Writing that Sings and Sears

They say you should use the "reflective voice" ... but is it true? And what does it really mean?

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New writers, especially memoir writers, are told they must reflect on the page, they must use the reflective voice in order to “make meaning” of their experiences.

But is this true? Should you reflect on on the page, and, if so, how much?

The truth is, it’s complicated. Yes, you need to make meaning of your experience. But if you want your writing to have an impact—if you want it to sing and sear and leave a lasting impression on readers—then long passages of reflection are not your friend.

Let’s break this down patiently as best we can.

This question of the reflective voice—which I often refer to as interiority, since that term covers both memoir and fiction—is one that arises often here at Writing in the Dark. In fact, we’ve been talking about it even more than usual over the past several weeks thanks to our Art of the Scene intensive. That’s because scenes by their nature are more dynamic and exterior than reflective and interior. In scenes, things need to happen in a real place at a real time in ways that we can see, hear, smell, taste, and feel.

Scenes are the part of writing that make us see and experience the world through not just the narrator’s eyes, but through their whole body. Scenes are the part of writing that feel real and alive. (If you want to deep dive into all of that, these Art of the Scene posts, including the comments, offer an extremely rich resource.)

But writing in a way that feels real and alive is challenging for most writers (I’ll say more on why that is later), so, not surprisingly, lots of questions have come during Art of the Scene. I’ll share some of them shortly, in order to drill down into this conundrum of whether and how much to reflect on the page.

First, though, let’s define “reflect” or “reflective voice.” Surely there are various ways to do so, but I use this word in reference to writing where the writer or the point-of-view character thinks on the page, using abstract language (thought is necessarily abstract) to express ideas and emotions.

Some examples:

I was angry and I wish I had handled things differently.

This was the scariest experience of my life.

The more I thought about it, the more I knew that what I said that I wanted wasn’t what I wanted after all.

Is there anything inherently wrong with these sentences?

No.

But, as I mentioned in defining “reflective voice,” we should note that these sentences are entirely abstract and interior. And if we allow too much of this kind of abstract, reflective writing onto the page, readers will be bored.

Why? Because these reflections offer no concrete specific sensory detail to keep readers’ imaginations engaged. There is nothing for us to see, hear, taste, smell, or touch. There is no recognizable setting, no cars whizzing by or bees buzzing or babies crying or dogs barking or rain pounding on the roof or cinnamon bread toasting or cantaloupe rotting or wool blankets unravelling or scraped knees bleeding or wedding rings lost in the lake or balloons popping or teeth chipping or wet kisses or Christmas lights twinkling or wood smoldering or knees touching furtively under the table, etc. You get the drift: the reflective voice, grounded in abstraction, can only hold our attention for just so long, and cannot, when over-relied upon, sear itself into our hearts and minds in a way that makes us say, “I can’t stop thinking about that passage.”

So, how much reflection is too much?

Every writer has to make their own choices, and it depends on genre and style (some genres of essay are entirely reflective!, and that’s not what we’re speaking of here). To be very honest, it also depends upon the skill of the writer, as with all other techniques of writing. So, as with all of art, this is a subjective matter.

That said, I find—and I’ve said this many times before—after thirty years of editing and twenty years of teaching, that almost all writers, especially beginning writers, reflect too much, and by a wide margin. But why?

I see two major reasons for over-reflection on the page.

1. First, most people are far more comfortable with writing in the interior, with reflecting, because it comes from the intellect. We can pretty easily think on the page. Thinking comes fast. We do it all day long, and most of our conversations with friends and family are reflective. This voice is our speaking voice, and it comes naturally. In fact, most of us have a hell of a time turning off our thoughts (which is why meditation is a skill that requires continual practice, forever).

   To the contrary, conveying the exterior world and/or indirectly revealing the interior world through exterior detail requires meticulous, slow attention to the world outside of ourselves. It requires us to observe the world through the our own senses as well as through our body of sensory memories. This kind attentive, observant writing allows the reader to feel and intuit the interior state of the narrator (and other characters). It's harder work than reflection, but it can create a beautifully satisfying effect. At minimum, I believe it is very important and wildly helpful for writers to know how to do this—how to meticulously and accurately and intentionally portray exterior details to convey emotion and meaning. Then, the degree to which each writer uses this skill or not, is, of course, up to them. A matter of subjective artistry.

2. Second, writing books and teachers tell beginning writers—especially if they are writing memoir—that they need to include “the reflective voice,” and this advice gets misconstrued and misapplied.

   

I’ll to say more about writing advice to “use the reflective voice” and “add more reflection” later in this post, but first I want to share some of the questions that have been coming up during The Art of the Scene.

One writer said recently:

I feel embarrassed to discover that interiority is not, in fact, an asset to my writing style and voice. When I learned about interiority, I thought, "Yes! I do that so well!" And now I have learned, by reading these examples of scene development the last two weeks, to focus more on exteriority than interiority. I actually enjoy reading interiority, but I'm questioning how to move away from that and try to strengthen the skill of exteriority. Any pointers on that?

