Your Story

by Joanne Fedler

  if we don’t know how it will turn out and we feel lost, we invoke the spirit of Wendell Berry’s words in which he reminds us that it is precisely when we have lost our way that we have come to our real work, and that our true journey has begun.

  if it’s only one thing (great, awesome, tragic, desperate), it’s unexamined; and

  if we start off already knowing the answer, we don’t have a way of inquiring into the truth of the experience.

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  Timbre

  The timbre of something is its resonance. Perhaps what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins might have called “inscape.”

  INSCAPE: The uniqueness, individuality, self-hood of all living things. The order, pattern, unique beauty at the heart of things. The very essence of things.

  According to Hopkins, everything has its own inscape—its essence, its marked individuality, and this is the elusive quality of the writing voice that we’re chasing. It’s often hidden in the same way that our internal organs remain mysteriously concealed. We often don’t know what we’re looking for.

  The timbre of our writing voice is our writing style, flair, brand, fashion. It’s how readers recognize and come to know us. It’s our writing personality, an indescribable blend of our life experience, history, idiosyncrasies, neuroses, sensibilities, and self-awareness. It sparkles with our humor, insights, and felt experience. As the poet Mark Nepo writes, “If I had experienced different things, I would have different things to say.” So getting to the timbre of our writing voice is when we find the thing inside us that wants to be said in the way that only we can say it. Our writing voice is a beautiful medley of craft (which we learn) and some ineffable part of us (our soul, if you like). It may be invisible, hidden, silent, but it’s there. It’s the part that Dr. Seuss describes in Happy Birthday to You! as “you-er than you.”

  Our writing voice emerges from that you-ness.

  Finding our voice is the combination of our willingness and capacity to:

  feel the things that have happened to us as deeply as we can;

  use the craft of writing to evoke the emotional experience in such a way that others can feel what we felt; and

  find a bridge from the utterly personal to the universal so our experience will have meaning and significance for a reader.

  We capture this timbre when we harvest whatever is buzzing deep inside us. It is our particular way of making sense of the world. Our writing voice may be hiding behind cliché, grief, convention, or clutter. Grab a shovel and clear the way. Finding your writing voice can be messy. There will be fallout, and some darlings will have to die in the process.1

  To find the timbre of our voice, we must stay in our bodies (be present); feel deeply; remember (however we remember), and then, in the words of William Stafford, weave “a parachute out of everything broken” and create the connections that tie the chaos and despair together. We don’t find it until we start writing. It’s a glorious gift bundled into the experience of apprenticing ourselves to this inner work.

  Our authentic writing voice is fresh, vivid, passionate, and personal. How do we know when we’ve found it? We know. It’s like falling in love. It is clear and bright—as if our spirit stepped out of our skin and onto the page. Our writing voice is never forced. It is a perfect balance between effort and grace. Some of it is earned, some of it is given.

  We can work backward. Our writing voice is also what we want people to say about our writing, e.g., “passionate,” “edgy,” “dark,” “satirical,” “humorous,” “quirky,” “fresh.” Once we know, we can become those things, inhabit those adjectives.

  _________________

  1. In his lecture “On Style,” delivered in 1914, Arthur Quiller-Couch said, “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”

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  Transition

  Our readers don’t really care if we lost weight or got over our homesickness. They want to know how they can learn to live with hunger and get over their own grief. They’re looking for points of connection, echoes of their own experience in our stories. We succeed when we connect with them, when we bridge the personal and speak with a universal voice. That’s when we make the transition.

  Here are three ways I know to do this:

  always ask whether a particular event or moment is serving your story and your reader;

  make space in your text for a reader. This is an editing job. Allow breathing space in the text so that the reader’s own experience can enter through the latticework of your words. Your writing must be porous, not dense like concrete; otherwise it becomes suffocating and, in the words of the wonderful Israeli writer Nava Semel, there’s no way for a reader’s “soul map” to enter the text;

  work toward exquisitely personal universal statements. You achieve these when you take your unique experience (nursing a dying parent, watching your marriage fall apart, losing all your money) and distill a truth that speaks to all human experience. Readers will then experience it as if you’ve touched on their particular experience.

  Goethe said, “The Poet should seize the particular, and he should, if there be anything sound, thus represent the universal.”

  When we write, we’re not looking for what is the same in our experience as everyone else’s, but what is unique. As readers, when we stumble across an exquisitely personal universal statement, we get a gush of oxygen. Poetry is full of them. Poets are in the business of devising these sorts of offerings. It’s like sipping nectar.

  This connection is almost energetic, auric. It’s as if the truth in me responds to the truth in you.

