On voice.
...and what shapes it.
A note: in case you noticed, yes, this week’s Core Stories newslessay is a couple of days late, because I decided to give myself a little more grace to be a human. And also because I was doing lots of other writing, including responding to hundreds of Instagram DMs — see below. Thanks for your patience!
1 | ON VOICE
No piece of media molded my voice — and my sense of self — like Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. When we first read the novel in elementary school, I remember thinking with dazzled delight, “You’re allowed to write like this?! You’re allowed to describe a person as a red balloon tied to an anchor, or say someone’s sad like a house on fire? Yes, a name really can be thick or soft like silver!”
I remember some classmates hating that book, saying it didn’t make sense. I just thought, “No, no, this makes more sense than any other story.” My writing voice, with its imaginative misuses of words and its syncopated singsong, with its insistence on lushness and playful oddities — I owe that to Cisneros, who showed me it was possible, right when I was first learning to call myself Writer.
In high school, we read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in succession. Every classmate so clearly preferred one or the other, and I remember thinking, “The Hemingway people are so not my people.” I loved how Fitzgerald’s sentences seemed to glisten; I loved the colors, the textures, the temperatures. To me, Hemingway’s voice landed dull like mud, while Fitzgerald’s was what some might call “flowery.” Give me flowery. I love flowers.
“Flowery” was the main critique I got on my own work in the writing classes I subsequently took in college. Overwritten. Too much description. Tone down the alliteration, the adjectives. To all of this, I always thought, “Respectfully, no. I like it that way.”
I’ve learned since then to be at least a bit more judicious about the flamboyance of my language, to remove a sentence I adore for the way that it looks and feels and tastes in my mouth if it’s not quite serving my story. I’ve noticed my sentence structures have changed, too — they’re looser now. This is one of the biggest benefits, I think, of writing regularly for many, many years on end: your voice matures through practice alone, adjusting intuitively and oftentimes so gradually that you might barely catch it happening.
But I still think it’s a valid choice to be “too much” on the page. To insist on exquisite, elaborate beauty. To craft phrases that feel good in the body of both writer and reader. Soft, delicate, pretty, fecund, emotional, mutable, slow — these are qualities we typically call “feminine,” and ones I hope you might associate with my voice. Do you see what happens when we call this sort of writing “too much?” And how voice can reflect identity and values?
Disorderly, unruly, subversive — my writing might be described these ways, too, and there’s where it reveals my queerness as much as my womanhood. It’s probably no wonder that my favorite writers right now, at age 31, are people like Melissa Febos, Carmen Maria Machado, Chanel Miller, Ocean Vuong, and Alexander Chee. These are all women and/or queer people. I hear something of myself in them. I feel safe immersing myself in their pages.
My writing is the writing of a child of two psychotherapists, her language and understandings shaped by psychological concepts since, well, birth. You can feel the farmer in my words, too, I think — how tactile they are, how much I reference mud and roots and embodiment. And everything I write, however personal, is oriented towards collective justice; you’ll hear that every time I zoom out of my own tiny life to name a structural influence or -ism, aiming to frame each paragraph within or against a broader system. My diction, my syntax, my tone and point of view — all of these are elements of voice and are inextricable from my personhood.
This is a really longwinded way to talk about that gross Instagram hacking incident that has finally been resolved — hallelujah! I’d seen the Stories that the hacker posted on my page, a few of which are screenshotted up at the top of this email, but I hadn’t been able to see the messages yet. Once I got back into my account, I spent several hours on Wednesday afternoon just sifting through them and writing to people, “I’m so sorry! That wasn’t me! I got hacked!” But you know what most people said back, right? Almost all of them said, “I figured” or “I know!”
Some people who don’t know me super personally could perhaps believe the hacker’s content: the idea that I’d made a hunk of money by investing in cryptocurrency. Now, let the record officially state: I do not understand bitcoin (or crypto in general), literally not at all, nor do I have any desire to; all I know is that it has an awful environmental impact, which is more than enough reason for me to stay far, far away; and besides, I generally hate the fact that money has to exist in the first place, and the only things I ever want to be rich in are sunshine and ripe vegetables and fresh water, and I work anti-capitalism into just about every damn conversation I have. Okay? Okay. Now you know, if you didn’t.
But as far as I can tell, the hacker didn’t successfully scam anybody they spoke with, and that’s a voice thing. No one’s going to believe your story if it doesn’t sound like you’re the one telling it.
Shall we break a bit of this down? First of all, I’d never, ever start a conversation with, “Hey! How are you ??” My voice is more, “[Name]! Hi!!! How are you, all things considered?!” But that’s sort of nitpicky. Except the “Hey.” I can’t explain why I feel so strongly about “hi” instead of “hey,” which is really just a reminder that most voice choices are unconscious, intuitive ones.
I would never answer a “how are you” question with, “Amazing thanks!!!!” That part makes me absolutely guffaw. I’ve never answered “Amazing thanks!!!!” to “how are you” a single day in my life. My real answer is much more complicated and verbose, and it differs by the day. Sometimes I envy the “Amazing thanks!!!!” people, but I am not that person. For proof, see…every single thing I’ve ever written, all hinging on the twisted complexities of the heart and mind.
These DMs reek of profit as primary value. Their tone is pushy, smug, and dopily upbeat; their language is devoid of empathy and appropriative of AAVE. I tend towards an often laughable wordiness, not abbreviations like “fr” and “pls.”
Even the emojis are an element of voice in this day and age, and the only time I’ll ever use the 🥺 emoji is in response to something very, very cute, like a pet. It is literally called the Pleading Face emoji; if I’m trying to get you to feel for me, if I’m pleading with you, I’ll want to convince you by way of some jaw-dropping words, not a sad little face.
Honestly, I could spend a lot more time and space breaking down each DM and Story. But that’s enough. My invitation, I think, is to look at that hacker language again, and then look at what’s here. Look at that hacker language again, and then look at how you text, speak, and write. Let that hacker language, in all of its skeevy falseness, reveal something fresh about your own voice, and what that voice signifies.
2 | A QUOTE TO KEEP CLOSE
“For me, it came down to just rip people off when you’re young. Rip them off all the time and figure out what parts work. The easiest way to begin defining your own voice is to look at the pieces and the things that you’re drawn to the most. When you’re reading them, be like, ‘What would I do differently?’ This is a very, very, very arrogant thing to do, but the only way to do it is with the hubris of being like, ‘In what ways does this thing that I love let me down? What would I do differently?’ Look at the work that you love and that speaks to you the most and think about the ways in which you yourself would’ve done that differently. And then do that. The more you do that, the more you’ll begin to write the thing that only you can actually say.”
― Sasha Fletcher in an interview with The Creative Independent
3 | A PROMPT YOU CAN USE
Take a look at a recent piece of writing, or even a text conversation with a friend. What do your vocabulary choices, sentence structures, and tone convey about your identity and values? Journal on that…and then do some editing, with those understandings even more present on the page.
Wonderful! I'm trying to apply what you conveyed about the authenticity of voice to my own media. xo