"One Writer’s Beginnings” by Eudora Welty (post 1): Welty “hears” a “voice,” “certainly not my own,” has “always trusted this voice,” “the voice of the story or the poem itself”

“Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn’t hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn’t my mother’s voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice. I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers—to read as listeners—and with all writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of the desire to write. The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don’t know. By now I don’t know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.

“My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes. I have always trusted this voice” (1. pp. 15-16).

Comment: Welty is neither crazy nor joking when she says that her guiding voice was not her own, but “the voice of the book or poem itself.”

Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison similarly said that her book, Jazz, literally wrote itself. Search “Who Wrote Toni Morrison’s Jazz?”

Of course, I interpret the dissociated consciousness of both Welty and Morrison as dissociative identity or multiple personality, the creative trait, not the mental disorder.

1. Eudora Welty. One Writer’s Beginnings. New York, Scribner, 1983/2020.