Every writer has his own style, voice or whatever else they call it - this essence of how a writer shows you who he is. There is a broad spectrum of a reader’s reaction to writing. I can like it, enjoy it, understand it, appreciate it, respect it, be amused by it. I’ve read classics where I can tell myself that this is good writing; there’s story, there’s emotion, there’s technique. I appreciate it, but it's of a cold, clinical, dispassionate variety. I’ve found that most writing elicits this reaction. But - and this is rare - there are some pieces of writing that I’ve read and it simply felt like I was stepping into my own mind and heart.
If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It's like eating candy for the soul.
- David Foster Wallace
The same way there are certain people you feel closer to, there are certain writers that you feel more with. You click with certain writing because the writing reflects the writer as a person. Great writing is more than just a collection of words that make logical sense. There is an urgent need to say something, to affect someone, anyone. Great writing is done with love. Maybe this is why there is so much bad writing, not just in this time, but in every generation; much writing is about things that the writer did not care enough about.
I’ve been trying harder to pick up a writer’s voice by slowing down and reading with full attention. I recently finished Mrs. Dalloway. There is a passage of Mrs. Dalloway’s thoughts after she hears the news of a young man’s suicide. This young man was a troubled war veteran and his doctor, Sir William Bradshaw, had prescribed him to be locked up in a sanatorium. The young man had thrown himself out of a window when the doctors were coming for him.
Or there were the poets and thinkers. Suppose he had had that passion, and had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great doctor yet to her obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some indescribable outrage - forcing your soul, that was it - if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed him, like that, with his power, might he not then have said, Life is made intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like that?
- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Mrs. Dalloway wonders if the young man was a sensitive soul. And if he was at the mercy of this dispassionate man, an upstanding and well-respected citizen, having committed no crime of the law. His crime was forcing his will on someone’s soul.
When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
- Anais Nin
Hell is other people.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
- Virginia Woolf
There are certain people in the world who want to control and dominate the lives of others. This passage shows a young man whose soul was being imprisoned by one of these people. And don’t we all know people like this?
I think I wanted to write this because I’ve wanted to write for a while but one of the things that stopped me has been trying to find that ‘voice/style’. I’ve read many different writers and I’ve tried to imitate some of them. But if someone’s writing style is a reflection of who they are as a person, trying to imitate their writing style actually means trying to imitate being them as a person.
You don’t live to be like someone else, you don’t write like someone else.