I wrote my first serious fiction story (as opposed to the few trifling class assignments I had done over the years) as a sophomore in college. At that time, I was obsessed with F. Scott Fitzgerald. When looking for new books to read then, I remembered the allure The Great Gatsby had held over me, so I gave his short story collection, Tales of the Jazz Age, a try. His prose seemed to ebb and flow as soothing as the sea, each word fitting neatly into the next like the conjoined pieces of a jigsaw. Not one story, from “Tarquin of Cheapside” to “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, could I put down until I was finished.
New ventures tend to inspire misplaced confidence, so when I set out to write my first story, I felt that I could do exactly what Fitzgerald had done. In retrospect, it wasn’t the worst idea––if his prose grasped my attention like that, then surely, if I wrote that way, my stories would hold readers too. Unfortunately, life rarely works in such a straight-line, Point A-to-Point B scenario, so while Fitzgerald had an indefinable flair to his elegance, I just looked like I was trying too hard. And to a certain extent, I was––it requires considerable work to be the best writer you can be, and I wanted to be the best writer I could be from the first word I put on the page. But I had to learn to be patient. My first couple of stories fell flat, even with my own family, which was a humbling experience (of course they said “this is great, honey”, but you can always tell when your parents are lying). I took a little time off from writing fiction to experiment with language through poetry and focus on reading more widely. By the time I dipped my feet once more in short stories, I had fallen in love with George Saunders’ absurdity, Susanna Clarke’s magical worlds, and Franz Kafka’s unsettling societies. I had been entranced by John Williams’ staccato, Hemingway-esque prose, a far cry from Fitzgerald’s melodic voice. And what I began to realize while writing was that my own voice was beginning to take shape, a somewhat curious combination of all the writers I had read and loved, yet something that was distinctly me.
But uncovering my voice didn’t mean that it was done being developed. Somewhat ironically, the hardest part of writing (for me, at least) is finding the right words to express the image that has just popped into my mind. I’ve heard other writers speak of the disconnect that arises from an initial idea and the resultant story on the page, how what they had originally envisioned fell somewhat flat in the final product. That doesn’t mean that the final product was ‘bad’, per say, but that the language of the story failed to keep up with the grandiosity of their imagination. But what I’m finding more and more as I progress in my own writing is that a writer’s voice is not contained solely in the language (after all, the words we use are almost never the same in the final draft as they were in the first), but in those initial moments of imagination. What images popped into my head as I sat at the desk thinking? I could write a story about a boy looking up at the sky and seeing a giraffe, his favorite animal, in the clouds. But then, inexplicably, a girl walks into this mental image I have concocted, a girl whose long neck recalls a giraffe. Then the story becomes about something else which I hadn’t consciously intended––about love, attachment, projection onto others, etc. Sometimes, our subconscious knows us better than our normal conscious self does.
If I decide to leave the girl in the story, the right words to describe her will come in time. But my voice came through initially in the images of the giraffe-shaped cloud and the long-necked girl. One of the reasons I love George Saunders so much is because he approaches his writing in much the same way––he believes that the subconscious images that arise during the writing process should be listened to and their pertinence should be decided upon later. The prose can be as clunky as I want in that first draft because, in the end, the language serves the story. The style of it, the melodic nature (or lack thereof), will develop almost naturally in accordance with the image.
Thank God I no longer feel inclined to be a pseudo-Fitzgerald. There are worse things to be, sure, but as a writer, one of the worst things I can be is anything but myself. Every story I set out to write is, in some way, a reflection of my interests, my thoughts, my dislikes. Trying to write with someone else’s preoccupations in mind is exhausting, and is no better than being in an ‘80s cover band (no offense to ‘80s cover bands, some of them are pretty great). It’s taken me a while, though, to realize that my voice was always coming through, right from the very beginning––before revisions, before excisions, it begins with just listening.