Another writer helpfully responded, before I did:

Maybe you are already doing a good job of combining interiority with exteriority! I listen to a podcast, The Shit No One Tells You About Writing. In some segments, they analyze query letters and first pages. One of the speakers (a literary agent I believe), is constantly telling writers to provide more interiority—she needs to know what people are feeling when they say things, the meaning behind the words. But I've come to learn this isn't all about writing interiority, that there are other ways to describe meaning through exterior details…

When I went back to look at all the draft chapters I wrote of my memoir, so much of it was interiority. What helps me is to revisit those scenes I'm describing with interiority, and instead, put myself back in it as an observer. What actions were happening? What was I (and others) doing with our bodies? How could I include more dialogue? What clues could I describe using body language, setting, words said, etc., that give those interior feelings, without stating them. This has been really hard for me, but I do feel like I've been getting better at it! I'm very comfortable with academic writing because of my analytical nature, and have had to learn to slow down and observe.

At this point, I jumped in and offered a few thoughts as well:

I wish agents and editors, when they say those things, would clarify that writing interiority is not all about telling and explaining! We can give interiority in many ways, some of which work, and some of which don’t. It’s true that writing “this happened, then that happened, and then, then, then” does not work. Obviously.

But adding, “I felt this, then I felt that, and then that, etc.” doesn’t work either. There’s more to it than that. Yes, you do need to make meaning of what happened to you or your character, a story is more than a chain of events. But the best way to make meaning is rarely to pack in a bunch of expository prose about how you feel/felt, and that is not likely what the agent on The Shit No One Tells You About Writing wants to see, either.

Let’s look more closely at this advice regarding reflective voice, starting with the brilliant Vivian Gornick, who, in her classic craft book on memoir writing, The Situation and the Story, said:

What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

This, undeniably, is wise counsel—but only if writers are also given the tools they need to arrive at this “larger sense” without long passages of explanation.

Sean Ironman addresses the phenomenon of over reflecting in his craft essay, “Writing the Z-Axis,”¹ in which he dubs over-reflective writing “bar essays” because they read “as if the writer on the barstool next to you is rambling about their life over a Guinness.” I learned about Sean Ironman’s essay from Brooke Warner, publisher at She Writes Press, in her insightful Writer’s Digest craft piece on the difference between reflection and takeaway² (in which she also sagely cautions memoirists against long passages reflection).

Warner’s essay provides crystal clear examples of effective reflection, including the kind that deepens and resounds as a more universal takeaway. Just days ago, however, Warner wrote again about reflection³, this time noting its importance in memoir, which offers a classic example of why writers sometimes feel confused about writing advice. But when I read both of Warner’s essays side by side, I see they are not saying different things. They’re just looking at the question of meaning in memoir from different angles.

In the more recent essay calling for reflection, Warner shares three memoir passages where reflective voice is used. And what I noticed in these passage (other than that they’re all written by highly skilled writers, Helen Macdonald, Shze-Hui Tjoa, and J.R. Moehringer), is that the reflection is:

Extremely brief (Moehringer)

or

Highly inventive and metaphorical (Shze-Hui Tjoa)

or

So closely tied to an concrete specific exterior detail that it’s almost inextricable from it, and part of a memoir that is also both historical and scientific (Macdonald)

In other words, each of these writers showcases exceptionally skillful writing, skill that Warner points out, as well. In fact, she warns—as I am right now—about the danger of misusing the reflective voice in ways that “interrupt the fictive dream.” I was glad to see that danger acknowledged, because this is the part of the reflective-voice conversation that too often gets short shrift—that is, the truth that reflection is difficult, can be over-and misused, and is like a strong spice: potent and valuable, but only when used sparingly.

In a future post, I would like to talk more about ways to use the reflective voice well, and how to avoid its pitfalls. What I want to talk about now, though—instead of reflection per se—is a way that we can accomplish what Gornick says we must—that is, to communicate “the large sense of what we have been able to make of what happened”—without overtly reflecting.

Not because we’ll never reflect—we should, and we will.

But since we’ll probably do too much of it in our early drafts, despite our best efforts, it’s valuable to arm ourselves with other options for making meaning of experience, for revealing interior states of mind and emotions, and for pointing the reader to the deeper aboutness of our stories.

We need tools and strategies we can use and practice instead of defaulting to that too-handy mirror.

The tool I want to explore this week, and the exercise I’ve crafted for you, is one involving concrete, specific detail (exterior) to vividly convey an interior state and/or to work in contrast to an interior state to effectively deliver meaning. Those of you familiar with my shimmer/shards practice are well prepped for this work.

But anyone can dive in because I’m providing two very specific—and very different— published examples where writers use exterior detail to convey emotion, along with close analyses of how and why each of them work as they do, and a stepwise exercise to help you do the same.