The voice of each piece is born on the first page

Image description: Black background with, on the right,  a black and white headshot of a short-haired white woman at a microphone, and, on the left, gold-coloured text reading, “George Saunders proposed on his substack that it’s in the editing process that literary voice emerges — the more a writer edits the more they’ll make choices different to other writers, resulting in a voice and style unique to them. Does this strike you as correct?  In terms of voice, no. Very no. The voice of each piece is born on the first page, spilling out slippery and alive.”

Just up on Auraist, my interview-essay on Spear, prose style—you will be shocked, shocked to hear I have Opinions!—and voice. And using tense to delay or accelerate characterisation, a bit of a rant about the whole misery-lit-is-better-lit fallacy, and more…

Here’s a little taste:

George Saunders proposed on his substack that it’s in the editing process that literary voice emerges — the more a writer edits the more they’ll make choices different to other writers, resulting in a voice and style unique to them. Does this strike you as correct?

In terms of voice, no. Very no. The voice of each piece is born on the first page, spilling out slippery and alive. It grows with the story. By the end the voice stands proud, distinctly itself—unlike any other, even from the same writer. All editing can do is wash and tidy that original voice, teach it to speak a little more clearly or how to play nicely with others. But the essence is unchanged.

Voice rests on style—the sinuous rhythm or blunt word choice, the metaphor systems and narrative grammar, the choice of what is stated and what left unsaid—and here revision, the series of conscious choices made after the fact, can sharpen and shape the style. To the extent that there is a difference between style and voice perhaps it’s that style is conscious, voice more primal.

Nicola Griffith on Auraist