Voice' Isn't the Point of Writing

NOAH BERLATSKY NOV 29, 2014 / THE ATLANTIC

Find your own voice. That's what teachers told me in creative-writing classes
when I was in college 20 years ago—it's what the Guardian trumpeted as the
goal of creative writing courses just this month. It's what old grizzled writers
always tell the young, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed up-and-coming wannabes.
With one voice they all declare, "You are unique, you and your bushy tail. Get
that uniqueness on the page. Every one of you speak your true self truly, as
only you can speak it, in a swelling chorus of soulful idiosyncrasy."

I took the advice to heart, or tried to, when I was young and bushy-tailed and
trying (like all the other writers) to get my work published in literary
magazines read only by the other writers trying to get their work published, so
we could all bond in appreciating one another's individuality. I discovered that
when my own voice was like Flannery O'Connor's, I could sometimes get
accepted; less so when my voice was like Ogden Nash's, as in the clerihew
below that I wrote years ago when I was young and foolish and trying to get
into MFA programs:

You could argue with Harold Bloom about whether or how great writers past
found their own voice (via agonized Bloomian rejection of mentors or via
other means.) But the argument is academic; for most folks, if you're going to
be successful, it's best to find that your own voice is similar to the voice of
someone on the prescribed list of folks who found a good voice before you.
(Pro tip: Ogden Nash and Edmund Bentley are not among them.)

Here, of course, I merely echo the complaints of many before me, who have
sneered at hidebound literary magazines in which every other story is written
by Joyce Carol Oates or her clone, and all the poems are by Wallace Stevens or
Robert Hass or some unholy combination of the two. But however
disillusioning my experience with the creative writing establishment was, I
have to admit it was good preparation for actually making a living as a writer.

Because the truth is, if you want to get paid as a writer, finding your own voice
can be a distraction—even a hindrance. The bulk of writing opportunities that
will actually provide you with a living wage are work-for-hire—writing
textbook entries, or exam questions, or website content boilerplate. And when
you're doing work-for-hire, no one cares about your voice. Or rather, they do
care, in that they actively don't want anything to do with it. The point of work-
for-hire is to make your voice disappear into the house style.

The truth is, if you want to get paid as a writer, finding your own voice can be a
distraction—even a hindrance.

Mostly that style is flat and factual. ("The enormous growth of world
population in the last hundred years has been sparked by advances in
medicine and disease prevention, by increases in life expectancy, and by
agricultural improvements.") Sometimes, if you're lucky, you might get a gig
where you're supposed to be entertaining or silly or punchy—where you're
allowed to explain in a study guide that Gone With the Wind is "Not evil-cool
like a horror movie or a Slayer album or a big awesome action movie. But evil-
evil, as in filled with hate." But even then, you're only as silly as the boss
decides you should be—and whatever you say is going to be tinkered with and
rejiggered by multiple editors, so that you can't even be sure if it was you who
wrote that Gone With the Wind was "evil-evil." I like the line, but can I swear
at this point that every part of it is mine? Work-for-hire means not even
knowing which bit is your voice when it's shouting at you.

Work with a byline is more individual—but again, only within limits. As with
work-for-hire, there's always a house style, and you have to conform. Rutgers
University Press cut my joke about Eric Clapton from my forthcoming book
on Wonder Woman, and insisted I use "whom" as the objective case of "who,"
even though I think it sounds archaic and overly formal. Writing for the
mainstream press, I've had to dump my paragraph long sentences with the
piles of subordinate clauses and the aggressive alliteration. And of course, to
write for the Atlantic, you usually need to write about things that
the Atlantic is interested in. Sometimes you can get lucky and a mainstream
site will let you write about some forgotten gem, but usually the calculus is
more straightforward. Nicki Minaj's latest video, yes. But an unknown,
gorgeous, random 2002 YA book about kids being turned into manta rays by
an evil scientist?

The voice you hear in your head, the language you speak to yourself—that's
not just your voice or your language.

I did write about Ann Halam's Dr. Franklin's Island at my own site—one of
the nice things about the Internet is that it provides venues where you can
natter on, unfiltered by editors, and largely unencumbered by an audience. I
enjoy doing that. But is the voice that speaks to no one my only one and true
real voice? And, for that matter, it's not like I typically post Ogden-Nash-esque
poetry in my own space. People are more interested in my criticism, so I tend
to tailor what I say and how I say it to an audience, even when I'm not
answerable to an editor. Nobody is rejecting my pitches, maybe, but I've got
other voices in my head, warning me that if I suddenly decide my authentic
voice is fiction, folks who go to the blog for critical writing are not going to be
amused.

Perhaps there's someone out there so famous or so obscure that they can say
whatever they will in public in a unique voice untouched by editors or market
considerations. But for the vast majority of working scribblers, writing is less
about finding your own voice than about figuring out how to say something
someone, somewhere will pay you for, or at least listen to. If there's a voice, it's
always an adjusted and negotiated voice, rather than a pure effusion of
individuality.

And that's not a bad thing. Writing is partly about individual expression. But
it's also about communication and community. Language is a social thing; it
exists between people. The voice you hear in your head, the language you
speak to yourself—that's not just your voice or your language. It belongs, to
some degree, to everybody. Which is what's so magical about language. It
connects you to other people. You speak through them, and they speak
through you, which is how, with unexpected familiarity, we understand each
other.