Find Voice in Attention

In January 1909 The Independent printed Sui Sin Far’s “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian.” Sui Sin Far was the pen name of Edith Maude Eaton, daughter of an English father and a Chinese mother, and the essay is a chain of scenes, almost all in the present tense. At about four she walks ahead of her nurse in an English lane, hears the nurse tell another woman that her mother is Chinese, and watches the woman turn and scan her “curiously from head to foot.” At six, at a children’s party, a white-haired old man adjusts his eyeglasses and pronounces her a “Very interesting little creature!” Then: “I had been called from play for the purpose of inspection. I do not return to it.”

Scene after scene records what is said about her within her hearing, and the looking that goes with it. People scan, survey, and “gaze upon” her family as upon “strange animals in a menagerie.” The pattern also shows in how things are weighed. Her father, who “deems it wisest to be blind and deaf to many things,” gets one dry clause. At a dinner table where her employer, the town clerk and her landlady discuss whether the Chinese are human, she lets their words stand uncommented and passes judgment on herself: “A miserable, cowardly feeling keeps me silent.” It shows, too, in what is left out. The scene on the West Indian island ends on the naval officer’s last offensive line, and she adds nothing. The tone varies, comic over an engagement ring and grave over a child’s “Why?”, while the narrator throughout notices being noticed and leaves the verdict to the reader.

It is tempting to treat voice as tone, a manner chosen in advance and laid over content: wry, lyrical, confiding, brisk. A writer who sets out to sound like themselves can produce mannerism, because “themselves” on the page is already an arrangement, not an object to be found. The opposite habit flattens the voice on purpose, in the name of seeming professional, and leaves prose from which no consciousness can be inferred.

On our account, a reader infers a mind from the pattern of what a text selects, and voice is the name for that inference, drawn from what is noticed, how it is weighed, how the sentences move, and what is left out. So every form has a voice. An essay has one, and so does a research report, whose restraint is itself a stance.

Joan Didion’s “Why I Write” (1976) describes voice from the inside. She says she writes to find out what she is thinking, what she is looking at and what it means, and that each of her novels began with pictures in her mind, as Practice 14 describes. She also says that changing the structure of a sentence alters its meaning as definitely as moving a camera alters what is photographed, and that the picture dictates whether a sentence is long or short, ends hard or falls away. Her own grammar, she says, is something she plays by ear, which she offers as a report of her own habits.

We would expect readers to trust consistency of attention. If a narrator notices what a surveyor would notice and then, for no reason, what a mourner would notice, the reader loses the instrument they were reading by.

The habits that make a voice may be the ones you stop noticing in your own pages, so a reader may hear yours before you do. You may learn more by borrowing another writer’s manner, or by writing as a narrator who notices differently than you do (Practice 39). Some Works want little voice at all, such as a manual or a report in house style, where the writer’s attention should stay out of the reader’s way.

Some tools now offer to rewrite a paragraph “in your voice” or to smooth it. Treat a suggestion from one as you would a suggestion from an editor or a friend, as material for your judgment, and if you accept changes, accept them sentence by sentence and be able to say why. Smoothing may remove the habits that made a page recognizable, and only you can say whether a given habit is a flaw or the voice.

Practice. Describe the same room twice, about a hundred and fifty words each, through two different systems of attention. Choose a room you know well. In the first version, someone is pricing the contents for a sale. In the second, someone is deciding whether it is safe to leave a small child there. Ban emotion words and any statement of what the observer wants; the system has to show in what is selected and how the sentences move. Then list the nouns in each version and count how many they share. Ask which version resembles your habitual attention, and what in your own pages looks like neither. Thirty minutes.