You’ll Never Find Your Voice In Writing
This was back in early March. My thesis supervisor called me into his office and let out a big sigh and I knew there was trouble. For context, he had read my first chapter and called me in to discuss what he described as “certain stylistic quirks” with my work.
“It’s good,” he scrolled through a few pages full of annotations on Google Docs, “but it’s way too dense. Reads like an Encyclopedia instead of a thesis.” A few more pages. “Have you tried unbuttoning your writing?”
“I’m not sure if I follow.” I let out a chuckle.
“Well, I want more of Waldun and less of whoever you’re citing”, he took off his reading glasses while drawing circles in the air with his left hand, “try to lead the reader by the hand. Be gentle. And don’t punish them with your erudition.”
Don’t punish your readers with your erudition.
This one remark from my supervisor changed my thoughts about writing, and my supervisor was right. After I had unbuttoned my writing, things started to flow. It seemed to me that a lot of my writing struggles came from trying to sound academic instead of focusing on the substance of my arguments, and this is the key insight that I want to share with you today. Sometimes, the best way to find your voice as a writer is by not trying to find your voice.
We all remember those frustrating days when Mr Hunt in an old sweater would preach the academic style. Those terrible rules: don’t deviate from the TEEL! Stick to the themes! Don’t ever use first-person pronouns! somehow remained with us even when high school had already turned into silly memories in Polaroids. And when we sit down to write something for ourselves, we still feel like Mr Hunt is looking over our shoulders to quality-control the production of yawn-worthy prose. We still don’t feel like what we say can escape the rubric and instead of writing, we’re measuring up to an idea of writing. This is a symptom of overidentifying with style and it doesn’t just happen in an academic writing setting.
In creative writing, for instance, Mr Hunt is the voice of our favourite writers, nudging us into producing replicas of their literary tomes. Here on Substack, Mr Hunt morphs into those unsolicited and agonizing notes on “10 ways to wow your reader with your prose!” And of course, in my field of literary studies, Mr Hunt is the director of an army of freshmen prose with run-on sentences and obscure harvests from a thesaurus. The problem with this overidentification with style and voice is that behind all the dazzling fluff, sometimes there is nothing behind the prose.
I think Benjamin Moser nailed the point in his book: The Upside-Down World where he wrote:
“As a young writer, I was attracted to writers with unmistakable styles before realizing how dangerous such writers can be to someone starting out. The temptation to imitate them is so strong that a young person can reproduce that style without understanding what substance underlies that style, and makes it necessary.”
Essentially, style is a natural by-product of trying to articulate a considered point. A great paradox in writing is that the more you know about something, the more difficult it’ll be to write about that thing in plain language. Writer’s blocks become editor’s blocks because we’ll realize that sanding concepts down to clear arguments takes more work than leaving them in obscurity.
This isn’t to say writing should always be economic and wide-awake. Sometimes what one tries to translate into words is so beyond the reach of everyday language that the prose can’t help but sound obscure. Sometimes a concept is so complex that a philosopher can’t help but use language that makes us want to run our heads against the wall. And especially in creative writing, sometimes a description of a simple sensation could be incredibly difficult to render in words. Take this beautiful line in Ulysses where Joyce describes the sensation of jealousy:
“A warm shock of air heat of mustard hanched on Mr Bloom's heart”
It’s painfully accurate, but if I were to show this to Mr Hunt, he’d surely tell me to pack up my stuff and retake sophomore English. And if anyone, under Joyce’s spell, were to replicate his style just to wow people, it would lose its vitality and degenerate into what E. B. White called the works of “uninspired scribblers who would confuse spontaneity with genius” who had committed “the unpardonable sin [of having] nothing to say”.
White continued in The Elements of Style:
“To achieve style, begin by affecting none – that is, place yourself in the background… As you become proficient in the use of language, your style will emerge, because you yourself will emerge, and when this happens you will find if increasingly easy to break through the barriers that separate you from other minds, other hearts – which is, of course, the purpose of writing.”
And upon reflection, this is what my supervisor meant when he said: unbutton your writing and don’t punish your readers with your erudition. It meant letting go of what writing is supposed to be in favour of articulating a clear idea or message. And instead of flaunting our writing style, we should all treat it as a sweet reward after we’ve served value to our readers.
