I USED TO work with an editor who liked to tell me that if he didn't see my name on a story I'd written, he couldn't tell it was I who'd written it. It wasn't clear to me he meant this as a compliment.
I rarely talk to my editors about the nitty-gritty of writing; this matter of a writer's , for instance, which is what my old editor seemed to be talking about. Maybe it seems esoteric to them. Or irrelevant. Though it's a subject—voice—I think about a lot, while writing a novel that may contain 100,000 words and may require 100,000 choices be made so the book both “sounds” the way I want it to and yet extends the limits of that sound
