Voices impel the telling, and the braiding and melody of their resonance and dissonance are what creates an urgency in the tale ~Sonya Huber
Voices impel the telling, and the braiding and melody of their resonance and dissonance are what creates an urgency in the tale ~Sonya Huber
Story Challenge | Week 6 | Voice ... editors want "voice," they want characters that sing, seethe, croon & command—and our work needs voices as real and distinct as fingerprints. How do we do that?
Happenings & Other Stuff
🗓️ Our First Live Salon for Story Challenge Live Salon is coming up! Join us Friday JAN. 19th 12:30PM CT for a Q & A, speed sentence shares & more (Zoom link sent 2 hrs ahead to all founders; manage your subscription options here & share comments/questions on this post—and thank you, Monika, for suggesting we add these headers for happenings!
✍🏼 Our next seasonal intensive starts in April and is devoted to embodied writing techniques, through which we will gently yet powerfully articulate the cellular knowledge, muscle memory, and fascia of connection from which we weave all stories. Join us!
🌴 By the time you’re reading this, I should be on the road to the Gulf Coast to finish my novel. More on that below; please send me all the luck, as I will need it!
Hi, friends! We’re halfway through our Story Challenge—and I am so in awe. Your work is so captivating, urgent, strange, and real. You are so inventive, brave, and above all, willing. These are my highest compliments. I am wholly wowed.
And we already have more than 300 comments in our bustling conversation on desire as an element of story last week alone—the comments sections on these posts offer a mini DIY MFA each week. It’s so rich. And many of you are sharing how tender, vulnerable, unfamiliar, and frightening desire can be (and how much you’ve protected yourself from feeling your own). What excellent preparation for April’s embodied writing intensive!
And this matters greatly, because I cannot help but wonder: can we ever hope to create something that thrums with the engine of desire on the page (desire within our characters and their plights, no matter whether those characters are real or imagined) if we ourselves cannot or will not want? Probably not.
So, I congratulate you for your courageous work. And this week, we’ll talk about an aspect of story that underlies and infuses every single other aspect: voice.
First, though, a life update. By the time this post hits your inbox, I should already be on the highway headed south for two months of remote work on the Gulf Coast.
But don’t let the palm tree emoji fool you. I am a working writer, and I will be working on the Gulf—trying to finish my novel, yes, but also doing my full-time University day job. I have always had a day job, despite starting my writing career in my early twenties with my first published essays followed by a children’s picture book when I was 26, etc. None of that work ever paid enough to count on it for survival, though, so for several years in my late twenties and early thirties, when my children were young, I worked full time as a magazine editor. After that, I taught elementary and middle school full time for a decade. In my early forties, I started my current job as a writer/editor and lecturer at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, where I teach Writing for Public Health and facilitate narrative health writing forums (among many, many other responsibilities including academic and medical editing).
Having a day job means I do not need to ask my creative writing to support me, which is very freeing. By not asking my creative work to support me, I keep the channel between myself and whatever is trying to emerge unfettered. Note, I don’t work any less hard at my creative projects than I would if I were trying to earn my living through them—in fact, I think I work harder, because I am less stressed about money, less afraid, and more able to take certain risks I might avoid if I needed this part of my career to cover my mortgage. I know my mentality around work and money comes mostly from growing up the way I did, with chronic financial instability and precarity, a constant storm of threat and insecurity. People can succeed with many different ways of balancing a creative life and a work life, depending on many factors (including access to other income streams!), but this is what works best for me.
So why bother to go to the Gulf to … work?
Well, for one thing, the ocean. Consider the mulish waves, their shocking spray, staining my calves with salt. Consider the deceptive sunshine, underscored with morning chill but pinking my shoulders nonetheless—and so much warmer than Minneapolis, where I live. Consider waking to that siren of orange sounding across the ocean each morning, cut through by the silhouettes of seagulls, pelicans, eagles, and dolphins. All this, seen from the quiet covered porch.
