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Spender's Song

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What Is Voice?

If you spend almost any time at all reading or talking about writing, you'll soon hear people talk about the notion of voice, and/or style. While they're slippery concepts, and often ill-defined, it's become fashionable to talk about finding your voice, and to place a great deal of emphasis on the idea that each writer has a unique, individual voice that can be discovered. In his book The Writer's Idea Book, John Heffron takes a fairly standard approach, speaking about how voice is related to tone, although for him "tone has a bit more to do with what you say; voice has more to do with how you say it". He suggests that if you work hard enough, as a writer, your own voice will begin to "shine through". In this model, voice is something inherent in each writer, something internal and particular, which cannot be inhaled from the outside world, but must be worried out from your own interior.

In his book, Writing with Power, Peter Elbow tries to come up with a more dense and coherent definition of the notion of the writer's voice. His model for voice includes three modes: the texts with no voice at all; the personal voice ("what most people have in their speech but lack in their writing - namely, a sound or texture - the smell of 'them'."); and the "real voice", which has "power and resonance".

The first of Elbow's categories of voice includes a range of texts in which the trace of the writer is deliberately obscured or obliterated. He talks about them having no voice at all, but I would argue that they do have a voice: a particular type of depersonalised quality that nevertheless speaks authoritatively. These kinds of texts - which include professional writing, textbooks, guidebooks and instruction manuals, some types of news stories and so on - is writing that aims to be devoid of human warmth or emotion. A great deal of the prose we encounter on a daily basis is written in some form of this voice, in a kind of prefabricated language riddled with cliches and hackneyed phrases.

The second of Elbow's categories of voice is a kind of halfway house of writing. Here, Elbow speaks, rightly or wrongly, to the notion that everyone has a particular way of using language in their common speech, and that this particularity, when carried onto the page, is an iteration of the personal - the personality - of the writer. This idea isn't new. Robert Frost wrote extensively about this idea in his work on the "sound of sense". In a letter to one of his former students, Frost writes:

Now it is possible to have sense without the sound of sense (as in much prose that is supposed to pass muster but makes very dull reading) and the sound of sense without sense (as in Alice in Wonderland, which makes anything but dull reading). The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words (a letter to John Bartlett, from Frosts's Collected Poems, Prose and Plays. p664).

Here Frost - like Elbow and many other commentators - point to a kind of voiceprint. A texture that all speakers, and writers, have and by which they might be identified. You might think of this as similar to the idea that we can each be identified and, some would say, psychoanalysed, by our handwriting. Not just what we write, but the way we shape our vowels, or cross our 't's.

The third category is something else again. While it has its roots in the second category - in the natural, native texture of the voice, it is a kind of extension of that raw, intuitive shapeliness. Elbow talks about writing that has power and resonance: writing that doesn't just express something, but expresses it in such a way that it connects powerfully with its readers. Here, the voice is both a natural and a shaped thing. It is the raw talent honed and perfected into a thing of grace, beauty and power. As Jay Parini writes, of poets but also of other writers:

Although easily recognized, voice eludes easy definition. It gathers in the words and syntax, the tone, of the poet who has worked hard and listened long. It is always a marvelous thing to apprehend, pulsing softly against the abstract and prefabricated voice of the culture at large, which bangs away in our ears throughout the day. In this way, poetry offers an antidote to the bludgeoning loud voices of mass culture, insisting on the still, small voice, the personal voice, thus staking a claim for what used to be called the invididual soul.

Spender's Song

Stephen SpenderStephen Spender is one of my favourite poets. Curiously, it seems to me, poets have a slightly different approach to notions of voice than other types of writers, perhaps because their work is so often written in the first person, and so often misread as autobiography. While writers of fiction struggle with the competing and complementary notions of the voice of the writer, and the voice of any one particular book or story, poets often see these things quite differently - seeing voice as something that a writer carries across texts. I want to come back to these different notions of voice as being either of the writer, or of the text, but for now I want to stay with Spender for a while longer, and explore his ideas about voice. Stephen Spender was an articulate critic as well as poet, and here Ray West speaks about his model of 'literary composition':

Stephen Spender has described the qualities of literary composition as (a) inspiration, (b) memory, (c) concentration, (d) faith, and (e) son. Inspiration is the moment of conception of the vague structure and form that the story or novel will later take on in specific ways. Memory includes all the singular details that the writer can bring to the work from the well of his own consciousness - the sensations, the images, the characters, and the events that will serve the original concept. Concentration is the means of bringing the awareness to the surface and applying it to the work. If it is complete, concentration will control such matters as tone and point of view, maintaining a consistency that will give the work much of its unity. Faith is the attitude that the writer must, at all cost, maintain in relation to his material and to his gifts as a writer. Song is the expert use of language, not merely in the sense of correct usage, but in the sense that language is the means by which a certain music is created, a sound in the ears as well as logic for the mind. It is meter, it is rhythm, it is even gesture.

