Your Fierce Original Voice
Your Fierce Original Voice
It's here! The Letter Reimagined, Week One! Write With Us!
Recently, someone in an online writing pedagogy group of which I am a member shared an anecdote and a question something like this:
A student asked a writer teacher, “Do you think writing can really be taught, or does it boil down to talent? Like, either you have it or you don’t?”
The person in the pedagogy group then asked others to share their thoughts in response. That was interesting, as those conversations always are. I’m glad to report only a few people admitted to believing that writing can’t be taught—that either “you have it or you don’t.” Some people said writing can’t be taught but it can be learned, which feels unclear to me. If something can be learned, than shouldn’t it also be, at minimum, easier to learn with thoughtful guidance?
It always surprises and dismays me when teachers of writing say, as some persistently do, that they don’t believe writing can be taught. It seems to me we probably should not be teaching writing if we do truly don’t believe it’s possible.
Of the majority of respondents who did think writing can be taught, most pointed to “skills and devices” as the teachable part of writing, while acknowledging that some people have—just as in athletics or music or other pursuits—more natural ability, more innate affinity for language, conferring an obvious advantage. However, most also were also quick to add that natural ability is not the main thing that will help a person build and sustain a “successful” life as a writer (whatever that means) and nor will lack of natural ability necessarily hold a person back from doing so.
Why?
Because the main thing a person needs to build and sustain a life as a writer—above all else—is persistence. Life as a writer requires a great deal of fortitude in the face of creative frustration alongside continual rejection and disappointment, unexpected setbacks, etc.
This all feels pretty true to me, and it’s all been said before. In fact, my MFA advisor, at my graduation, said that writing requires three things: talent, luck, and perseverance, with the third being by far the most important.
But anyway, one person in the pedagogy group said something especially interesting to me, which I’d not heard said in quite this way before. They said that while writing can certainly be taught, voice cannot. And voice is the quality every agent and editor is after. We hear it all the time. Voice, this person said, can only be found by the writer.
I’m not sure I agree entirely with this assertion (after all, I have actually taught classes on voice…). And I am not sure of the difference between “finding” one’s writing voice and “finding” familiarity with other devices and skills on the page. But I do agree that voice is hard to teach. Very hard.
Partly that’s because we all have—as I’ve written about before in this space—a multiplicity of voices. Indeed, back during our epic Story Challenge last winter I wrote an extensive and complex craft essay about the mystery of voice that was replete with examples, excerpts, and analysis and which, on reflection, is a mini-workshop all in itself. That post is ridiculously in-depth and should probably have been split into three or four posts, a skill I need to better learn here on Substack, but I digress.
Anyway, that extensive voice essay also offered not one, not two, but three interrelated exercises on voice—exercises designed to both crack open our voices and help us to recognize them, inspired by wise words on voice from exemplary writers including George Saunders, Sonya Huber, and Jane Hirshfield, who herself said:
Voice … is the body language of a poem — the part that cannot help but reveal what it is. Everything that has gone into making us who we are is held there. Yet we also speak of writers “finding their voice.” The phrase is both meaningful and odd, a perennial puzzle: how can we “find” what we already use? The answer lies, paradoxically, in the quality of listening that accompanies self-aware speech: singers, to stay in tune, must hear not only the orchestral music they sing with, but also themselves. Similarly, writers who have “found a voice” are those whose ears turn at once inward and outward, both toward their own nature, thought patterns, and rhythms, and toward those of the culture at large.
And in the months prior to that epic Story Challenge week on voice (not counting my Assay craft essay on child narration as an aspect of voice) I’d actually already written at least three separate times on the topic of voice—what it is, how to recognize yours, how to learn to play it like the instrument it is (those three craft essays and exercises are linked in the exercise portion of this post).
The reason I’m revisiting voice now, today, on the first day of our four-week “The Letter Reimagined” intensive, is because letters are all about voice.
Through the lens of letters, we can explore, test, identify, and refine our voice(s). We learn to hear voice, and, therefore, learn to tune it.
Just consider this brilliantly helpful bit on epistolary writing and voice I found