Somewhere a Voice Is Calling

You want to frame the question in a way that will be daring and presumptuous enough to challenge your personal borders.  If it doesn't challenge you, how can you expect it to challenge anyone else?  That's for starters.  So how about this:  How can you tell when a particular bit of music was composed by Mozart and not by anyone else he happened to admire?

There are simple and more complex answers to that question.  You are more familiar with the former than the latter, although you are growing more comfortable with the concepts and vocabulary of the latter.  Then there is the matter of a collateral question, one that steers the conversation away from the original question and its answer:  Are you comparing yourself to Mozart?  The direct answer to that question is a simple yes, the more nuanced answer contains your growing awareness of why you make such a reach, the man's energy, his sense of humor, his inventiveness.  He is a splendid standard to set, given his stunning, varied output, nearly all 600 +/- of which is being performed over 200 years later.

You can distinguish most of his music from some of his contemporaries because it has such a distinctive voice, his harmonic sense merging with these other aspects such as energy, sense of humor, personal favorites (such as Haydn and J.S. Bach) and what the music of his time sounded like.  It is also instructive to pick a voice from another discipline as well as one from you own, thus you are able to pick out such stylists as Elmore Leonard and, of course, Ernest Hemingway in a blindfold test.  You listen for the voices of others as you listen to your own.  What do you sound like?  What are your rhythms, your cadences, your dialogue, your narrative.  Can you recognize your own voice, distinguishing it from the work of others?  And why do you personally think voice is so important that you have to make this kind of argument about it?

Voice determines the way your stories evolve, the characters you chose to perform in them.  Although somewhat of a stretch, voice would become your way of casting Jack Nicholson, of I want you to hold the chicken between your knees fame, as Lear, Al Pacino as Robin Hood, Sean Connery as Scrooge; similarly Meryl Streep as The Wife of Bath, Helen Hunt as Varya in The Cherry Orchard, Susan Sarandon as Lubya in the same play, the common theme being you would not expect these characters to come equipped with these voices.  What a splendid new dimension an unexpected voice, perhaps your own voice, can give to a work.  Voice is your take on the performance that is your story; it must come through to you before you can trust it to carry the burden you place on its shoulders.  Accordingly, you must ask questions, constantly probing to find out how you feel about the circumstances that have insinuated their way into your psyche and are not attempting to scoot free as a story.  Plot is important only after the fact of the story being told; voice will speak to the reader, assuring the reader of the tone of the story.  Listen to the voices you hear about you during the course of a day's adventure.  Make note of the ones that attract your attention as compared with those that disturb you.  Be able to acknowledge if a person's voice bears the tells, the give-away gesture or facial tic the skilled poker player looks for in the face of his opponents.  Be able to distinguish Mozart from Haydn, Beethoven from Mozart.

Be able to tell your most secret you what voice you would have reading to you, whispering to you, reading your work aloud, and of course reading her work aloud because you would never become involved, would you, with a person whose voice was a rasping nag or an off-pitch squeak; you would only become involved with someone whose every range was one you knew and understood for the emotion behind it; you would know when she was irritated, with the world, with you; you would know when she wanted you to make a decision and when she wanted to make the decision.  You would know because you listen, of course, but you would also know because there was a moment when you heard her speaking when you knew this was a voice you could become involved with.

This is exactly the way you want your voice to sound when you transfer story from your mind and heart to the page; this is why there are writers you admire and those whose voice sound to you like that off-key alto in the coffee shop who calls your attention from what you were reading or writing or whomever you were conversing with, wondering Who is that?


Got to listen for the voice.  Got to have it in your work.

Hold That Thought

For the second time in just under a month, I had occasion to listen to three actors I much admire, being on one way or another interviewed. The first actor was Idris Elba, who did such a layered portrayal of the Baltimore drug underlord, Stringer Bell, in the HBO novel-as-TV-series, The Wire. Not long after, in another setting, I heard Dominic West, who portrayed a Type-A-personality Baltimore cop, Jimmy McNulty, on the same show. Just yesterday, I heard Hugh Laurie, star of the long-running TV series, House, in which he is the eponymous near-genius M.D. with a board certification in infectious disease and street cred for his diagnosis abilities. House also gobbles pain killers by the handful to alleviate chronic pain. His venue is a teaching hospital near Princeton, N.J. I don't know his cv, but I believe he is supposed to be a product of American schools.

This is important to me because all three actors, when not in character, speak with their native English accents and cadences as opposed to their character's native American English accents and cadences. A ham at heart, I am always on the lookout for an accent to grab onto, twist around a finger or two, perhaps even work into a story. The importance of language and its effects had its conscious effect on me back in the day when, watching another splendid actor, Derek Jacobi, portray the Roman Emperor Claudius, I became aware that his guards all had a deliberatly British accent but were said to be from German-speaking backgrounds, an effect that "allowed" or "caused" me to hear their dialogue as the Latin spoken at the time.

Actors have numerous ways of absorbing a regional dialect, including tapes and CDs of speech samples, living among their desired target group, consulting vocal coaches, even consulting books, and the always satisfying all-the-above choices. Actors have also the options of some of the more popular acting school techniques, including but not limited to that of Sanford Meisner, a staunch advocate of "being there," being the character while sending the real self to the principal's office or some other such exile.

