On Voice
“Call me Ishmael.” This simple, three-word sentence introduces of one of the most distinctive voices in fiction: Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick. But what do we mean when we use the word “voice” in this context? Voice is not just what a speaker sounds like. In fact, many of the voices we know and love are constructs—interpretations of what we think a speaker sounds like as we read words on a page and animate them in our mind. We also form a sense of artist’s voices from even less explicit sources: listening to a jazz saxophone player solo, immersing ourselves in an abstract painting, or watching an ensemble of dancers perform a choreographer’s score.
In his book The Art of Voice, the poet Tony Hoagland writes:
What do we want from a contemporary poetic voice? One good answer to that question is that we want to feel that we are encountering a speaker “in person,” a speaker who presents a convincingly complex version of the world and of human nature.
The voices that compel us to pay attention are distinctive, living presences who (with varying degrees of honesty) reveal how they grapple with their personal history, process the world around them, struggle to connect with others, and express their feelings. Hoagland adds:
A poem strong in the dimension of voice is an animate thing of shifting balances, tones, and temperature, by turns intimate, confiding, vulgar, distant, or cunning—but, above all, alive.
We have no trouble identifying a distinctive voice, but it can be difficult to know whose voice we’re hearing. Is it the voice of the artist (their “authentic” self), or one of many voices the artist has created to express their various personas, one no more “authentic” than another? Some argue that we are born with an intrinsic voice—that the artist’s struggle is about discovering their voice. Others argue artists create their voice (or voices):
And how many times have you read in some review or other that a writer has finally found his “voice”? Of course he has done no such thing. Instead, he has found a way of writing words down in a manner that creates the illusion of voice.
—Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead
Whether you believe finding your artistic voice is a process of discovery or creation, finding your artistic voice is always a journey. It’s an ongoing exercise in listening—in amplifying what resonates most for you (the signal) and dialing down the volume of things that don’t resonate (the noise).
The Five Basic Ingredients of Voice
A distinctive artistic voice is a mixture of five basic ingredients. The amount of each ingredient that goes into the mix, and the order in which the ingredients are added is up to the artist, but each of these ingredients adds to the character (flavor) of an artist’s voice.
The five ingredients are:
Experience: What you’ve encountered, lived through, participated in, and been affected by. Your life experiences are one of the primary ways that you determine for yourself what’s “true.”
Sensibility: What you pay attention to and respond to in the world around you. What vibrates for you—physically and emotionally. In short, the details you notice and share.
Perspective: How you see the world. The beliefs and concepts you hold that help you understand the interrelationships between your experiences, sensations, ideas, and feelings.
Personality: Your distinctive traits and characteristics, including how you express yourself in the world. Personality is our most easily grasped trait.
Skill: Your current level of ability in your chosen medium of creative expression. As you master your medium, your ability to express a wider range of emotions and ideas grows.
Artists often talk about the moment they “discovered” their voice: the moment always occurs as they are working, fiddling with mix. To create the presence that Hoagland describes you must investigate each of the five traits to find the ingredients that resonate for you. Which of your experiences drives your belief in what’s true? What are the sensory details that stimulate your imagination? Which ideas shape your thinking and outlook? Which aspects of your personality do you want to include in your artistic voice? What additional skills will you need to develop to support your artistic voice? These are just a few of the questions you’ll need to explore as you compose your voice.
Whether you’re trying to discover your authentic self, or consciously creating the “I who is not ‘I’,” the work is the way forward. The work is the only way to test the authenticity of the voice itself. Hoagland again:
A successful poem is voiced into a living and compelling presence. This convincing representation of a speaker may be created by force, or intellectual subtlety, or companionability, or even by eccentricity, but it must initiate a bond of trust that incites further listening. That presence in voice is not always “intimate” in a warm, “best friend” kind of way, but the reader must be impressed that the speaker is a complex, interesting individual who is intriguingly committed to what she is saying, and how she is saying it.
Consistency
When we discover an authentic voice, we are pulled into a dream. What first pulls us in is often an interesting sensibility, perspective, and/or personality. But what keeps us engaged with an individual work of art or an artist’s voice is consistency.
A believable voice is consistent—like a good friend, we develop a set of expectations around what our time in the company of an artist’s voice will be like. When that voice runs counter to our expectations, we say that the work is “out of character.” The inconsistencies become a kind of noise and the voice becomes incoherent. The dream state crumbles, and we can no longer hold back the critical voices who then tear apart the fabric of credibility the artist previously wove.
The voice that an artist develops is rooted in their unique expression of the five basic characteristics outline above. We expect that an artist’s voice will evolve and grow, but we don’t expect the artist to uproot their voice.
In her book Find Your Artistic Voice, the artist, illustrator, and author Lisa Congdon says “The consistency in your work is the ultimate expression of your voice.” She adds:
When you find that your work begins to use consistent media and subject matters and has a consistent style over time, this is evidence that your voice is emerging. Does consistency mean you’ll never experiment or try new things? Of course not! And you wouldn’t want to stop experimenting either. Constantly pushing your work to new places is what will keep your voice evolving and keep your work satisfying and engaging for you and the people who follow your work.
Creating your artistic voice isn’t a one and done thing. It’s an ongoing process. We expect and need artistic voices to evolve—those that don’t bore us and eventually become irrelevant. But we also believe that the trust we’ve placed in the voices we love entitles us to participate in the journey.
“Call Me Ishmael”
Ishmael introduces himself with a simple, three-word declarative sentence that grabs our ear. Take a moment to read the full first paragraph.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
It takes just 201 words for Melville to introduce us to Ishmael, grab our attention, and pull us into his epic story. Ishmael’s voice must carry us through Melville’s massive novel—and it does. This short paragraph does everything we need it to engage us and earn our trust. We get a quick introduction to Ishmael’s backstory, followed by a taste of his sensibility, perspective, and personality. We experience the ebb and flow of his thinking and learn about his philosophical nature. And he’s introduced as a kind of everyman as he says, “If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings toward the ocean with me.” With that, we are onboard for the journey.
Melville’s mastery of his craft is miraculous, and so is our capacity to transform his words into a living voice—every bit as real as the voices of the people we talk to every day. Developing your artistic voice takes hard work and time, but the payoff is huge. In the right hands, a voice can work miracles.