But despite all this oceanic energy, I’ll actually be working longer and harder hours than usual, because I can, simply by virtue of being away from the many home-front responsibilities toward which I devote considerable time and energy—namely, grandchildren and other family-related activities. (Side note, I’m going to miss them so much, I already miss them and I haven’t even left, especially with all the continued churning around Z’s case, though don’t worry, he definitely won’t be going anywhere while I’m away; I’m terribly prone to homesickness and even had a nightmare last night and when Jon heard me sleep-crying and tried to wake me I apparently blurted out, “nightmare!”). So, it’s not simple. But, we booked this stay a year ago, and, given the nature of my life right now, it’s only through being away that I can effectively make any productive space for my novel (a conundrum I’ve written about before). Given this stretch of semi-isolation with Jon and Frannie (thank goodness), I will finish my draft by the time we come home in March.
I feel excited and nerve-wracked but also grateful and all the other things too, so here we go … oh, life.
Meanwhile, I’m more thankful for this Story Challenge every week. How thrilling to burn with desire, or ache with it, really, to be stopped short by an image that means more than it means, and filled with the energy of jumping into the action in media res, to feel the force of place pushing and pulling, to be obsessed with my characters, and, of course, to be vibrating with the sound of this thing we call voice.
Speaking of voice, what do we even mean by that? Well, in every post of this challenge, you’ve seen me exclaim over precise moments of “voiciness” in your work—a sentence here, phrase there, a single word in the perfect place. But again, what is that? You know it when you hear it, right? But like everything else about craft, we deepen our agency, range, confidence, and potential as artists by illuminating and making conscious our “inner knowing.”
To bring that inner knowing to the surface, let’s start with this incredible reflection from Jane Hirshfield:
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.
You can read Hirshfield’s full quote in this Maria Popova essay on the Daily Good, originally published on Brain Pickings back before it was The Marginalian). Because that whole essay is incredible, and because I love Jane Hirshfield so much already, that I ordered the book in which Jane’s quote first appeared, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, and it arrived today! I’ll be sharing more from it as we move along.
I also love
’s craft book Voice First. Although it’s feels slightly more specific to CNF than to fiction, Voice First addresses—straight out of the gate—the issue of multiplicity of voice, which feels crucial to me. In a Lit Hub essay excerpted from her book, Huber wrote:I believe that we often hold this sense of voice as “self” or “essence” a little too tightly. The idea of one “authentic” voice is a holdover from a time when we saw each self as singular, isolated, and separate. These days, we’re moving beyond ideas of simple subjectivity and objectivity, and we’re more likely to see the self as constituted in relation to others, in community.
Huber’s thoughts track with my memory of a talk on voice by the novelist Vanessa Vaselka at the Tin House Winter Workshop back in 2015 or so. Vanessa spoke about the need for our characters to have voices that were distinct from each other, yes, but also, that contained distinct registers within themselves. This is so important.
Sometimes writers tell me that they worry about too much revising, because they fear their work will “no longer sound like them,” that they will “revise their own voice” out of it. I do not believe this is possible, frankly, for several reasons:
Our writing voice is not our speaking voice, even if we consciously strive to write as we speak (which is a commendable and often very enjoyable voice to read). George Saunders has written about the fallacy of the “natural voice” here, and his essay is well worth the read, but here’s an excerpt that gets at the main point I’m making here:
We might think of it in musical terms. The “natural” sounds we make when talking to someone are not singing. When we decide to sing, we consent to make sounds that are purposely not our natural sounds. We stretch or expand or exaggerate or rarefy our natural sounds. Sometimes, as part of our strategy, we might try to make these sounds appear “natural.” (I think, for example, of Tom Waites singing “Time” – it’s like speech until it isn’t, and it moves us in part when the speaking lifts up into singing.)
Likewise in prose.
We all have, as Huber points to, multiple voices. They’re all ours, they’re all “authentic.” Even when we’re putting on airs, we’re doing that for real. So the idea with voice is to be in control, to be conscious, and to make choices in order to produce the effects we want.
