The Narrative Voice in Life Writing
I have been writing for more than thirty years, more than half my life. Roughly fifteen years ago I became aware of the concept of “the voice” in my writing, after two objective readers a year or so apart complimented not just my writing but also my voice. Being told “you have an excellent voice in your writing” after submitting three or four prose poems (all of which were nevertheless rejected for not fitting the journal’s vision) stunned me because I had never heard anything like that before and haven’t since. But in the last several years I have understood this in relation to other authors’ writing, particularly fiction, having worked on some of the best fiction I have ever read as a freelance editor, and if you knew me personally, you’d understand what a compliment that is.
The narrative voice of any text is paramount; I believe it is the key to the piece’s success. The purpose of literature is to educate or entertain readers, bring them knowledge or escape (and the pleasure of), even attempt to accomplish both goals simultaneously. How this is achieved is like putting together a puzzle with a couple hundred pieces, if you will. As any writer and discerning reader knows, many elements go into developing and writing a story or work of nonfiction. For me, the voice of a literary text is the border of the puzzle that moves smoothly round the sides and edges; the narrator’s voice (or author’s) is the frame, it contains and holds together the portrait, the landscape, the completed picture of the fiction or nonfiction. The narrative voice is at once about containment and flow, movement forward without faltering and missing a step in the dance to the music of Time. The form, without being inflexible, must give rise to the forward movement of the narrative, leading to and closing off the flow when the storyline calls for, when the plot has come to its end, the denouement reached, or when the history of the idea or event, or of one’s own life in memoir or autobiography, has been brought to its inevitable curtain fall.
When it comes to the literary voice, I became fascinated by it in fiction first, many years back after having read The Hours by Michael Cunningham and A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood. But for about two years now I have become intrigued by it in the context of memoir and personal narrative, and for a few reasons. First, I recently finished working with an older man who wishes to use his yearlong journal entries from 1977 when he traveled abroad to Europe, the Middle East, and India to pen a memoir about his experience. Second, since entering middle age, I am recognizing more and more that the evolution of the self through the stages of life can only be met by a creative writer through shifts and changes in genre and voice.
As we get older our experiences and the knowledge we glean from them and other avenues alters who we are. We grow and evolve, become other selves, shedding the many others that have come before, and letting go is the deepest, hardest part of this process, a process that we are often not truly conscious of. It is the depth of the awareness of the evolving self amid all the flux in the world that I believe gives a knowing narrative voice the power to not only evoke this truth but also tell the story with a control that is masterfully disguised by its flow. Finally, alongside having moved into middle age, I know that with the passing of my mother, the death of my relationship with the love of my life, and the end of my almost two-decade-long friendship with my best friend all during 2020, it is time I relinquish (at least for now) the poet’s voice that has reigned more or less supreme for over twenty-five years and turn the page to memoir and personal narrative. The point being, it is only in directly telling my story, finding origins and missing pieces, that I can come to terms with truths about myself and others, learn to accept, learn to let go. All writing is, in a manner of speaking, a form of therapy, sometimes so much more instructive and transformative than the real thing. Nobody knows you better than you know yourself, clichéd as it sounds. There is, I believe, no greater truth than that, especially when you go in search of yourself willingly, openly, trusting you will find the answers you seek. The traumas I experienced during the first several months of the pandemic must be dealt with appropriately, before their consequences get any worse than they already have.
Writing, no matter the genre, takes time, effort, and commitment, especially writing about yourself, facing the demons and the illusions, the dreams never attained, and the loves lost or that never came to be, or came to be a nightmare rather than a true romance. In life writing, because you are telling your story, and you are more than likely an average, ordinary person who may have endured extraordinary experiences and survived them, your voice is pivotal, no matter what you’ve been through, to telling the tale of the important events and experiences of your life. Life writing asserts your presence in the universe, it is a way to be seen and heard among the din of all the other countless voices trying to break through the surface of the constantly meandering river of Time. Life writing is, in a strange way, telling on yourself to yourself, through the act of self-discovery, and that’s the hardest thing, because naturally we don’t always want to hear or confront the underlying truths, some of which, about ourselves and others, may not be pretty, but rather, unfortunately, downright ugly and heartbreaking.
The narrative voice, in all writing of course, but especially in life writing, is like a needle, and the theme you will be illuminating through the story you tell is the thread that pulls together the minute particulars and details of the events and relationships you have experienced over time and makes their meaning, value, and purpose clear, leading to a deeper understanding (a portrait) of who you are. So often, until we look at them closely, the events, encounters, and people in our lives are a blur of dots (think pointillism) and puzzle pieces that don’t seem to fit or make sense (as to why they happened or were a part of our lives) until we gaze back over the abyss of time past, across the decades that have unwound, unspooled, and then can we only begin to weave the tapestry of the life we’ve lived, drawing meaning and an enlightened vision of ourselves from our journey, from the paths we took and the decisions we made. For me, there is no wonder as to why for almost twenty years my strongest belief, my mantra above all others that I espouse, is that life is a dance to the music of Time. And that dance is always beautiful, always in harmony with the cosmos, with the breath and pulse of Life, no matter how many times we may misstep (creating seeming discord) or lose our way (and feel ourselves drowning or succumbing to the chaos of the world or of our own life), for the way, in truth, is never lost, but only always ever found as having been there all along after it has been trodden.
Life writing, in the end, is a means of perspective, a mode of seeing our life (even the world) from a vantage point that we cannot have until we are outside of and past the situations and the moments that have not actually “changed” our lives but created them, made them the beautiful mosaics they truly are.