The phrase “voice in writing” simply refers to a writer’s distinctive style—to his or her unique way of using vocabulary, imagery, tone, and rhythms. Voice (important in all writing) is especially important in memoir writing—a form in which the writer conveys deeply personal experiences and reflections.

Generally speaking, the voice in autobiographic writing is a combination of your younger self as protagonist (in the past)and your older self as narrator (in the present).

This dramatic engagement between “self now” and “self then” sustains reader interest, even when a work lacks the mechanics of a forward-driving plot.

Some writers seem to possess a natural and innate writing voice—a style-by-birthright. They need only refine it. Others have a road-to-Damascus experience, when suddenly the words just sound right.

The shift from early conformity to mature liberation seems especially common among those who grew up on society’s margins. The African-American writer, John Edgar Wideman, notes that in his early novels he tried to legitimize black characters and settings by “infusing echoes of T. S. Eliot, Henry James, William Faulkner, and English and Continental masters.” In Wideman's words:

As I grew and learned more about writing, I found, or rediscovered I guess, that. . .what the anonymous slave composers and the people who spoke in the slave narratives did, what they were doing was drawing from a realm of experience, a common human inheritance. . . .As a writer I didn’t need to go by way of the European tradition to get to what really counted, the common, shared, universal core. I could take a direct route and get back to the essential mother lode of pain, love, grief, wonder, the basic human emotions that are the stuff of literature. I could get back to that mother lode through my very own mother’s voice.

The American novelist, Saul Bellow, had published two “well-made novels” in the 1940s, when he sensed that something was amiss. He later said:

I could not, with such an instrument as I had developed in the first two books, express a variety of things I knew intimately. Those books, though useful, did not give me a form in which I felt comfortable. A writer should be able to express himself easily, naturally, copiously, in a form that frees his mind, his sensibilities. Why should he hobble himself with formalities? With a borrowed sensibility? With the desire to be ‘correct’? Why should I force myself to write like an Englishman or a contributor to the New Yorker? I soon saw that it was simply not in me to be a mandarin.

The result was the Adventures of Augie March, with its famous first sentence:

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and I go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

The main lesson is this. We are each authorities on our own worlds, and we convey that world through the details we share. Effective memoirists use similes and metaphors that lie within their time and place, no matter how exotic.

Listen to Maya Angelou’s voice in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Note the details and imagery:

On Sunday mornings Momma served a breakfast that was geared to hold us quiet from 9:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. She fried thick pink slabs of home-cured ham and poured grease over sliced red tomatoes. Eggs over easy, fried potatoes and onions, yellow hominy and a crisp perch fried so hard we would pop them in our mouths and chew bones, fins and all. Her cathead biscuits were at least three inches in diameter and two inches thick. The trick to eating catheads was to get the butter on them before they got cold—then they were delicious. When, unluckily, they were allowed to get cool, they tended to a gooeyness, not unlike a wad of tired gum.

Maya’s images are poetic, but she never takes the reader out of her range of experience. Her voice contains the music of her roots. It is a black, female, literate, inclusive voice—authentic to the core.

Written language is more concise and precise than spoken language, but in autobiographic writing one should strive for the diction (word choice) that one uses in ordinary daily speech. Flowery and abstract words, excessive use of modifiers, and overly long sentences will bog the reader down and smother the story. Unnatural, academic, and consciously literary language will distance and frustrate the reader.

In autobiographic writing, the spoken language of one’s time and place allows a reader to experience one’s way of life. The writer must strive for clarity, but memoir writing also allows for “flavor.”

So, find your voice—even though it may take time. Stay in your world. Listen to yourself. Create the similes and metaphors from images and experiences that you know and understand. Seek out the details. Write from your specific history and cultural experience. Stay true to your voice. Others will learn much about you from your voice, and you will learn much about yourself.

Orlo J. Otteson
651-278-4824
otteson@aol.com