The Other Voice

Preserving the gap between the body and the word

This is what it looks like from where I am sitting when I write.

Yesterday, I spoke on the phone with a writer whose words I’ve read and worked with for several years, yet whose speaking voice I’d never heard until that call.

I couldn’t stop smiling during that conversation, noting in bemusement the vast difference between what I’d imagined his voice to sound like and what it actually sounded like.

The gap between my imagining and the real was quite amusing, and also relieving. I imagine most writers are conscious of the difference in their spoken voice and the written one, and I’ve perhaps worried over this matter a bit more than I should. When talking with friends, family, or really anyone else, I sound nothing like how I write. The Appalachian “hick” of me has never gone away, nor do I want it to; I say both “dude” and “mate” a lot; I’m often given to bursts of enthusiasm which mumble my words; and particularly, I utter animal growls a lot more often than I notice.

In other words, I don’t really “sound” like a writer, if there’s a way writers are supposed to sound. But there isn’t a specific way, and talking with that writer yesterday reminded me of that. In fact, the few writers I’ve met who sound just like their writing are actually quite boring people, typically over-educated and really quite stuffy.

That’s not to say that, at least for the less rigid of us, you can’t hear some of our speaking voices in our writing, or some of our writing in our speaking voices. I think particularly of both

Dougald Hine

and

Caroline Ross

, both of whom I’d been reading before meeting personally. Each writes with a quiet, measured tone, as if inking each word after several mindful breaths. In person that measure is also there, but the exuberance in their souls is much less restrained by the limits of the written word. This comes out well in their recent (and delightful) conversation; without a recording device, even more so.

For anyone who writes for a living, or who at least tries to, the disconnect between our body voice and our other voice can be really perplexing. Even more so when our writing gets edited by others who don’t know — or don’t need to know — what we “actually” sound like. This is a quite difficult reality anyone who’s sold writing to journals encounters, as the end result is often completely stripped of the bodied voice. In fact, those persistent bleedings-over of personality are often seen as excess to be pared away or pruned back, leaving only the bare thrust of meaning for wider consumption.

I’m also an editor, and I’d hardly argue that even the best writers don’t need some help getting their ideas across. Especially in developmental editing for books, a lot of culling tends to be required, pulling out irrelevant asides which, though often interesting, clutter the path of the reader to the author’s vision. Essays, likewise, often need this unpleasant work, though I don’t edit others’ essays as often as I once did.

The problem is that there’s also an external pressure an editor can only resist if he or she is conscious of its presence. The often brutal stripping-down of writing seen in commercial leftist journals such as Jacobin — where each article seems to blend into the next, and the authorship of any particular essay feels as relevant as the manufacturing lot number on a generic food product — is certainly due both to the reductionist drive of capitalism and the flattening legacy of Christianity. Writing becomes a product that must be universally consumable, free from exotic or unpalatable flavors, and easily distributed in recognizably standard packaging.

External pressures do not always stay external, and thus we also find ourselves measuring our words against these universalizing standards. In the process of breaking my years-long addiction to social media, it was the internalized self-limiting framing of writing with which I struggled most. This kind of reduction and flattening are seen best in the formulaic way in which the algorithms train us to write, the repetition of meaningless phrases like “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but;” “Unpopular opinion, but”, “Okay, sooo,” or the meme-derived rephrasing of opinions in the form of conversational comparisons between “literally nobody ever” and the target of the post.

Becoming trained to read and write by computers, we begin also to think like computers. Our writing becomes as processed as the food available in supermarkets and our thinking as standardized and as unremarkable as its flavors. Expression outside this standard sticks in the throat, gurgles in the gut, disrupts our digestion with the hulls, bran, and fibers industrial manufacturing long ago discarded as without value.

We pare ourselves down to fit into the computational shipping containers that distribute our thinking to the world, and wonder why little of us and little of others seems ever to interest us anymore. Worse, nothing seems “revolutionary” or “radical,” because nothing ever can be within such restrictive framings. There’s already never been much room for the oracular, for the bardic, for the truly poetic, and now there’s even less.

After my conversation with that writer yesterday, I’ve come to suspect the gap between the bodied voice and the written voice is probably how we save ourselves.

Perhaps there was a time when writers wrote how they spoke and spoke as they wrote. This was, after all, the directive many guides and courses urged upon writers for a long time, and the aforementioned “highly-educated” writers seemed to have suceeded at it. But as I said, both their writings and their realities are stuffy and insufferable, and I truly hope never to be like them.

Instead, I’ve decided to enjoy the difference in my voices. So much of my life anyway cannot be well translated into writing. The many hours I spend in a gym each week aren’t easily written about, and part of the extreme joy of that training is that I’m my most unwriterly-like when I’m there. There’s no thinking to do when I’m lifting, and the only translation of meaning ever necessary is when I’m trying to understand someone’s German.

That doesn’t mean I won’t try to write about such things. In fact, after a bit of a long struggle to re-orient myself these past few months — leading to a period of scant writing no doubt many of you’ve noticed — I’ve realized I actually need to write more about the bodied life. The everyday is much more profound than we let it be, but also much less translatable into marketable processed “content.”

What I won’t do, though, is worry about how different my voices are. That’s anyway how life together works best, when no one is trying to make the self — one’s own and those of others — fit an expected narrative and mode of expression. Resisting the reductionism of the machines requires being irreducible, impossible to strip down, and intractably inconsistent.

And now, after I’ll have written this sentence, I’ll be off to the gym, where I’ll growl and grunt unintelligibly in a voice that can never be translated, only understood.