Find Your Voice through the Music of Writing

In the writing and publishing world, we speak a lot about “voice.” I find that for aspiring writers, voice is either a nebulous, mysterious entity they want to attain but can’t define or an aspect of writing they have no time to worry about. Certainly developing good content and communicating it through accurate syntax takes much energy and time, and without those efforts you will have no book. But if you ignore the art of voice, though you create a book, it will matter little. Your pages will still stay silent because few will keep open the cover.

Even if a highly trained opera soprano has the pitch control and resonance (105 decibels) to shatter fine leaded crystal, we won’t enjoy listening to her unless she also masters musicality. Gem cutters, too, develop brilliance in the stones they cut through precise knowledge, skill, and manipulation of crystalline structure. But almost no one carries around a bag of cut stones, brilliant though they may be; we admire a diamond when its sparkle resonates in its setting. In this same vein, masterful writing may command grammar and knowledge well, yet we celebrate and obey its voice not because of syntax or even because of well-formed facts, but because of style.

 Voice Lessons

Learning to sing well requires breath control, proper posture, and developing skill to magnify sound using the spaces and caverns in our bodies. Vocalists must learn clarity not only of tone but diction (enunciation), how to push sound forward or backward in their mouths and to use chest or head voice as appropriate for the music genre, and how to engage body language to communicate the song. We haven’t yet even discussed reading notes or understanding melody and harmonization, and still we can see that developing a singing voice, like a writing voice, takes much effort and practice.

And yet, when the time comes to perform, much of what shapes the vocalist’s voice is what the singer has been naturally and uniquely given: vocal cords. When we sing, we reveal the idiosyncrasies of our own special voice box. No matter how much you train, you will never have another person’s cords or exactly his or her voiceprint.

A writing voice, also, has its own unique “style print.” As writers chisel tired group-speak from their thoughts, they reveal more facets of themselves. William Strunk and E. B. White explained that “all writers, by the way they use the language, reveal something of their spirits, their habits, their capacities, and their biases. This is inevitable as well as enjoyable.”[1] These revealed facets of spirit, habit, capacity, and bias angle light at other facets, and before long, they reflect the unique beauty inside each gemstone; the writer willing to chip away at language to find words and rhythms honest to her soul looks up to discover she is no longer a diamond in the rough. Her writing has begun to sparkle.

Apart from a laziness of logic, master stylist William Zinsser said that what makes writing most tired

is the failure of the writer to reach for anything but the nearest cliché. … these dreary phrases constitute writing at its most banal. We know just what to expect. No surprise awaits us in the form of an unusual word, an oblique look. We are in the hands of a hack, and we know it right away. We stop reading.[2]

He further warned writers against settling for the easy and thoughtless statement:

Don’t let yourself get into this position. The only way to avoid it is to care deeply about words. If you find yourself writing that someone recently enjoyed a spell of illness, or that a business has been enjoying a slump, ask yourself how much they enjoyed it.[3]

Celebrated editor Sol Stein, agreed, noting that discovering and honing voice requires concerted effort: “An extremely small percentage of writers show signs of an original voice at the outset. It usually develops over time, and has two components, the originality of what is said and the originality of the way it is said.”[4] He added that “many authors first find their ‘voice’ when they learn to examine each word for its necessity, precision, and clarity.”[5] “Voice” in writing, then, is a combination of authenticity, originality, and precision. It is an attention to words not only for what they mean but also for how they sound.

The Way Words Sound

Rhetorical and literary devices color language, and so do attention to the rise and fall of syllables, the rhythms of punctuation or piling up phrases and images, and even the choice of words themselves. Language conveys meaning through sound even while marked as mere squiggles on a page.

Zinsser commented that “this may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize. Therefore such matters as rhythm and alliteration are vital to every sentence.”[6] We learn language primarily through sound. Babies mimic the sound patterns of language well before they grasp its meaning or its grammar or its vocabulary. They coo and babble with the rise and fall of their parents’ intonation and play their lips and tongues and vocal folds over repeated consonants and vowels. And so, White wrote, “When we speak of Fitzgerald’s style, we don’t mean his command of the relative pronoun, we mean the sound his words make on the paper.”[7]

Through sound, we control and direct meaning, we create trills and flourishes of excitement, we raise questions, we declare passion, and we dampen the beat of our hearts to a whisper. Poetry’s heyday in terms of readers and sales may be long gone, but its mysterious artistry remains at the heart of voice. White suggests trying out a new arrangement of the words of some of our most famous and enduring voices, such as Thomas Paine’s, to begin to grasp the power of sound:

If you doubt that style is something of a mystery, try rewording a familiar sentence and see what happens. …Suppose we take “These are the times that try men’s souls.” … The words, as you see, are ordinary. Yet in that arrangement, they have shown great durability. …Now compare a few variations:

                            Times like these try men’s souls.

                            How trying it is to live in these times!

                            These are trying times for men’s souls.

                            Soulwise, these are trying times.[8]

Zinsser assessed White’s rearrangements in this way: “Paine’s phrase is like poetry and the other four are like oatmeal—which is the divine mystery of the creative process. Good writers of prose must be part poet, always listening to what they write.”[9] What is the mystery? It comes from the power of poetic metrical feet, the way we accent or tread lightly and quickly over syllables, joining them or separating them. Paine’s phrasing accents the first syllable, causing a stop and pause immediately as we start. These. Solemn. These, not those. We are in it together, now. Next, we trip lightly like the smallest billy goat gruff over the words “are the” to land heavily on the third syllable of the foot, “times.” With its t starting sound linking this word to “these,” this syllable lingers on its ending s, echoing the end of “these” and foreshadowing “souls.” To bring the statement to a close, we have an iamb (Shakespeare’s pentametric favorite), “that try,” followed by a strong spondee, “men’s souls”—an unaccented syllable followed by three accented ones. Here is no smallest billy goat tripping over the bridge. Here, in these consecutive accents, the biggest billy goat asserts his presence with strong hoof and horn. Even so, he leaves us not with an explosive and final consonant but with the swishing s noise of an eternal river flowing under the bridge and beyond. These times affect more than the here and now.

