes and instruments in the shadows; about trying to keep clean in a half bucket of tepid water; about the cobbles digging into your chest. Nor about the slow numbing of the arms, the creeping paralysis of the muscles as the fingers tried to work against the cow’s powerful expulsive efforts.
There was no mention anywhere of the gradual exhaustion, the feeling of futility and the little far-off voice of panic.
Yorkshire comes alive as a setting through nouns like “cobbles,” and we have that “smoky oil lamp” for our place in time. But Herriot takes a light hand with diction, preferring more neutral and timeless words. There’s nothing slangy about him. He lures you into a dream by not distracting too much.
We could talk for a while about a phrase like “the little far-off voice of panic,” how it contributes to tone (Herriot is always blushing at himself before others can) and why it works to establish his mood in the scene (there is a franticness to that jumble of words) even if we might typically advise against stacking up adjectives like that.
James Herriot is a paradox. He can laugh at himself and poke fun at others, enjoy a stiff drink and a sincere prayer, and toe the line of bawdiness without ever tipping into vulgarity. All those word choices and gradations of feeling create the fingerprint of an earthy gentleman on the page.
But surely that’s not all voice is?
Herriot is fond of the compound-complex sentence and riffs of threes which bring smoothness to his delivery. Syntax determines rhythm, whether a voice sounds staccato or languid, harsh or musical. Consider the difference between Herriot’s hook and a more modern alternative.
They didn’t say anything about this in the books, I thought, as the snow blew in through the gaping doorway and settled on my naked back.
They didn’t say anything about this in the books. Snow blew through the doorway and settled on my naked back.
Part of Herriot’s charm is that he takes us with him on his country rambles. It’s like we’re riding shotgun as he drives out into the countryside, standing there in the doorway while he narrates the story to us with his face pressed to the floor. The first version sweeps us into that dream with “I thought” conjoining inner life to physicality. The alternative might sound more dramatic, but it casts the narrator more impersonally as someone reconstructing the action from a safe distance, not as the reader’s friend caught in a painful predicament.
It’s easy to forget, but Herriot wrote after Hemingway, and his charming style defied Papa Modernity’s stoic masculinity. Hemingway made a name for himself with a blunt and brutal voice. If asked why the chicken crossed the road, he’d have said: “To die. In the rain.”
That cutting brutality, the watermark of Hemingway’s cynicism, is never clearer than in the closing lines of The Sun Also Rises, where Jake and Brett imagine a love that could never be consummated for many reasons, not the least of which is Jake’s war injury:
“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Based on the examples above, we could easily tell Herriot and Hemingway from each other in an anonymized stack.
But isn’t it more complicated than just tone, diction, and syntax? I don’t buy what Gary Provost is selling in his famous infographic.
Write a combination of short, medium, and long sentences, and chances are good that you’ll end up sounding just like everyone else, which these days means sounding like ChatGPT. We’ll probably never know who Started. Using. Periods. For. Emphasis. But social media is filled with copycats, each indistinguishable from the next.
describes another syntactic style that she calls “the stack”: “The stack style is a way of writing that involves stacking short, pithy sentences, each their own paragraph, one on top of the other.”The goal of stack writing is to keep impatient readers’ attention and get boosted by algorithms that scan for patterns like these. But the result is a bunch of synthesizer-like voices that all sound the same.
It is hard to sound like yourself. First you have to know who you are, what you love, what you hate, and how to build a bridge between the world and yourself. For generations of writers that meant imitating literary heroes, maybe borrowing a phrase here and there, sometimes by choice and sometimes unwittingly. There’s a little of Byron and Carlyle and Milton in Willa Cather’s voice, and one scholar even claims that her syntax in English reveals hidden French.
The writer with a distinctive voice, the kind you can spot in a pile of manuscripts, has read so voraciously that they are filled with examples of tone, diction, and syntax. But that writer has one thing that a Large Language Model lacks: personal taste. A genius like Cather does more than calculate the most likely phrases to parrot, she synthesizes all she has read according to her own liking, the sounds she finds most pleasing, the rhythms that the writers she admires have set.
From all that she creates a new thing, which no teacher can teach: she opens her throat and she sings.
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Several failed attempts at teaching Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and my kids’ complete lack of interest in classics like “The Princess Bride” say otherwise. There SHOULD BE no mistaking the difference between facts and irony is what I should say. A friend once claimed that there should be a sarcasm emoji. To which I say, NO, NO, NO. If your ear can’t tell the difference, the fault lies with you.
Joshua — Chicken/road jokes as told by different authors should be a fun game. If I come up with one, I will be back.
Okay. Not good but to kick it off. Dylan Thomas was asked why the chicken crossed the road and answered: so it could sing in its chains like the sea.
And — a great essay, but I hope that goes without saying.
Just picked this up the other day😃