The Search for Voice

I’m delighted to be here with you this morning. I have looked forward to it. Like many of you, I am in love with this place, this Chautauqua. In love with the gingerbread houses, the super ice cream cones in Bestor Square, watching the children wade in Lake Chautauqua, hearing the organist practice Bach from my front porch. All of these things.

But there is something more to Chautauqua for me. I have always found this place to be a place of ideas. They seem to mill about the Hall of Christ, hover around the picnic tables on the Alumni Hall lawn, spring on passers-by at the Bell Tower. They are in the air. And each year, like a catcher of butterflies, I try to catch the ideas that I discover here and share them. In truth, even before I came to this place, I can predict it. Ideas began to accumulate. They stalk me. And they are inevitably ideas about the wonderful, mysterious process of creating story. Sometimes in the course of reading a novel, or writing one, or gathering in the art for a picture book, or at some other juggling point in the process of making a book something niggles, or surprises me, or something about the creation of story suddenly becomes abundantly, abundantly clear.

Over the years, I have quested after character. What makes it? Where it comes from? Quested after the belly of the whale that place in story of climaxes and character change, quested after human action, the interaction that drives a book, quested after the use of the senses in writing innumerable quests. But of all my quests, searches, discoveries, call them what you will, the search for voice over time has haunted me the most. I believe it haunts writers and lovers of literature alike. But voice, ah, it remains mysterious, elusive sister of the craft, sought, desired, frequently misunderstood.

Yet voice is so important that editors who receive as many as a thousand manuscripts a year will say that voice is the first thing they look for in a manuscript. They open a package up. They look at the first two paragraphs of a manuscript, and if they hear voice, they read on. If they do not, they put the manuscript back in the package and return it to the author.

Teachers say that in literature, voice separates the ordinary from the extraordinary. Certainly, writing will not be called literature without voice. Yet, people, each with great assurance, debate what voice even is. It is how a character speaks. No, it is how the author speaks. Wrong. Voice is much broader than that. Voice is style. Wrong again. Voice is simply the personality of the writer coming through.

And on the debate rages. No wonder artists and editors and literary folk of all sorts have difficulty figuring out exactly what this mysterious aspect of the craft voice is. And no wonder the search for it. Even today, I must admit to you that I am only a curmudgeon in all this. I am a Tigger-like character, an inveterate, peripatetic, who sniffs busily around in what Milne call the forest of the imagination. That forest, where imagination is king or queen, but not, not satisfied, merely to play there as any good Pooh or Eeyore would be. Tigger-like, I want to discover how the stuff of the imagination turns into books.

I stepped into this woods of the imagination early, and it has been no journey, no easy walk through the woods. It has been, as I have implied, a journey. Perhaps if you began with my being a storyteller as a child. Not so much a reader at first, not so much, but mostly a storyteller weaving stories out of any fabric I was remotely near. The ceramic animals, miniature cats, dogs, chickens, on my grandmother’s red-enameled shelf in her bread-smelling kitchen. If I could get there, that is, before my cousins. Around the mulberry tree, in my tiny backyard, where the neighborhood kids and I circled like little Sambo and his mother and father melting like butter under a July sun while I told them stories.

Most of all, weaving stories through paper dolls that took me into their world, a world created by giant chair legs and bronze statue lamps. When I told my stories, of course, I played all of the voices, all of the roles. Have you ever listened to children in their worlds? I have just finished spending a week with my two grandchildren, Rami and Melanie, each, they’re 17 and 18 months old. Already they hear voices, everything speaks to them, from candlesticks to dogs, and the older they get, the more articulate children become in this.

As children they understand, as children do so many things, as I think that I understood under the mulberry tree, that voices contain what? Anger, bitterness, brusqueness, or sweetness. And children modulate their characters as a violinist does the notes on a violin.

Voice, but of course there is more to voice than creating different voices for different characters, though this is important and essential too. As a young writer on the Louisville Courier-Journal, I was sent as a first real assignment to cover a horse race as the cub reporter. I had never seen a horse race in my life. The editors loved the idea of seeing and hearing a greenhorn’s reaction in a Sunday feature article, and it was an exciting, exciting opportunity for me. By that ripe old age of 23, like many young people, I had left behind the modulations and natural inclinations of children toward voice.