Works the same for the writer; being the characters allows them to speak and be heard or, appropriately, not heard. Like an iron-on transfer for a t-shirt, being the character brings another presence to the front, often a presence at some odds from the reality of the actor. Being infused with the reality of the character allows the actor to experience the potential for the character's responses, sponteneity, and yes, even language. True enough, each actor brings his toolkit of the character's sponteneity. (I have often in recent years pondered what I, for instance, could bring to Lear, things that would nevertheless allow me to project a plausible Lear instead of a Shelly at a party doing a parody of Lear.)

At every moment in a story, the writer copes with the multifarious question of what a given character would do in such a situation, then copes with the techniques to bring that character's response to plausible life. Thus has the writer taken on all the parts in a play, making it at once more daunting a task to "be" so many characters. This multifarious quality has the blessing of distracting the writer from being herself or himself, allowing said generic writer to concentrate entirely on "being there," of "being in the moment."

The key to all of this starts with listening to the characters, listening as the particular point of view character of the moment, then responding via the instinctive response of that character, based on what the goals of the story are.

Whether it's the first draft, the tenth, or the last, the antagonist--your antagonist--is thought. The moment you start thinking is the moment your antennae are out searching for signals from other readers, literary agents, editors, the reading public, rlatives who will be horrified by your portrayal of them, various exes in your life who will see your work as an elaborate revenge fantasy.

The What-Do-I-Do-Now? Moment

One of the things I most enjoy about so-called writing classes is the sense of rebellion that overcomes most students during the course of a semester.

Last night was my night for Creative Writing (a distinction I think is nothing less than a hoot) at Antioch University, Santa Barbara. Antioch is a special place, where students seem to be valued and encouraged to experiment, a place where grades are not assigned but rather the students are given a two- or three-paragraph evaluation. This last is a bit of a bother, but not much because, after all, how are you going to give a grade in a Creative Writing course in the first place?

Mid afternoon and an email arrives from one of the eight students, attaching her assignment for the class, then informing me that she's going to a band concert in L.A. An hour or so down the line, the one male enrollee emails his intention of not being present because he had to finish a paper for another class, a serious class by implication, a class where fact and logic trump imagination and emotion. (Okay, you've got me: by definition then, Creative Writing classes are either funny or not serious, or both.)

I am now down to six students, including two who'd decided to take off the previous week. This is quantitatively good because these two will each have two papers to read for the rest of us to comment on, the missed week and the present assignment. This is qualitatively good because having only six persons present seems to open the flood gates of questions, the answers to which have a more dynamic and lasting effect than were I to address the same materials in lecture format.

These six students run the age gamut from about fifty at the higher end to thirty at the lower end. Of these six, two are in the course because, hey, it's three units toward a B.A., and they had an opening for a class on Wednesday nights. All of them are in some career or other, now pursuing--with one exception--a psychology/counseling track. The one exception makes no bones about wanting to do what I do, which is to teach writing and write writing, as opposed to working in the medical field for an orthopedist.

They have all reached a point in the stories they are working on, to fulfill class requirements, where they are all of them stuck at the same dramatic point, which is in effect, wondering how they are going to cope with the problem they have dramatized.

I smile at them and welcome them to the club: Congratulations, you've reached the point reached by brother and sister writers since the beginning of our profession, the point where you don't know what to do to get out of the problem you've gotten into, thus demonstrating something most readers and many nonreaders experience every day.

It's scary, one of them ventures.

I smile again. I've got her. You don't get good stories without writing yourself into the corner, twisting the arm of convention and morality. You've reached the Abu Ghraib of Creative Writing, where the characters have to feel they're stepping off the edge of a cliff where, unlike in King Lear, there is no one miraculously waiting to catch them.

They smile back, a kind of recognition that they understand.

The pay at Antioch is not all that great. The person who hired me was apologetic when she told me how much I'd get for this ten-week quarter. I knew then that if I could bring even one of the students to the point I've just described, the pay wouldn't matter.

After all the FAQs were asked and answered, all six of them smiled that giddy smile of understanding the risks that go beyond the surface gloss of Creative Writing being the title of the class. They saw the place, each within the boundaries of her own story and her own awareness of where the cliff ended and the dark void of uncertainty began. One by one, they leaped.

Sure, they're all at their jobs now, many of them connected to student loans, men, kids, ambitions--life. I'll have four more shots at them before the semester ends, by which time I'll be thoroughly enmeshed with fifteen others about a hundred miles south of here, at another university, and in, ta da! graduate school.

Since receiving an email from Digby Wolfe, now doing a gig at the University of Canberra, wondering if I'd relish the thought of joining him there next summer, I am led down the paths of whimsy where he signs up to do his old gig of being MC on What's My Line (the Australian version). What I tell them when they ask what my daytime job is: I lead people to the edge of a cliff and get them to cheerfully jump.


My Book Talk commentary this week is on the forgotten Golden Oldie, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, by Angus Wilson