Voice, it’s difficult to encapsulate.
Publishers, editors, agents, all say voice is what they look for when a manuscript pops up in their inbox or slides across their desk. Listening to them discuss voice in my winter residency, none of them offered a singular definition of it. I suppose because there are so many selves in each of us, that when we finally pin down that strange straggly way in us, which holds all of them, it’s impossible to explain how it is done. Or what it is exactly.
I’m reading George Saunders’ latest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. It seems everyone is reading it. My partner read it first, praising his master class lessons from the couch next to me over coffee. Four Russian writers I’ve always wanted to read are now available in slivers, packed into one book. Slowly, I make my way through.
The second chapter touches on voice. If you only read the book for this one chapter, on Turgenev’s The Singers and Saunders’ lecture-essay on The Heart of the Story, then you will have added gold to your literary toolbox. He writes about voice as becoming a writer “capable of producing the necessary level of energy,” and by this he means, a living breathing text. One where people want to follow along, finish, until the end.
He goes on,
“This writer may turn out to bear little resemblance to the writer we dreamed of being. She is born, it turns out, for better or worse, out of that which we really are: the tendencies we’ve been trying, all these years, in our writing and maybe even in our lives, to suppress or deny or correct, the parts of ourselves about which we might even feel a little ashamed.”
When I read this my eyes ballooned with tears. I don’t want this to be my voice, my embarrassing, unruly, uncomfortable parts. No. Not that place.
I think that’s why I’ve called it that strange straggly way in us. It’s like that one bent tulip in the patch growing beyond the garden’s edge. It may also be because I read Adrienne Rich’s poem Upper Broadway this morning and her first lines startled me, the leafbud straggles forth and later this is faith.
Straggle (Verb) – to stray from the road, course, or line; to wander about in a scattered fashion; ramble. Move along slowly, typically in a small irregular group, so as to remain some distance behind the person or people in front. (Noun) – an untidy or irregular arranged mass or group of something
I liked straggle. This idea of a strange straggly voice sauntering behind all the others, observing them, reporting, at a distance, with experience. I also liked it as a noun, this irregularly arranged mass of voices, of all of oneself telling a story in an untidy, glorious way. There’s something very human about this image for me.
It’s an amalgamation of our insides, all of what one’s experienced, thought, repressed, alchemized with our outsides: interests, what we read, listen to, watch.
After my last post a friend wrote me, she said, “I feel like your writing is really coming into its own.” Into its own. I read again to myself. This, a great compliment, as I feel I’m coming into my own. My thirties have helped.
Writing this manuscript is like entering into the dark woods, walking through brambles and tangled vines to get inside, then once inside, noticing, moss, fern, dew and many paths to walk. I’m trying to reach a clearing, a sunlit lake beyond the canopy of trees. A secluded, tea coloured, spring fed lake. Swimming in that lake is like no other place. This is why I’ve gone to the woods and though I know I will get lost along the way, distracted, I continue on, plodding and when I come to the lake, I trust I will have a map to explain a way there and a way out.
Unearthing the strange straggly way in us is tough because it requires knowing ourselves. Something I’ve struggled with most of my life. It means pushing past the person we’ve constructed to please others or keep the peace or fit in at the party. Writing is a continuous learning about the self and it helps us take shape in the form we were always meant to inhabit.
The “I” in memoir is used to explore the complex people we are beyond the page. It’s a character with a voice and like all characters; the “I” is fallible, fragile, with friends and foes, histories, belongings, aspirations. One way to capture this voice in memoir, as Sue William Silverman says is to write from two songs, the song (voice) of innocence and the song (voice) of experience (she took this from William Blake). As I write, I notice what a writer offers a reader is well beyond reportage. Sure, the telling is important, the specifics, the details. Their concreteness grounds us. Though, what a reader returns to a text for is what the writer has mined for them through experience and time devoted to articulating that experience. The emotional labour and honesty, is the gift. The reader, often myself, wants to be pulled out of the mire, wants relief, a glimmer of truth.
Another term for this is the double perspective—the voice of the narrator and the protagonist—there are two voices here, working together, in conversation. They are as Phillip Lopate says “two different creatures” yet in memoir these voices are both you, a prior and present self. Modulating a divided self on the page is no easy feat. And again, I think it’s even more than a divided self, I think the truest voice rises forth from the multitudes within, or as Saunders puts it ‘When we “find our voice,” what’s really happening is that we’re choosing a voice from among the many voices we’re able to “do…’ how brilliant and terrifying!
In two months time I will finish the first term of my MFA. All of this mostly completed alone, in my writing cave, painted Windsor Green by Benjamin Moore for anyone wondering. My mentor will no longer hold my hand, scanning my submissions, approving of it in places, nudging me to dig deeper in others. There will come a time where only I will decide what’s included and left out. I’m reluctant to let go. I cling like a child to a mother’s slacks.
Likely, I will ask a good friend or my partner to be a first reader through the months without my mentor. Someone who knows me well and won’t let me get away with showing off or half-truths.
On the inside flap of Annie Ernaux’s The Years is written, “the voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges…the narrator eschews the “I” for the “we.” How very controlled and thoughtful this decision was for Ernaux to use first-person plural. She’s telling a story of a different time, where collective life is inextricably woven with private life, hence the pronoun we.
My book is a mess. Its tense is all over. My voice, I’m sure dissolves and reappears, not for the controlled reasons like Ernaux but because I’m hesitant, trepid in moments and then bold and blunt the next.
It’s okay that my voice isn’t polished. Writing a first draft begins with getting it all down, the beautiful and the ugly, like laying out the ingredients for an arrangement of flowers. In my case often using too many words. Then comes the discarding, shaping, and clustering—giving space for the light to seep through.
I’m assured, by Saunders words. Assured that I cannot get away from myself. My voice. Assured that no one can be me, tell my stories in the strange straggly way I tell them.
I continue on.