I had learned to write with a capital W, a well-composed, those analytical papers at college, a well and efficiently constructed newspaper article at the newspaper. I could write a creative writing piece that met the compositional standards of red-penciling Mr. Haley, a madman with red pencil and observant comment who taught creative writing at Miami University where I went to college. And indeed, after taking notes all day at the Keeneland racetracks, my big chance to break into big time reporting–or so I thought.

I wrote a piece that was organized, assiduously careful with information, ripe with detail and charming anecdotes, which I had carefully collected. But when Cary Robertson, the editor of the magazine’s section of the Courier-Journal looked at my story, “I thought it was my final copy,” he said. “This is fine, Patty,” but I waited. “Patty, the piece has no energy, no pizzazz.” He looked at me like the Dutch uncle that he was despite the tough smoking newspaper atmosphere he lived in. “This is a feature. You’ve been to see your first horse race. I want to hear your voice in this article.” He looked at me to make sure I was listening. “You are going to have to let go when you write, at least a feature article.”

Did the search really begin there? All those years ago? And what did he mean, let go? After learning all I had learned, suffering through Miss Black’s 11th grade English class, through Miss Englebretsen’s freshman English, after finally figuring out what independent and dependent clauses were, I, I had to let go.

And then in big New York, almost a decade after leaving the Louisville Courier-Journal, Ron and I landed on a suburban street, 36 Abbeyville Lane, White Plains, New York, where a new neighbor I had just met, knew someone who had joined a writer’s workshop in writing for children, run by the writer, Jean Fritz, THE Jean Fritz. And somehow she knew that Jean had openings in the workshop; only two. I couldn’t have moved faster to fill one of those two spots. If any of you know Jean Fritz’s work, you may well know her writing voice.

This is from And Then What Happened, Paul Revere? Listen.

In 1735, there were in Boston, 42 streets, 36 lanes, 22 alleys. 1,000 brick houses, 2,000 wooden houses, 12 churches, 4 schools, 418 horses, at last count, and so many dogs. The law was passed prohibiting people from having dogs that were more than 10 inches high, but it was difficult to keep dogs from growing more than 10 inches, and few people were willing to part with their 11 and 12-inch dogs, so they paid little attention to the law. In any case, there were too many dogs to count, along with the houses, streets, alleys. There were, of course, people in Boston, more than 13,000. Four of them lived in a small wooden house on North Street, near Loveland. They were Mr. Revere, a gold and silversmith, his wife Deborah, their daughter Deborah, and their young son Paul Revere, born the first day of the new year.

Voice. It is not surprising that I began the search for voice in earnest with this brilliant writer and teacher. At first in Jean’s workshop I behaved logically. I dearly love history and was smitten with the courageous Major Rogers. Major Rogers who was a woodsy New England rascal as well as a hero. I had on the spur of the moment the summer of having already sent my few Rogers chapters to Harper. Oh, about 50 pages and Harper had sent it back with a note. Sorry, Harper said, this character is fascinating I’m sure but he just doesn’t come alive.

It was my rewrite, my effort at making this story come alive, that I brought to Jean’s workshop and I can’t recall Jean Fritz ever saying to me that’s not it; you have to let go, as Cary Robertson had said to me. I can’t remember her saying to me “you must have voice” but as important as writing was in that workshop, reading was equally as important and every week the 18 of us read some new book. The Mixed-Up Files of Basil E. Frankweiller, by Elaine Konigsburg, was one. Here are the first words of this book which you may well know:

Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her back. She didn’t like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place. And that was why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Voice. We read the Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume. Maybe you’ve read this too:

I won Dribble at Jimmy Fargo’s birthday party. All the other guys got to take some goldfish home in little plastic bags. I won him because I guess there were 348 jelly beans in Mrs. Fargo’s jar. Really, there were 423, she told us later. Still, my guess, my guess was closest. “Peter Warren Hatcher is the big winner,” Mrs. Fargo announced.

Ah, what detail, hmm, voice. We read frequently out loud one of my favorites, The Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell:

I remember the day the Aleut ship came to our island. At first it seemed like a small shell afloat on the sea, and then it grew larger and was a gull folded, full with folded wings. At last, in the rising sun, it became what it really was, a red ship with two red sails. My brother, Ramo, was only a little boy half my age, which was twelve. He was small for one who would live so many suns and moons, but quick as a cricket, also foolish as a cricket, when as he was excited for this reason and because I wanted him to help me gather roots and not go running off, I said nothing about the shell I saw, or the gull with folded wings.

