“Writer’s Voice” is what Multiple Personality is called in Creative Writing Programs

Margaret Atwood (27 Oct 2013 post) isn’t the only writer who has said that novelists have multiple personality. In The Love of the Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald said:

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”

“Voice” is a literary euphemism for multiple personality

When Margaret Atwood and F. Scott Fitzgerald say that novelists have multiple personality, most writers and professors of literature agree. However, they may not realize that they agree, because they are used to thinking about it other terms. They don’t call it multiple personality. They call it “the writer’s voice” or, simply, “voice.”

Voice, like multiple personality, has roots in childhood

“Voice is nothing fancy. It’s simply the way you, the writer, project yourself artistically” (1, p. xv). It’s everything that makes your writing uniquely you. “Our own experience of voice began, as it does for many writers, with the exuberant, natural voice we had as children” (1, p. xv). “All children are natural storytellers and natural improvisors” (1, p. 29). Coincidentally, as noted in this blog, multiple personality starts in childhood.

“Voice” means hearing voices

“As you begin to explore voice, you will undoubtedly begin to hear many voices speaking inside you. Some voices arise as if disembodied, offering mysterious sentences or phrases…Others will be attached to characters, who begin to give hints about who they are…Some will seem to start a story…One of the most startling things about your inner voice may be its diversity. It’s not one voice, but many. You’ve got a lot of company: voices that seem to come from nowhere, others that make return visits, some that have been chattering away for as long as you can remember” (1, p. 38).

The voices are autonomous and have secrets

The kinds of voices include character voices, narrator voices, and editing voices. Their essential feature is their autonomy. For example, “Characters think to themselves, dream, have memories; they have an autonomous life that you, the writer, are not part of. In crucial ways, they live beyond you” (1, p. 117).

To learn the voices’ secrets, interview them

Indeed, characters have their own secret life, which the writer can only find out about by interviewing them. “Take a character whose voice you’ve heard speaking inside you, whom you want to get to know…When you (and she) feel ready, start the interview” (1, p. 118).

As E. L. Doctorow said in a 1988 published interview, “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” Of course, he didn’t mean schizophrenia, but rather multiple personality.

1. Thaisa Frank, Dorothy Wall. Finding Your Writer’s Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1994.