Don’t Let Writing Advice Silence Your Authorial Voice?

Lit Salon on the perennial question of writing instruction ... and whether it does more harm than good

What’s voice in writing, anyway? And what’s tone? Have you ever wondered about one or the other, or the difference between the two? I had a chance to talk to Megan Vared of

ALL WRITE NOW

this week about voice and tone, a conversation you can find here if you are interested! Here’s a snippet:

It's hard to talk about tone without talking about voice, because the way I see it, tone is an aspect of voice. You can think of voice as related to the writer/narrator's personality, and tone as the writer/narrator's attitude toward the subject or audience. Tone is a crucial tool, because even the most compelling narrative voices should never be monotone. Instead, a voice should vary in tone and register for all kinds of reasons, mostly related to emotions, even while the voice itself retains its character.

And if that whets your whistle, you can dive a lot (lot) deeper with this in-depth craft essay on voice from our Story Challenge last year. And if you really want to get into the weeds, there’s always this perennial favorite on the hazards of reflective voice in memoir and personal essay.

Last of all, if you are hoping to expand your community of writerly friends, we have a great friend-making thread going on here at The Friendship Experiment—it was an experiment to try this, and so far it’s been very inspiring.

And now for this week’s archival post.

Don’t Let Writing Advice Silence Your Authorial Voice?

From the archives/Dec 2024

Here’s a headline I saw the other day:

“Don’t Let Writing Advice Silence Your Authorial Voice”

The same basic sentiment was expressed in a Zoom chat last week … and in many viral Notes recently … and in countless memes everywhere always.

But is this danger real? Will you, in fact, “silence your own voice” or lose your “creative source” if you study writing and aim to write words meant for readers?

I don’t think so, or I wouldn’t be a writing teacher and I certainly wouldn’t be writing this newsletter, which is devoted to emboldening, illuminating, and transforming our writing—and our lives—through the ongoing study of the craft of writing and the never-ending reinvention of the ways we can “do language” better.

So, although I don’t want to be harsh or incite controversy or talk over anyone—that’s not my style, on Substack, or in life—I do feel strongly about study of writing as art, just like music, dance, theater, painting, sculpting, etc., and that’s why this week’s Lit Salon takes on this perennial question of writing instruction ... and whether it does more harm than good.

First off, some disclaimers.

1. If you want to write on your own just for self-expression, therapeutic benefits, or fun, go for it!

2. If you don’t want anyone to read your writing, that’s fine, too! You can write just for you in a journal. Or you can share your writing if you want. Whatever feels best for you, you can do. You’re in charge.

3. Some writing instruction really is unhelpful, misdirected, and even harmful. I have written about that kind of writing instruction many times, including here, in the post Do Writing Teachers Prey on People’s Dreams, and here, in The Very Bad Writing Workshop, about why I don’t believe in traditional MFA-style critique workshops. But bad instruction is a possibility for anything under the sun that you might wish to study, so the mere existence of bad writing instruction is not, in itself, a basis for dismissing the value of writing instruction altogether.

Indeed, if want to write creatively—as an art—but you don’t want anyone to tell you anything about the craft of creative writing because you fear you might pollute your writing or silence your voice by considering anyone else’s “advice,” I fear you’re missing out.

Because the pursuit and practice of anything as an art form, from needlepoint to oil painting to opera to circus to magic to dance to music to carpentry, etc.—whether professionally or as a hobby—typically involves some form of instruction.

Indeed, for the pursuit and practice of almost anything, art or otherwise, we naturally understand and accept that some form of guidance—study, mentorship, apprenticeship, classes, coaching, practice, etc.—is simply required in order to develop and advance skill.

Only when it comes to creative writing, it seems, does the role of instruction incite such resistance and backlash.

Ann Patchett, in her fabulous essay, “The Getaway Car,” included in her book about writing, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, addresses this odd anomoly this way:

Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration? Chances are, any child who stays with an instrument for more than two weeks has some adult making her practice, and any child who sticks with it longer than that does so because she understands that practice makes her play better and that there is a deep, soul-satisfying pleasure in improvement. If a person of any age picked up the cello for the first time and said, “I’ll be playing in Carnegie Hall next month!” you would pity their delusion, yet beginning fiction writers all across the country polish up their best efforts and send them off to The New Yorker. Perhaps you’re thinking here that playing an instrument is not an art itself but an interpretation of the composer’s art, but I stand by my metaphor. The art of writing comes way down the line, as does the art of interpreting Bach. Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art you must master the craft.

Ann Patchett is not wrong.

But what if you don’t want to get to the art of writing? What if you just want to write for fun? See disclaimer #1 above. Writing just for yourself, just for fun, is always an option.

But the headline I shared at the top of this post was not directed at people writing just for fun. It was directed at aspiring writers. As are most of the memes of a similar nature directed at people who are writing as a pursuit, writing to share their words with others, writing as writers. And, in fact, these memes often go hand in hand with other memes saying some version of, “anyone who writes is a writer.”