Voice, perhaps–glory be for the first time–I began to hear voice, really hear voice. I realized these writers were not merely writing different things, saying different things. They were genuinely using different voice to tell their stories. Lucky me. I was at the same time taking a master’s degree in English literature at Manhattanville College and began to hear voices there, too, from D.H. Lawrence in The Rainbow, when in a courting scene, Will Brangwen and his love are gathering sheaves on a glistening moonlight night in one of the most subtly sensuous love scenes ever written.

I heard the voice of W.B. Yeats writing about descending into the rag and bone shop of his heart to find his poetry and story in the circus animals desertion. In James Joyce, writing in Ulysses in one continuous, breathy, four-page sentence at the end of the book, at the moment when Bloom’s lover recalling, the moment in El Jaseris when she says, yes to Bloom, yes, I said, yes, I will, yes.

And the unforgettable voice of William Shakespeare, Lear being, being the one who made me weep when he as a father wailed, howl, howl, howl upon discovering the death of his dearest child, Cordelia. I was startled, stunned, touched by all these voices.

The truth is I could hardly sleep at night for the discovery, the power of Lear. The humor of Joyce’s Bloom, the images of Yeats, the irony of Paul Zindel, each in a voice powerfully, musically, yes, yes, musically, and uniquely, itself, each containing its own pauses, its own circumspection, and again, its own rhythms, frequently, frequently.

I was beginning to understand this thing called voice, but where in heaven’s name did it come from? Whatever it was, and whatever, wherever it came from, as a new writer, I knew that I wanted voice, too. After that, when I wrote, I did what the newspaper editor, Cary Robinson, had suggested all of those years before. Instead of squeezing a story into existence as I had that first draft of my Keeneland racing story, or in my early drafts of Major Rogers, I now let go. I let go. Whatever I had learned about grammar, or composition, or development, I tucked away. That grounding, important as it may have been as grounding, went plop into the same reservoir with every other piece of learning, or sensing, or experiencing I had accumulated that far.

My well, along with the lapping of water on the Lake Huron shore after a storm, the smell of an empty garbage can after the bag had been removed, the oily winding of a raindrop from a window pane. The grammatical grounding was tucked away with all of my, my rhythms: running for the school bus, playing Czerny exercises at our rickety parlor piano, singing jump rope rhymes, power: Polly put the kettle on, kettle on, kettle on. Polly put the kettle on, we’ll all have tea. And the simple, distinct rhythms of my own body, my breathing, my heartbeat, the pace at which I walked and talked and moved.

All my proper compositional learning went into that well, that reservoir, along with my sense of fairness and rightness and beauty and love too, along with my sense of humor and wit. It all went into the great pot, or well, which I did not attempt to separate but only to stir.

Letting go was the single most important thing I ever learned, and it had to do as much with unlearning as learning. And it had to do with trust that in writing this way, What would emerge only partly with my understanding would be something that would speak for me, or my character that would reflect who I or my character was, and how I or my character spoke, and how I or my character felt.

Trust that what a reader would hear when a story came from that place would be my voice. Because it was stamped with everything that I had ever been and was, my fingerprint or the fingerprint of a character screened by my person and, yes, my voice. And I went on to write in that way, leaving Mr. Haley and his red pencil to my reservoir, just one small speck of experience, along with the detail and residue and music of my life. Voice. With great vigor and great passion, I wrote.

And then, although still writing, I went on to edit books like Jane Yolen’s Owl Moon and Ed Young’s Seven Blind Mice, like Brian Jacques’ Redwall and Thomas Barron’s Heartlight, like Justin Denzel’s Boy of the Painted Cave and Patricia Polacco’s Pink and Say, always searching for or encouraging voice and adding up in my mind, piece by piece, what I thought it was and where I thought it had come from.

So that as an author, I would sit down and write from that slightly mysterious letting go place. And so that as an editor, I would never forget when I put my hand on a manuscript or a piece of art of someone else’s, an author, an artist, a student, I would never forget not only the power of voice, but how private voice is. How fragile voice is under the pencil of an outsider. That is what made the teacher Mr. Haley and his red pencil so dangerous. Voice. And I continue to discover more and more about mysterious, wonderful, elusive voice that I believe we writers use need to know.

That voice, perhaps, first of all, is conversational. Whether in dialogue or inner narrative, that’s what Cary Robertson meant when he said, let go. Let go to how you speak when you speak. Or your daughter, your best friend, your love.

