Finding Your Voice(s) Is the Key to Claiming Your Story
Experimenting with different voices in her work allowed prolific essayist Sonya Huber to get to the hard stuff and find more joy and agency in her writing.
Do you ever feel like âvoiceâ is one of those writerly terms youâre never totally sure youâre following or that youâve nailed? If yes, this Craft Classic from Creative Nonfiction by writer Sonya Huber, in which she feels liberated by discovering that she doesnât have to be beholden to only one voice, should help.
When youâre inside a piece of writing that hums and crackles and sparks, when a real person is talking to you from the page, youâve encountered a voice. âVoiceâ is what writing feels like. It sets off sympathetic vibrations in readers. It gives us a sense of connection to another live human presence, creating a real and complex moment of communication. As the poet Adrienne Rich put it, words written with voice have âthe sheer heft / of our living behindâ them.
We already have voices, so the guidance to âfindâ oneâs voice is often confusing for writers. If youâve read about voice, you might have encountered the idea that it is a singular essence that animates writing, made up of craft and style choices and tone, and that it is somehow connected to our âreal self.â As a young writer, I heard this advice suggesting that I had one âauthenticâ voice, the âreal me,â with the rest of my expression somehow impure or fake. I knew that I had a certain style, a set of phrases and an underlying grammar that united much of my writing, but when I thought about my voice, I felt self-conscious. That âone voiceâ concept made me feel like I couldnât stray far from my roots, like I had one crayon to color with. Following that idea, it seemed like Iâd somehow have to incorporate all of my being and influences into one mode of expression so that, no matter what, Iâd always sound a little like a Midwesterner stuck in the 1980s, and my true style was a kind of anchor or tether, one Iâd always circle around, with a limited range. Worse, I couldnât even tell you much about my âsingular voiceâ beyond a list of words I chose regularly, a few bad habits of sentence construction, and some influences of region and era.
Throughout my years of teaching writing, I have tended to skip the question of voice because it didnât seem to help my students. Instead, I gave them writing prompts and asked them to inhabit various perspectives, real and imagined, past, present, and future. As these writers exercised and stretched and explored these different selves, they began to feel something flow that had been frozen. They began to inhabit their writing, and that comfort on the page often transferred far outside the world of memoir or the personal essay and enlivened their academic writing. But I didnât yet have a theory about why this worked.
As Janet Burroway writes, âBegin by knowing, and exploring, the fact that you already have a number of different voices.â You can borrow voices, learn to listen to your own, exercise them so they grow stronger, trade them, try others on for size. And you get as many as you want. When you use one, two more appear. And yet they are all connected and shifting. Every voice we develop is an interface or cognitive tool to help us interact with a specific slice of the world in a specific time and place. We move along throughout our lives, and we discard some of our old voices, or they are used to make new ones. Once you appreciate all the voices you have to work with, you can mine them, and discover others, for writing in all genres. Your web of voices is youâbut itâs also other peopleâs impact on you, what youâve read, and what youâve experienced. As Walt Whitman wrote, you âcontain multitudes.â And as Felicia Rose Chavez writes, âHow we speak is as abundant as we are.â
I stumbled into my own experiments with voice when I began literally to stumble with an autoimmune disease. Chronic pain affected my joints, but it also affected my energy, my thinking, and my writing voice. Before I got sick, the writer voice only needed coffee to get started. Iâd sit down at the screen, and words would appear. I didnât always know what would appear on the page or how good it would be or where it would go, but I always knew that words would appear. But after I got sick, I felt like I couldnât think, couldnât zip along and fling handfuls of words at the keyboard. Instead, I pecked one letter at a time, my thoughts unspooling very slowly. I scrawled panicked and sad journal entries between naps, doctorsâ visits, and angry attempts to wash dishes and do chores with hands that didnât seem to work. I had to switch gears constantly to become the assistant professor doing all of her jobs well and calmly. Without that assistant professor role, there would have been no health insurance for me or my five-year-old son, and no food. But going to work used almost all the energy I had.
I fought against this change. I forced myself to write the way Iâd always written, escalating a terrible battle between my mind and my body. I got depressed because my writing had always been the one thing about my life that I could control. At the root of this was a lot of anger toward myself and the world and a lot of fear about what my future might bring. I did not want to be where I was, and I didnât want to have to give up writing.