Our voices also have multiple registers. My “work” voice can sound one way with colleagues I’m close to, and another way with others I’ve not met; it can sound one way when I’m tired and stressed, and another way when I’m energetic and playful. All of these voices are my work voice, just separate registers.
Our stories generally have more than one character, and each needs their own distinct voice, even if the distinction is as minor as one saying can’t and the other saying cannot.
Finally, as Saunders says, “[T]he writers we love choose, and then hone, some method of moving from their everyday voice to something more rarefied. They work hard at this.” And that generally takes a lot of alertness and a lot (lot, lot!) of revision. Voice emerges from the body of experience, and is tuned in revision.
In the same Lit Hub essay quoted above, Sonya Huber wrote:
Voices are grown by those who have nurtured and supported us, by the way our bodies absorb the sounds and touches, rhythms and gestures and expressions that we’ve been bathed in. And listening to the voices of our communities—absorbing them as valuable and life-giving elements, as brilliant threads that carry messages for surviving and thriving in their sounds and cadences—can also heal. Our voices each have truths to offer, and some of the best writing comes from merging voices, braiding them, and letting them free.
What a beautiful way to think about voice! And when I think of the chorus of voices that have offered truths, voices that I’ve found arresting, mesmerizing, hypnotic, graceful, assured, or otherwise compelling in my recent reading, I think of many, including unforgettable voices from …
Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead:
First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they've always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let's just say out of it.
Clare Keegan’s Foster:
’s The Collected Schizophrenias:I wonder what it will be like, this place belonging to the Kinsellas. I see a tall woman standing over me, making me drink milk still hot from the cow. I see another, less likely version of her, in an apron, pouring pancake batter into a frying pan, asking would I like another, the way my mother sometimes does when she is in good humor. The man will be her size. He will take me to town on the tractor and buy me red lemonade and crisps. Or he’ll make me clean out sheds and pick stones and pull ragweed and docks out of the fields. I wonder if they live in an old farmhouse or a new bungalow, whether they will have an outhouse or an indoor bathroom, with a toilet and running water.
I tell myself that should delusion come to call, or hallucinations crowd my senses again, I might be able to wrangle some sense out of the senseless. I tell myself that if I must live with a slippery mind, I want to know how to tether it too.
Larry Levis’s “Winter Stars”:
Sometimes, I go out into this yard at night,
And stare through the wet branches of an oak
In winter, & realize I am looking at the stars
Again. A thin haze of them, shining
And persisting.
Vauhini Vara’s “Ghosts”:
Here I should conjure my sister for you. Here I should describe her, so that you feel her absence as I do—so that you’re made ghostly by it, too. But, though I’m a writer, I’ve never been able to conjure her. I remember the same small set of details: her loud laugh; her bossiness and swagger; her self-consciousness about her broad nose, her curly hair. But even this isn’t fixed. Her hair fell out. Her nose narrowed. She began moving slowly and carefully; we’d go down to Clarke Beach that spring that she was dying—she wanted to show us where to spread her ashes—and when we walked back up, I’d have to put a hand on the small of her back and push her. She did not laugh as often.
I could go on and on with examples. But instead I’ll remind you of Sonya Huber’s wise words about our rightful access to the voices within us, the voices outside of us, and the spaces between them:
The good news is that, even if our writing voices have been shut down or suppressed or ignored, the voices are still there, waiting to be channeled to. Voices continue to flow and combine. Voice is made up of the words you like and the words that hurt you and that you reclaimed and the way you in particular put words together to try to describe the indescribable.
This week I invite you to play with voice—doing some “merging, braiding, and setting free.” What you’ll find in this week’s exercise are three precise invitations to vocalize in a distinct way, plus several previous exercises on voice that may be useful to get your wheels turning. These three exercises are infinitely repeatable and equally applicable to deepening existing work and/or staring new work. If voice is the most crucial aspect of story (and it arguably is), these exercises are your way into a richer, wilder, more embodied and less predictable relationship with the voices in your work (including your own!).