A writer doesn’t affect language, put on airs or different language to become a writer. Quite the reverse. That was the right. That was the fight that T.S. Eliot had in his tradition and talent over language. He admitted that the fussiness of John Milton’s poetic but convoluted language had his own beauty, but he insisted that true emotional power lay in the common image and rhythms that inform our everyday speech and life.

Oh, what an extraordinarily important sentence. Let me go further. True voice is conversational, not just because it is informal, but because in writing it, a writer can more easily, more surely dip into the dialogues and images of his or her own soul. The soul of memory, the soul of caring, the soul of indignation, the soul of what flight means and fear, the soul of persevering. No wonder voice reflects so profoundly what the author or artist is. Listen for a moment to the voice of Summer, the orphan girl in Missing May by Cynthia Rylant. Summer has been talking about Ob and May, her foster uncle and aunt’s love for one another when it comes to her thinking about her own mother’s love for her.

“I know I must have loved like that. Even if I can’t remember it, I must have. Otherwise, how could I even recognize love when I saw it that night between Ob and May? Before she died, I knew my mother must have loved to comb my shiny hair and rub, rub that Johnson’s baby lotion up and down my arms and wrap me up and hold and hold me all night long. She must have known she wasn’t going to live. And she must have held me longer than any other mother might, so I’d have enough love in me to know what love was when I saw it, or felt it again.

Run on sentences, extended repetition, ands, rather than commas, natural, conversational, soulful, and powerful. The forced self-conscious created voice contradicts the very nature of what the soul is.

And sometimes the writer doesn’t even know what’s in his or her soul until the writer discovers a character through which to speak or until she or he lets go in narrative, in narrative telling. Voice not only wants to convey story but experience itself. It wants a reader to buy in. to believe in the authenticity of the scene or character. Story is enveloped in gossamer, but textured threads of the imagination when a character and the character’s voice do not ring true, the threads are broken.

A reader cannot, as Samuel Coleridge wrote, suspend disbelief. From The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Patterson, Gilly is being taken to her third foster home and has just put up with a lecture by social worker, Ms. Ellis, who is driving her there:

Gilly, Ms. Ellis sighed and shifted her fancy-on-the-floor gears, Gilly… My name, Gilly said between her teeth, is Galadriel. Ms. Ellis appeared not to have heard. Gilly, give Maime Trotter half a chance, okay? She’s really a nice person. That cans it, thought Gilly. At least nobody had accused Mr. or Mrs. Nevis, her most recent foster parents of being nice. Mrs. Richmond, the one with the bad nerves, had been nice. The Newman family who couldn’t keep a five-year-old who wet her bed had been nice. Well, I’m 11 now, folks. And in case you haven’t heard, I don’t wet my bed anymore, but I am not nice. I am brilliant. I am famous across the entire country. Nobody wants to tangle with the great Galadriel Hopkins. It’s too, too clever and too hard to manage. Gruesome Gilly, they call me. I lean back comfortably. Here I come, Maime Bad Baby, ready or not.

Do you hear the repetition that becomes rhythm? Do you hear it growing? Do you hear the anger become resolution? Voice not skim the surface? It is the vehicle of the soul. Whether it is the narrative storytelling voice or the voice creating new character and it believes not in being efficient, being adequate or just okay, it does not believe in formula.

Voice lives at the edge. It takes risks. It is brave.

From Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli, the first page:

They say Maniac Magee was born in a dump. They say his stomach was a cereal box in his heart a sofa spring. They say he kept an 8-inch cockroach on a leash and that rats stood guard over him while he slept and they say if you knew he was coming, and you sprinkled salt on the ground and he ran over it within two or three blocks he would be as slow as everybody else.

They say–there’s that rhythm again–Jerry Spinelli talks about writing for 20 years before really being published. How long, how long, uh was this story on rhythms and the images of Maniac Magee boiling up from the well of his soul? And ah when they came they came with the authenticity of a great voice. Nothing medium or just okay or adequate or efficient or formulaic about it. The voice of Maniac Magee is outrageous. It’s out of the ballpark, absolutely no question.