But is anyone who writes a writer?

Sure, in the same sense that anyone who cooks is a cook, anyone who paints is a painter, anyone who saws wood is a carpenter, anyone who dances is a dancer, anyone who stops a pipe leaking is a plumber, anyone who balances a bank account is an accountant, anyone who swims is a swimmer, anyone who trains their dog is a dog trainer, anyone who tends to the sick is a doctor, anyone who removes a splinter is a surgeon, anyone who pulls a tooth is a dentist, anyone who plays an instrument is a musician, anyone who sings is a singer, anyone who skates is a figure skater, etc.

I’m not being facetious—these analogies are all true, in their own way. But we organically recognize the difference between skating and being a figure skater or tooth pulling and dentistry. Likewise, writing as an art requires craft, or “the artistic skill or technique with which an author puts together narrative and other elements in order to convey meaning and produce effect” (Massachusetts 2017 English Language Arts and Literacy Framework).

But aspiring writers are very lucky, because writing is by far the most accessible of the arts to learn. For example, my husband is currently studying oil painting, which requires expensive supplies and equipment and a level of direct, on-site instruction that far exceeds my experience of studying writing, which, to be honest, I mostly learned from books and solo practice until a decade ago when I finally went for an MFA.

As a former foster kid, I know well that there are so many ways to learn and practice the craft of writing independently. But, on the other hand, as someone who had to learn alone for so long, and also as a writing teacher, I know too that for most people, the study and practice of writing is faster and more effective in community. It’s also much more joyful. Just ask anyone who’s doing exactly that here at Writing in the Dark.

But what if studying and practicing creative writing makes you less certain about your writing?

What if the writing advice you encounter is often confusing and contradictory, and every time you try to apply someone else’s ideas about about the craft of writing to your own work, you feel less confident instead of more?

Then you’re doing it right.

Creative friction is how we grow.

Even if you are writing only for yourself—only to process and better understand your own life—you benefit from the creative friction of applying the craft of writing to your story. Emily Rapp Black addresses this point in her memoir The Still Point of the Turning World, about losing her son to Tay-Sachs disease, a rare and always fatal congenital disorder. About the experience of writing through grief, she says (emphasis hers):

The act of creation forces creators to establish a new world with new rules and structure and form, an act that is sustaining not only in an emotional and a human way but also in an artistic way. This last point is key: yes, these grieving writers journaled and documented their day-to-day lives, all those singular moments, but they also went back and shaped their words. They did the work of revision. They wrestled with language and form. Plunked down into a situation in which they were entirely helpless, they found something to do, not to distract themselves from the situation but to look it straight in the face, as artist are required to do. Otherwise, what are we doing?

The kind of wrestling Emily Rapp Black describes—that creative friction—is exactly how we develop ourselves as artists (and humans). It’s also a required element of the practice of writing.

The kindest, most generous gift you can give yourself as an aspiring writer is to befriend that creative friction as soon as you possibly can. Embrace it and invite it to sit beside you always. Give it a permanent seat at your table. Because there is no way out of creative friction but through it, and we never get all the way through it, and nor should we even wish to, because there is always, always, more to learn, always another rung to reach for, and always a rung we will never reach no matter how long and hard we try.

The key to weathering this permanent friction is forgiveness.

As Ann Patchett also says in “The Getaway Car”:

Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let’s face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds), I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.

So, is it true that writing advice will silence your authorial voice, kill your creativity, dull your inspiration, get in the way of your words?

No.

Not in the way that these memes seem to imply.

To the contrary, writing as an art requires study and practice as a lifelong endeavor. And this is why curiosity and playfulness are such crucial qualities for writers to develop in themselves. Curiosity and playfulness keep us engaged with the limitless wonders of language, its inexhaustible potential for containing or constructing whole new shimmering, menacing, heartbreaking, life-saving worlds built with two dimensional symbols we meticulously and lovingly and forever imperfectly arrange one after another after another.

Curiosity and playfulness can keep us happily struggling (yes, happily struggling even in the face of extreme creative friction) with the many tools and devices of creative writing, from plot, setting, characters, conflict, symbols, metaphor, point of view, interiority and exteriority, concrete specific detail, sensory images, white space, implication, subtext, line breaks, rhyming, assonance, braiding, collaging, alliteration, imagery, repetition, anaphora, conceit, premise, climax, resolution, unreliability, defamiliarization, and many, many, many more.

Like the study and practice of anything else, from flipping an omelette to batting a ball, the study and practice of writing can and will at times be confusing and frustrating. You will need various kinds of coaches at different points along the way, and sometimes you’ll encounter a bad one.

But writers don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. They keep writing, they keep learning, and they keep forgiving.

Love,

Jeannine

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