I find this model of literary composition exciting, poetic and inspiring. It seems to me to be a quite coherent unpacking of some of the many elements that go into making each writer, and each story or poem, unique. I'd like to expand a little on Spender's elements of composition.

Inspiration

Inspiration has its origins in the ancient Greek verb inspiratio, and in the associated ancient Greek model of writing. Insipiratio means "to breathe into" and refers to the relationship between the Gods, or muses, and the poets of Ancient Greece. According to classical literary criticism, Homer did not 'make up' his stories of Odysseus, but had them 'breathed into him' by the muse Calliope. This is why, at the beginning of the Iliad, for example, Homer invokes the muse. He is a mere mortal; he was not there when Agamemnon and Achilles battled and so he must call on the goddess to inspire in him their story so that he can deliver it to his audience. The poet is merely the vessel, the instrument, of an eternal force of consciousness.

These days, we tend to think of inspiration as coming not from the gods, godesses or muses, but from a far more diverse and mysterious complex of influences. We are inspired from within - by our imaginations and dreams - and we are inspired from without - by the object, people, places and events we encounter.

Inspiration, in the modern parlance, refers to that spark - the initial, sneaking suspicion that there's something there, in that image, or character, or place. My feeling is that these moments are various: that stories rarely arise out of a single moment of insight, but out of the accumulation of a horde of buzzing fragments. A red shoe, a cobbled street, a story shaped like an aria ... For me, inspiration rarely strikes in a single glance, but is a series of small shocks, accumulating in the blood.

Memory

Each writer has their own store of memories: a past out of which they have arisen. Faulkner wrote almost obsessively about his roots in the American South, Stephen King writes about small-town America, Kate Grenville more and more about the Australian past, Richard Flanagan about Tasmania. They write about more than this, of course, but it seems to me that something calls them backwards, into these landscapes of story. Your own memory is an equally rich store of details, emotions, experiences and ideas. We draw on these memories in myriad ways: we recall the smell of our father's baking, the feel of the cotton sheet on a sunburned body, the terrible beauty of our first kiss - sometimes we write about them directly, and clearly, sometimes we pull up out of this seemingly endless store a memory that we adjust to fit the story. Or the story sends us down into that basement, looking for things to flavour the scene, to give it the heft of authenticity, of a life lived.

Concentration

In the most prosaic way possible I think of this as the necessity for you to sit at your desk, or wherever it is you write, with pen and notebook ready, or computer open and waiting. Not for a moment, and not just when inspiration strikes, but regularly, and for long hours of your life. This is the surface of the thing: the need to be at the desk, working. Beneath that is something more subtle. The necessity of concentrating on what you are doing, rather than loosening all the cells in your brain and feeling your way. I've said before that I think that every writer has to find their own balance between emotional engagement with the work and intellectual engagement. For me, concentration is about both: you must concentrate on your emotions, and find ways to express them that are moving, but not melodramatic. You must concentrate on your craft - on your sentences and the shapes of your stories - and work on them with as much concentration as a sculptor pulling the work out of a hunk of marble. One eye on the future of its form, one on the reality of what it is now, and one on the path you must take between the potential and realised work of art.

Faith

While you are at the desk, even if it dissipates when you walk away, you must believe in the work, and in your ability to write. It's all very well to doubt yourself in the face of a crowd, or to worry about how long it's taking, or how many rejections you've collected this month, but at the desk, in that secret place between the worlds, I think most writers do have faith, both in themselves, and in the work they're creating. It shimmers at the end of your pen, and you scribble towards it. Most writers, I sense, have that terrible feeling that they have the ability to write an almost perfect work, if they can only get that thing inside them onto the page. You can almost taste it. Touch it. You know it's real. Sometimes, when writing, I have the sense that I know - almost perfectly, but caught in my peripheral vision - what I want it to feel like to read the book I'm writing. I write towards that: hopeful and afraid.

Song

This last, of course, is essential, and often overlooked. Some writers will tell you it doesn't matter - that story is all that matters. Some writers believe clarity of expression is somehow not about expert use of language. I've heard people make the mistake of thinking that a concern with the shape of sentences is a sure sign of a literary writer, or a self-conscious writer. Someone who litters their work with elaborate metaphors and linguistic tricks. To me, this is a false dichotomy. Good writing can be poetic, but it can also be clean and crisp. Song pays attention to the form of things, but also to the sound, the pure lilt and swing of language. To the way the right word, at the right moment, shines on the page like a benediction. Writing without singing is flat and difficult to read. Dull. Pointless. It blunts the experience of reading, making the reader work to make sense of what's happening, who's in a scene. It doesn't have to be self-consciously beautiful; simple things, too, have their magic.

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OWL

This article is an edited extract from a lesson on Voice in the online Fiction course offered through Olvar Wood onLine (OWL). Click here to read the full course outline, or here to visit OWL.

 

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