Finding Your Voice
I cut every falsity I recognized and used other words and phrases, usually simpler. When my defenses fell and I spoke directly, fewer false notes occurred.
WHEN I WAS AN UNDERGRADUATE at the University of Illinois in the early 1960s, I discovered a language lab that nobody used. In it I could listen to foreign-language conversations or popular poets of the day reading their own words. The recordings were 78-rpm records, large as dinner plates—a common medium of the time along with saucer-sized 45s and reel-to-reel tapes. Did nobody use the lab because half its contents were recordings of poets? In its sheltered precincts, in a deeper isolation induced by heavy 1960s headphones, I listened to Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, Theodore Roethke, Marianne Moore, and the fiction writer Eudora Welty.
Hearing their voices, and having heard Frost and Roethke read in person, I told myself I would like to write like them. I felt the same about Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol and F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Baldwin and William Maxwell: I’d like to write like . I was 19 and later on, older and wiser, perhaps, I sensed I didn’t want to write like any of that crew. I wanted to
