Harnessing Distinct Authorial Voices in Memoir and More

If you shadowed a teenager from the start of a school day, chances are you'd hear them speaking differently with a younger sibling, their dad, school  friends, and teachers. Called code switching in spoken language, we all regularly do this to communicate. That's true in writings as well. Someone who's sending off a letter to their HOA board about objecting to a fine likely will use more formal language about their displeasure, for instance, then when texting their partner who has left them waiting at a restaurant.

In fact, a writing professor from Kenyon College that covered the nuances of voice during a recent talk shared that most people speak at least five languages (with other languages counted among them—in his case, the Thai of his immigrant parents). Here's how I've processed what I learned from this fascinating talk by Chicagoan Ira Sukrungruang, who covered the use of fractured voice in memoir as part of this writingcraft.com sponsored workshop.

Our Internal and External Voices

The poet, author of four nonfiction works, and a short story collection shared several voice exercises during the memoir-focused workshop to try out later. One involves writing from the internal voice who doubts our ability as a writer, and another from our supportive internal voice about why we should write. The exercise was a great reminder that people and characters not only have different voices that we slide into depending on the group we're reaching out to in the world, but that the same holds true for our internal voices (our inner dialogues, or inner monologues). Ultimately, he noted, "Conflict in most literature is a conflict of multiple selves."

A key early content step is often considering which of your different identities to use in terms of voice (image from Freepik)

An example of this I've read plays out in the memoir Ordinary Girls. In it, Jacquira Díaz has to decide whether to stay in the street tough persona of the married-young girl whose addicted mother screams about her unworthiness, or to toil with becoming the marine-disciplined adult who believes in herself, including honoring an attraction to other females.

Why Considering Voices Matters

Writers tend to be drawn to voice, Sukrungruang noted, because being accepted for it can give a general sense of acceptance. In other words, our written voice is connected to our ego. In addition, he shared that developing writers often mistakenly think that finding their authorial voice will unlock their writing capabilities.  

While clarifying your main point and other fundamental factors also influence a work's success, establishing a clear, engaging voice (or voices) can help with effectively reaching readers. In Sukrungruang's case, he shared that the voice decision is often made early on in his drafts, if not before a piece gets written.

For shorter pieces, such as that letter to an HOA board, sticking to one of your voices makes total sense (with the general aspects of what constitutes a voice covered in this previous post.) Sukrungruang shared an example of the weighted voice he drew on for an essay about racism after a grand jury failed in 2014 to indict a white policeman for killing Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

For longer works or ones with more nuanced aspects to cover, a single voice (or persona, as he prefers to call them) can be too limiting. "You are not looking for a singular authorial voice because voice is a function [of circumstance]."

A compelling example shared of how context shifts voice came from Sukrungruang's changed writings over time that are about his relationship with his mother. As a young man, the voice of a son he used was more playful and brusque, reflecting the frustrations of interacting with a Thai immigrant assimilating into South Chicago. Now that he's a parent himself, and she's in her 90s and has lost some of her English-speaking capabilities and more, he noted developing a more tempered voice that is tinged with sadness.

How and When Voice Shifts Can Happen

Addressing emotional shifts

The above example highlights how a writer's emotional shifts over decades can bring about a change in voice. In one of the example writings shared during the class, a physical change in circumstance brought on emotion-related voice changes within a single memoir scene.

In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavich has a scene in which she's riding a bike, and her father pushes her down a hill. The voice used starts with her current, formal adult one as she sets up the scene ahead, before switching to short, declarative statements of general terror when she's in her girlhood state at the top of the hill, to terror plus physical sensation-driven, run-on sentences part way down the hill, to a final, sixth voice of a logical girl again after the crash. Only this logical voice breaks into passive voice questions or one-word sentences at times, reflecting her terror-transformed self.

Changing which voice/persona you use at different points in your writings can add to the content's impact, just as changing to a distinct outfit might impact how you and others perceive you (image on Freepik)

As Sukrungruang parsed it out during the talk, a change in voice within paragraphs like this one can involve adding (and subtracting) layers to something like a general feeling of terror. Among the stylistic approaches that can appear as layers within certain voices are the psychological distance from an experience that Lidia applied when introducing the bike riding scene. Or, as noted in this post about Sukrungruan's Ferguson piece, an author's point of view can shift within a work as a part of driving a point home.

Juxtaposing voices for impact

The Chicagoan illustrated this impact of a switch in voices from one section to the next while sharing the ending two sections of Kiese  Laymon's memoir, Heavy, about the impact of racism. The second-to-last, long block of a paragraph is all written as declarative sentences about how Americans will do X, will do Y, and will do Z to eradicate the disconnects between us.  Sukrungruang likened it to a hope-filled balloon of a paragraph. Laymon follows that paragraph with a series of single-sentence paragraphs in a row --- all short, and all about his perception of reality:

"We will not imagine."

"We will not share." And so on.

After the previous voice-of-hope section,  this heavier one is "like the balloon has been popped," Sukrungruang shared.

Some Mechanical Elements of Voice

These examples illustrate how the specifics of voice can manifest not just in the words chosen, but in the length of sentences or paragraphs. Repetition of words (anaphora) can also play a part. In Laymon's case with the hopeful paragraph, the "we will" repetition adds to the confidence conveyed. But in Sukrungruang's Ferguson verdict essay, he starts each sentence with the word "Because," which adds to the heavy voice of the piece (I replaced "tone" with "voice" here because he is ambivalent about using tone as a separate way to describe voice, while noting that it can reflect the attitude that we bring to a particular voice/circumstance/ piece).

The length of sentences and more that make up someone's voice can create a visual "fingerprint" of their style on the page (image by Anindyarfitri on Freepik)

The effect of varying sentence and paragraph styles when a voice shifts can be that readers see visual markers of a voice's unique structures on the page. Sukrungruang recommended practicing viewing works from this vantage point (looking at the shapes formed on the page, as a separate step from reading sentences). That's partly because a writer might use a particular voice, and its associated structure, to call out a section as being more important. For instance, Sukrungruang cited James Baldwin's use of long paragraphs to highlight his main points.

In fragmented, episodic memoir like Lidia's, which lack a traditional chronological order, he shared that a structural guide that helps readers connect chapters might be a single event and concept that the writer is exploring. For instance, the loss of a child who was stillborn serves as the content pillar that Yuknavich revisits regularly in her memoir. In the end then, even when voice varies a lot within a work, other structural elements (including white spaces between changes of voice) can serve to help readers connect the dots of intended meaning.

By Barbra A. Rodriguez

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