It probably even surprised Jerry Spinelli, but in fact voice, real voice, is frequently out of the ballpark or another… I call voice profound. Yeah, I call it profound. It’s in its profound; I’m gonna start that over sorry. Profound in its rhythm and novels like Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. Shortly after Hatchet has crashed a small airplane in the wilderness:

It took an hour, perhaps two. He could not measure them yet and didn’t care for the sun to get halfway up and with it came some warmth. Small bits of it at first, and with the heat came clouds of insects, thick swarming hordes of mosquitoes that flocked to his body, made a living, living coat of his exposed skin, clogged his nostrils, when he inhaled poured into his mouth when he opened it to take a breath. He had come through the crash but the insects were not possible, he coughed them up spat them out sneezed them, sneezed them out, closed his eyes and kept brushing his face, slapping and crushing them by the dozens, by the hundreds, but as soon as he cleared a place, as soon as he killed them, more came, thick, thick, whining, buzzing masses of them, mosquitoes, small black flies all biting, chewing, taking from him.

Excessive. That’s what voice often is, and full of fragments and asides, excesses, full of fragments and asides and successful.

Scott O’Dell told me that he wrote his survivor’s story, The Island of the Blue Dolphins, in iambic pentameter. Gary Paulsen’s rhythms came from a less precious place, growing up as he did in Minnesota, the son, as he names them, of the town drunks. Are his rhythms less powerful than Odell’s? Hardly, but surely they are different. It is the soul that informs, soul that has churned with hurt, with desertion, exclusion, a soul that has been starved, a soul that knows the wilderness, has willing rhythms, an unforgettable voice. Voice, profound in its metaphors and similes. Voice, profound also in its detail.

Haven’t you been hearing that all along? In Jean Fritz’s Paul Revere and Judy Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Hatchet. Profound. I find that a great many people say yes, I know what detail and voice is, but when they write it, really write it, it’s not close enough to the bone.

Profound detail should make me see something in a way I’ve never seen it before, never. And it could be simply said. Remember these lines from Jane Yolen’s Owl Moon:

And then we came into a clearing in the dark woods. The moon was high above us. It seemed to fit exactly over the center of the clearing, and the snow below it was whiter than the milk in a cereal bowl.

Whiter than the milk in a cereal bowl. Ah, I see it, for the first time.

I am from time to time invited to writers’ conferences, where whole, where whole hours are spent on marketing, or how to write a query letter, or do I need an agent? Something is wrong with that picture. Talking profundity here. Commitment to the soul of story. Some authors never get in touch with that soul and voice eludes them. Yet some of their books are among us. I was looking for Island of the Blue Dolphins yesterday and ran by mistake into the Babysitter Club series.

Incidentally, I say yes to that series. It’s a good thing for young people. It’s entertaining and fun and lets kids experience relationships. It’s a good read. Books like those in the Babysitter Club series are not books of voice. Books of voice will not let the readers escape unscathed. They will make the reader believe, make the reader experience and hear and see, and may stay with the reader a lifetime. For writers and editors, there are then implications.

As an editor, I am in a powerful position. I can X out, change, cut. I have tremendous power as an editor. But when an author of whatever age is searching for the stuff of its soul and is risking using that voice, I as an editor need to be aware, need to walk, not in Strunk and White’s shoes alone, but in the author’s shoes, to listen for their rhythms, for the growing storms, the pulse of the author, the heartbeat, the breathful sigh, listen for the, listen for the subtleties of pulling back to fragment or simple exclamation. My role is precarious too. I can only approach voice and author with absolute respect. I need to be more cheerleader than referee, but a knowledgeable, informed cheerleader in order to help the author free story in themselves so the author can finally open up and tell the story he or she wants to tell.

That way, the story deserves to be told. No wonder deciding what story to tell is so important. Profundity, profundity that may inform voice does not come as easily from using someone else’s idea, whether the idea comes from an editor or friend or some superficial search such as a marketing plea, like “multicultural is selling, so write a multicultural story.” And if an author does begin, not from the inside of his or her own story, but from the outside, from the outside, recovery then is essential. A writer must still go back to the rag and bone shop of his or her heart to make the soulful connection, to make voice live and thus a character in story live.

A writer’s voice is not character alone. It is not style alone. It is far more. A writer’s voice, like the stroke of an artist’s brush, is the thumbprint of his or her whole person, his or her idea, wit, humor, passion, rhythms.

I suggest to you today that to discover voice, whether it is the voice of novel or easy read, of diary or poem is perhaps the real beginning of a writer’s life as a writer. And so here in this Chautauqua place of ideas, in this place of the imagination, I share these ideas with you.

I hope that you will ask yourself, do I have voice? If it is not yet yours, may you thrive on the amazing journey to find it.