Do I have a distinct writer-voice?

It’s easier to notice the quirks and abnormalities of a voice when it’s not your own. Peculiarities of accent and lilt and mannerism, proclivities in tone and subject matter. Other people notice yours first before you notice yours. It’s like the musk in your car’s backseat.

I had a call with a friend last night, and she was of the opinion that I do have a distinct writer-voice! In her consideration, I tend to write pieces that are funny, leaning into absurd, leaning into horror. I never quite crystallised what I’ve been going for, because I’ve never really had an explicit goal of my writing other than Write fifty words a day (that nobody else will read), but now that I consider her analysis, I think it’s very appropriate! I think those emotions, along with general social awkwardness, are the ones I find the most fun to evoke through writing, and thus I naturally drift in those directions.

So here are my thoughts about my fiction so far.

I’m quite partial to the very short story, the kind that takes up a mere one-and-a-half pages of screen real estate. I dash them off in an hour or so. Perhaps this length is imposed by the medium—I can only write so much in one day’s diary entry—but I’ve grown to appreciate it as a feature of the art form. They’re bite-size—each story takes about a minute or two for an average reader to read through. If she finds it doesn’t do anything for her, then I’ve only stolen a minute of her time. I am hesitant to try longer-form writing, partly because it would require much more skill and effort but mostly because it would demand much more of my readers. Big-time novelists can do that—their readers can trust them to deliver enough bang for their buck—but I’m not sure I deserve that trust yet. So flash fiction it is. Low risk, medium-to-high reward.

Brevity prevents me from drawing my characters too finely. Many of literature’s most celebrated characters get reams of character development and backstory, their psyches exquisitely mixed cocktails of trauma and triumph, but I can’t do that in two pages. I wish I could, but flash fiction does not lend itself well to slow-burning ecstasies of character study.

So I neglect character and work from situation instead. What if you found someone else in your cubicle, and she insisted it was hers? What if your crush waved in your direction but he wasn’t waving at you specifically? What if the Weeknd moulted in front of you? I find that the premise of a story is the part I can really bite my teeth into, and everything else—characters, setting, tone—falls into place in service of that premise as I begin in medias res, often at the first line of dialogue where everything goes astray, and race toward my predetermined conclusion.

And so in most cases the entire story happens within a single scene. Perhaps another way to say this is that so far I write scenes and not stories. At best I write scenes which suggest the outline of the wider story, but I find it easier to leave it to the reader to imagine what this wider story might be.

My characters do get some characteristics—preschool teacher, mall janitor, has a fiancé, paranoid—but mostly they have but the barest hints of personality, because they’re ciphers for the reader to slip herself into.

I do get the impression that my characters all sound like versions of me. This has a straightforward explanation. I have an impression of what terrible dialogue sounds like—normal people don’t talk that way!—and my mantra for avoiding terrible dialogue is “Write how you talk.” Thus I find myself inhabiting each of my characters as they speak, and so their speech is mine.

That isn’t to say that they all sound the same, though! I am perfectly capable of shifting registers in my own speech, and I can distinguish my characters in dialogue by assigning different registers to them. So they can sound different, which contributes to characterisation, but they’re still just different aspects of me. I wonder how I can learn, or if I can learn, to write characters that sound completely unlike me.

It strikes me that this is something that a skilful writer ought to be able to do.

One last observation, and a liberating one, though time will tell if it is destructive. I have tried my best not to labour under the delusion that I ought to be a great writer. I have no idea what makes a great writer, what separates wheat from chaff, prose stylists from hacks. I know that if I tried to posture myself as a great writer, it would probably involve me trying to imitate the surface features of other great writers’ work and failing spectacularly to capture the essence of what makes their writing great. It would also raise uncomfortable questions of why are you trying to imitate writers X, Y, and Z instead of A, B, and C? Who decided that people like X, Y, and Z should be considered the exemplars, the pinnacles of writing, the canon?

So I have a different goal. Simply, I try to write pieces that I, as a reader, would enjoy reading. Whether other people enjoy reading them is entirely incidental, but if I am anything like other people, then chances are more likely than not that they will. In effect, your enjoyment of my writing becomes a proxy for your tastes’ similarity to mine.

I hope you enjoy my writing. If so, you will probably enjoy my company as well.