By Alyssa Rosenberg Terry Teachout, the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal, had a beautiful piece in the August 2 issue of the paper about the way authors' voices sound, and what it says about the "voice" in their writing. As Ben Yagoda points out in his marvelous book The Sound on the Page, understanding where voice comes from, and developing a voice in your writing is a maddeningly elusive project. It's relatively easy to discern who an author's influences are, what eras they want to evoke, whether they want to sound educated, or authentic, or ethnic, or whatever. But it's much, much more difficult to determine what a writer's work says about who they are, and what part of them remains indelibly embedded in their work. There's no test yet for writing's DNA. Teachout says of Raymond Chandler, who he describes as sounding rather like Elmer Fudd: "Hearing Raymond Chandler's mousy voice left me certain that he created the stalwart yet sensitive Marlowe as an act of wish fulfillment, allowing him to "do" on paper what he would never have dared do in real life." I don't listen to books on tape because I find the pace too slow, but Teachout makes a convincing case that if we could listen to writers read their own works, it could be illuminating at best, or at minimum, enjoyable. Sadly, the lack of a market has dissuaded publishing companies from getting recordings it already owns out there. There are a lot of writers out there whose voices I don't care about too much, either because they're forced by a convention like newspaper style to sublimate a lot of whatever voice they might otherwise include, or because they're workmanlike writers whose main value is the information they convey. But having heard folks like Anne Fadiman, or Ian Frazier, or Adrian Nicole LeBlanc speak, I hear those echoes again whenever I read their writing, and I know a little bit more about where the words they choose originate.