  In an interview, Cheryl Strayed, author of the memoir Wild, said:

  When we see a painting that we love, we’re not standing there thinking about the artist who made it—we’re thinking about how that painting makes us feel, what that reflects to us about our lives and the world. And so I love when art exceeds . . . its creator, which is the whole goal of art . . . , when it becomes not about the person who created it, but about the people who consume it.

  This is especially true in memoir, when you’re writing about yourself—it has this horrible, false reputation of being the narcissistic form, which I think is pure bullshit. No good memoir is really about the writer—and yet it’s deeply about the writer.

  She reminds us that, as writers, our job is to learn how to “use [our] life as material for art” so that our lives become the raw material from which we craft something that is not for or about us, but for and about our readers.

  Here are a few from my memoir, When Hungry, Eat:

  When we are far from those we love, we can use that as a metaphor for how far away we are from the self we can learn to love better.

  and

  Be patient with hunger. It is precious. We can love things more for the smallness of our portion.

  and

  I understood that “going back” was an illusion that prevented me from going forward. Inside my own body, I was already home.

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  Trust revisited

  The pull to the page is what gets us writing. But it takes time before things click.

  Often we read what we’ve written and we sink inside. The words aren’t right. There’s a breach between the longing inside us and what we’re able to produce on the page. Maybe we really are no good at this. Do we have zero talent? Who did we think we were anyway, trying to write a book?

  Keep diving, going down, and if you come up empty-handed, go back down for another look.

  Our writing voice clicks when our ability with language finally meets that longing. It’s like when two opposite sides of a magnet finally connect.

  It’s just like when we start learning a new language. At first our efforts will be clunky, we’ll trip over the grammar, use words incorrectly and in not quite the right context. But with time and practice, as our ears and tongues becom
e accustomed to the language, we begin to flow, we don’t overthink every time we speak, we slide into the language and feel as if it’s speaking through us. Connecting with our writing voice is like this.

  Have you ever tried to learn a musical instrument? I did—at the age of 45 I decided to learn to play the guitar. At first I had to think each time I played a chord. I couldn’t imagine putting all the chords together and actually playing a song. I kept making mistakes. It felt less like making music and more like weight lifting. But with time and practice, I eventually got into a rhythm. It began to feel graceful and breezy.

  Writing gets like that too. With time and practice. It is part exertion, part grace. We control the effort, but we must yield for the grace bit.

  You’ll know it when it happens. The words will come out right. They’ll match the longing. They’ll speak rightly and make sense of the rumblings in your heart, the marvelous chaos of sense, emotion, and memory that have pulled you to the page.

  Our voice is both natural but it is also crafted. It is like the perfect pitch.

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  Traveled

  My father once told me I have no sense of humor. I do take life a bit on the serious side.

  Yet my writing has been called “hilarious” and “laugh-out-loud funny.” What this means is that I’m much funnier on the page than I am in real life.

  So who am I on the page? It’s not my raw, spontaneous personality, but rather a version of my personality funneled, refined, through the distillery of my craft. That filter is also carefully structured to be a conduit to a particular reader. Our voice must always be powered by the consciousness of the question, that almighty important question: How will this connect with my Mary?

  Our personality on the page is carefully constructed. It’s the version of ourselves if everything we thought and felt was first allowed to ferment and work its way through our consciousness into words. Writing is not a spontaneous expression, but one that travels a long way—through our experience, through the body, through the heart, through the head, and eventually through our hands onto the page.

  It’s our personality, well traveled. It’s been on a journey through consciousness and craft.

  Don’t trust the untraveled voice.

  There’s a beautiful poem by Kenneth Koch called “One Train May Hide Another” that is based on a sign he saw on a railway track in Kenya. This poem forms the foundation of much of my teaching. In it, Koch reminds us that each thing in our lives—each moment, event, person—may “hide another.” We need to stop and wait to allow them to pass to see what has been patiently hiding behind them all along.

  Finding that authentic voice might just be about waiting to see what was already there. Often our real writing voice is hiding behind what we first write.

  Though our true voice is made of everything we know about ourselves, it also has a mysterious element to it. It may not fully be the “you” you present to the world, but the you tucked away inside you. Many of us haven’t even met this part of ourselves.

  We have to travel to meet it, to retrieve lost selves left behind or repressed, or our imagined other selves living out a fantasy. The encounter can feel bewildering, like meeting a contradiction, but in the words of Walt Whitman:

  Do I contradict myself?

  Very well then I contradict myself,

  (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

  The self that is complete has integrated ambivalence and paradox and is comfortable with things not quite making sense because they are not one thing or another but both, or many, or at odds: ordinary and miraculous. It’s the “AND,” not the “OR” maneuver. Romantic and dreary. Holding both grief and lightness. It’s this exertion of holding two things that don’t belong together that creates a heart space of inquiry. We drop out of one dimension. We see through many dimensions. We don’t flatten, we expand:

  I am a loyal married woman and I am a free gypsy spirit belonging to no one but myself.

