Justice B. Hill

At a Poynter Institute seminar on sportswriting a few years ago, a young friend of mind sat in on Michelle Hiskey’s session about “finding voice,” and her theme struck him as something he often frets about with his prose.

Here is his recap of what Hiskey, a sportswriter at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, told participants in The Sports Journalism Summit:

“She compared the voice element to artists like Romare Bearden, who displayed his painting style in ways that American jazz/musical audiences could appreciate. She used him as a jumping off point to show us methods to create voice/style, but also to show how voice/style could be inspired. One thing I’ll definitely remember after that seminar was that Bearden was a mentor to August Wilson, and that two of Wilson’s plays (“Fences” included) were written as tributes to Bearden.”

I agree with Hiskey’s views about voice, although I can’t speak with any specifics on what she actually showed the group in the exercises she gave them during her session. I can say this, however: Voice isn’t something that remains static in a writer’s career.

Years ago – and I do mean, years ago – an editor told me that a writer doesn’t find his voice until he [or she] is in his 30s. For in a writer’s younger years, he’s fiddling with technique, mastering point of view, grasping the nuts-and-bolts of usage and grammar and trying to understand what editors mean when they use terms like “narrative” and “nut graf.”

A strong, resonate voice? C’mon, when does the writer have time to hone that to a razor’s edge?

What I tell young writers is to find out who you are first. You can’t pretend to be Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison or Calvin Trillin, though your voice might have a bit of all of these writers in its tenor. But a literary voice is an individual thing, as unique to each person as his fingerprints.

In On Writing Well, William Zinsser describes voice this way: “My commodity as a writer, whatever I’m writing about, is me. And your commodity is you. Don’t alter our voice to fit your subject. Develop one voice that readers will recognize when they hear it on the page, a voice that’s enjoyable not only in its musical line but in its avoidance of sounds that would cheapen its tone: breeziness and condescension and clichés.”

Zinsser rightly points out that, on some level, writing and voice and style are subjective. It’s often easy for someone to pick out things that lack style – literary or otherwise. Just look at some of the disasters that have made their way into Macy’s windows. I ask myself: What were these folk thinking?

That’s what I say about newspaper stories that don’t ring with a pleasing sound. The shrillness of overwrought prose and of half-baked themes turns me off as much as listening to Soulja Boy and Lil’ Kim or watching American Idol does. I prefer stories that sing like Aretha Franklin or Al Jarreau; I prefer stories that are loud, lyrical and filled with emotion; I prefer stories with personality.

Voice is that personality. Voice is “you,” as writer Susan Orlean puts it.

“Developing a writer’s voice is almost a process of unlearning, one analogous to children’s painting,” she says. “Young children often create fabulous paintings, only to be told after they start school that real houses don’t look that way. At that point, most people lose their ability to be visually creative. Truly great painting retains some element of a child’s emotional authenticity. Great writing does, too.”

Orlean, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, asks two questions, which I’m sure Zinsser would ask as well: Who am I? Why do I write?

Her two questions are part of an honest, self-analysis any writer must go through to find her voice. She must know herself, and she must know why she writes.

The reasons for the latter, frankly, probably don’t much matter. As for the former, I think people are in constant search for a better understanding of themselves. People evolve.

Don’t believe me?

Just go and ask somebody. Go ahead, ask. I doubt anyone will tell you he’s the same person at 49 that he was at 29. He’s wiser, likely more thoughtful and, of course, a dozen or more pounds heavier. Events have reshaped his view of the world and of his friendships; he’s handled his share of life’s ups and downs. To him, time tends to have more value because his hourglass is closer to empty than to full.

He’s different, and everything else in his life is different as well.

If he’s a sportswriter who’s critiquing his body of work, he’ll notice that he stopped trying to mimic sportswriters like Shelby Strothers, Red Smith, Tex Maule, Sally Jenkins and Michael Wilbon a long time ago.

He’s decided: I am who I am – good or bad. He’s matured.

That maturity has armed him with a larger arsenal of literary weapons. He knows more about the principles of grammar and usage. His stockpile of words has grown thicker. He’s more inclined to write to inform than to impress. He sees the world and life with more clarity than he ever could have in his restless yesteryears.

His literary voice, once he uncovers it, reflects all of that, too.

“Soon after I started writing,” Orlean says, “I realized that I was crafty and could come up with gimmicks to make my work look jazzy. As I matured as a writer and gained more confidence, I began losing what I had mistakenly understood to be my style. I returned to something simpler. One watershed moment was the realization that my writing voice had circled back to something natural, intuitive, and instinctive.”

And so should yours.