Voice

[Anonymous]

#922

“Voice” is indeed the hardest, or maybe just the most elusive, part of the writing process to figure out…actually, it makes sense that it would be the last piece to fall into place. I’ve long been aware of the quality of intimacy between writer and reader that, face it, comes from skill on the part of the author….all the way back to my earliest memories of reading literature—I like to use as an example Kurt Vonnegut Jr. ‘s black-humored but humane voice that comes through in a book that the author himself figures in like Breakfast of Champions, but present as strongly in his fictional work—and the distinctive voices found in new journalistic types like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. Again, clear personal voices can be found not just in memoir, but also in literature: Dickens, Austen, Steinbeck etc. and science fiction writers like Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison, and in the widely divergent styles of critics like Pauline Kael and Lester Bangs. Well, for good and bad, in some of these instances.
I feel like my classmates all have found their voices to degrees—I am particularly able to say that in the case of Patrick and Chrislande, my workshop mates, both of whom are able to express themselves in distinctive ways even as they deal with their structures. I myself feel more than a little behind. Where I have found a voice that feels as if it is my own was in a few pieces I wrote critically in recent years…an account of my friendship with David Wojnarowicz and a 3-part series I wrote about one of my favorite cartoonists, Alex Toth…these are pieces that have gained me the most recognition. I worked very hard on them and was invested in the results. But although I have certainly had the opportunity to adapt the voices of David and my partner Marguerite in those books to good affect, I have done so little in the realm of memoir writing myself. I have to admit that I didn’t get far enough in this class, though it is no fault of the teacher of her methodology. I just need to engage more with memoir and I am sure that eventually I will.

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