  When we speak from this place, we speak in truth. As a traveler who has been there and returned with new eyes.

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  Teachers

  What if you don’t know where to start looking for your writing voice?

  That’s where teachers come in. Books are your teachers. Other writers are your teachers. As much as we find our voice through an intimacy with our own writing practice, we must also read—all the time, and different things. Sometimes by reading the way others write, we feel an echo in ourselves, or see a lighthouse guiding us closer to our own voice. Find writers whose prose lights up your blood like a match to sambuca. The kindle to finding your voice is somewhere in there. Find writing that stirs and awakens you.

  Write down the names of 10 writers you love and why. What you love is a clue, it’s calling something forth from within you. Read lots of memoir. See how others have done it. Copy them at first to get a feel for how they write.

  And know that’s just the beginning.

  In all spiritual stories, the search for the treasure that takes heroes on journeys far, far away is seldom about the outward journey. The treasure is back home, within. The outward journey is simply the catalyst for the inner one. But we can only get to the inner journey when we have completed the pilgrimage of exile. If we haven’t exhausted the tourism of our search, we’ll forever be thinking, Maybe it’s just on top of that next mountain, or Maybe I should read one more book about how to write.

  To find our writing voice, we must travel outward in order to find our way back into our own hearts.

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  Ten thousand hours

  As human beings, we have the right to be loved, warts and all, just for who we are. But not when it comes to our writing. People do not have to love our writing just because it comes from us. We get no special love from a reader. We have to earn it. As writers, it’s not enough that we just write. There is an act of creation and craftsmanship that is not just about blurting out the first thing that pops into your head and squirting it onto the page.

  Good writing has worked its way through the skin, the body, the heart, the brain, the mind, and out through the hands. It’s a journey of 10,000 hours of scraping away the static, clutter, rust, and cliché from our voice. Only then does it embody the gnarly grit of experience sanded down ’til it’s sheer and silky as glass. It has the suppleness and confidence of the yoga teacher’s flow, not the shaking jerkiness of the novice saluting the sun. It is the jazz musician who understands the medium and whose music seems effortless, but whose hours of dedication are felt imperceptibly in every note.

  As Toni Morrison writes, “I rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like I never did. I try to make it look like I never touched it, and that takes a lot of time and a lot of sweat.”

  To get to a place of smoothness, where all the effort and time are concealed, we must dedicate ourselves to writing.

  During our 10,000-hour apprenticeship, we sometimes access a moment of grace, and we catch our voice like a wave or a bird on a breeze. We enter flow, where there is a conscious, practiced ease. Our voice knows itself, and when we’re with our voice, it knows. It’s that kind of knowing we’re searching for in our writing.

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  Texture and tone

  To make our story real and rich, we want to create texture. We do this by making sure we and our other characters are not clichés or stereotypes; that we dance between light and shadow; that we do not look for neat answers to the questions our life throws up. We want to engage all the senses—to evoke the times, the moments, the situations our story is about.

  Here are some techniques we can draw on:

  Exposition and scenes

  Sometimes we need to move the pace of the story along quickly, so we summarize events for the reader. This is called exposition or narration. But when we need to slow things down and zoom in, we intersperse the exposition with scenes, using dialogue and action to show the people and the places in our story too.

  Showing and
telling

  You don’t write about the horrors of war. No.

  You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying in the road.

  — Richard Price

  Don’t tell me the moon is shining;

  show me the glint of light on broken glass.

  — Anton Chekhov

  The reading experience should offer your readers the chance to understand your story through their own eyes. As writers, we want to leave spaces for the reader to fill in: not too big and not too small. Enough space for imagination, but not so much as to become obscure.

  When we show, we paint an image for the reader (like in movies) so the reader gets to interpret and feel her own emotional response. This is how we create rich, vivid text that is open to interpretation. It makes writing inviting, not didactic.

  The movie director David Mamet talks about telling the story

  in cuts . . . through a juxtaposition of images that are basically uninflected. . . . A shot of a teacup. A shot of a spoon. A shot of a fork. A shot of a door. Let the cut tell the story. Because otherwise you have not got dramatic action, you have narration. If you slip into narration, you are saying, “you’ll never guess why what I just told you is important to the story.” It’s unimportant that the audience should guess why it’s important to the story. It’s important simply to tell the story. Let the audience be surprised.

  When writing about emotions and senses, we should aim to show rather than tell. Telling robs the reader of his or her own emotional take on the situation. It flattens instead of expanding the text.

  Hemingway said, “If a writer . . . knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”