None of the other arrangements have such internal cohesion of meaning, rhythm, and sound. If you want to master style and find your voice, regularly practice your scales through poetry’s economy of words and wealth of euphony. And after you have warmed up your chops, make note of your breath and the flow of phrases.

Breath and the Flow of Phrases

Where a musician chooses to breathe between phrases and where he draws out sound and joins it to the next phrase affects its interpretation and dynamics. Writers, too, affect interpretation and dynamics (emotion) through long and short phrasing, complexity, parallelism, and a pile-up of ideas or a separation and sorting of them.

Of course, audience and reading level matters for these choices, but complex subjects need not require the dense—and often obtuse—phrasing often found in academic writing. Nor does children’s literature necessitate sing-song, simplistic subjects and verbs. Clear communication of intricacies depends on precise word choice (diction), specificity, and accurate logic (whether in argument or syntax) more than complex sentence structure. And sound simplicity transforms to profundity through masterful style. The important question to ask as you set out to write your tome, is what is the melody in your heart and mind? It’s difficult to ignore who you are, though we try it all day long, aspiring to mimic much lesser versions of other sinners and saints. Listen for the voice that seems so familiar yet not like anyone else you’ve read. It may be the real you!

Some voices, like Ernest Hemingway’s, gravitate to short-stopped, single-note, hard-thumping melodies; others, like William Faulkner’s, default to looser lyrical passages that flow over hills and valleys, arounds curves and corners, through doorways and backwoods and back again. Neither style is right or wrong, better or worse, more skilled or less—both ring authentic. As long as clarity and logic reign, sentence length matters less for readability than for style.

As with rules on sentence length, other rules of good style sometimes paralyze authors from finding their voice. Uniqueness comes from both applying the rules and breaking them in intentionally creative (but not sloppy!) ways. Consider how the dense notes and themes and variations of the baroque Cello Suite No. 1 in G major differs from the simpler, more lyrical song, “The Swan.” The “rules” of the one style contradict the other: drawing out each single note from a whisper to a full-throated sound in the Cello Suite would ruin it, while reducing the dynamic pull of one note to another in “The Swan” would make it boring. Master stylist Yo-Yo Ma creates enduring beauty playing both because of his precise, interpretive attention.

  Similarly, I spend much of my day pleading with authors to root out being verbs (“is” and “am”) from their sentences, and to reduce modifiers and prepositions and get word order right. But brilliant essayist Annie Dillard seems to do none of those things in this beautiful and oft-quoted passage:

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections, but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.[10]

What you cannot see from this excerpt, of course, is the way Dillard ties together recurrent words, ideas, and themes from the many previous pages in her Pulitzer Prize winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. But even without that context, these sentences say “Annie”—and they resound.

Rather than carelessly and lazily using weak being verbs, Dillard’s I am creates a recurrence of identity as well as introduces the main vowel of assonance throughout the passage, the a. She pays attention to her consonants, too, with her fs in frayed and fallen and fits, her gs in getting, along, aging, and eating, and her ws in washed and world and wandering, awed, wreck, whelm, wind-rent, whose, whose, whose, and down.

She begins the paragraph with two, well-controlled sentences, and then launches into a winding mouthful. But she hems it all in with parallel syntax—that whose, whose, whose, and the not...but, not...but.

She splits a verb and it’s prepositional adverb, “wandering about” with the “awed” adjective that should follow “am.” As her editor, I would never ask her to change it—her ear for the lilt of rhythm, assonance, and consonance is delightful and uniquely hers, and the meaning is clear with no stumbling.

She piles on phrase after phrase, yet intuitively knows that to bring the idea to a close she must let her intonation rise “upstream” and fall “down.” Dillard knows the rules of style and also her voice.

So how can you keep working on mastering voice? It takes a lifetime, but for now, consider practicing the following steps:

• Widen your vocabulary and play with word choice. Regularly consult dictionaries and thesauruses for synonyms with better syllables or consonants for your sentence.

• Cut the fluff. Edit for any words, phrases, and redundancies you can remove without altering meaning.

• Land on strong syllables. Emphasize concepts and important sentences with the natural intonation and rhythm of the words rather than relying on italics, capitals, or other means. Leave the most important word for last.

• Organize logically. Pay attention to parallel phrasal syntax and recurrence if your sentences are naturally longer winded. Pay attention to parallel concepts and words if your sentences are short.

• Train your ear. Attune yourself to the beauty of assonance and consonance over the bold directness of alliteration.

As a final note, remember that voice is like a diamond. You must pay attention to cut, clarity, color, and weight. Keep writing, because these are the times that try men’s souls, and like Annie, we are all frayed and nibbled survivors in a fallen world. So as you explore each facet of your subject, make sure you cut and polish to let the light shine in. Go be brilliant.

[1] William Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style, 4th ed (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999), 67.

[2] William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 33–34.

[3] Zinsser, 34.

[4] Stein Sol Stein, Stein on Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies (New York: St. Martins Press, 2000), 209.

[5] Stein, 209.

[6] Zinsser, 35.

[7] Strunk and White, 67.

[8] Strunk and White, 67.

[9] Zinsser, 36.

[10] Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: HarperPerennial, 1988), 242.