Across The Waters
An Interview with Jill Hackett
SBWC: The idea of voice in writing is a slippery one. How
do you define voice?
JH: Indeed ‘voice in writing’ is
a slippery term. Its slipperiness is
what inspired my research and my book—and the second chapter, Describing Voice,
wrestles with definition. The most
useful definition I unearthed was from Donald Graves and Virginia Stuart—a kind
of foresenic authorial DNA: “Voice is the imprint of the person on the piece. It is the way in which
a writer
chooses words, the way in which a writer orders things towards meaning. As writers compose,
they
leave their fingerprints all over their work.”
I began each interview
asking the women authors how they defined their own writing voice. YA author Yoko Kawashima Watkins’ response
was one of the most memorable: “In simplicity. A shout from the heart.
That’s all, nothing more. Tell the truth, and the feelings.”
SBWC: You’ve said that as a technical writer you were
trained to write “in other people’s voice, or in no voice at all.” Can you talk
about the process of discovering your own writing voice?
JH: As a technical writer, I was
trained to write mute. Erase the person
(and their fingerprints) from the information—e.g., just hand the reader the
correct wrench and tell them how to use it.
Ironically, my 20 years as a technical writer strengthened the craft of
writing—making me all the hungrier for the art of writing. It taught me to write to deadline, pound out
a first draft, revise, incorporate edits, assess criticism, and integrate
necessary unforeseeable major changes in almost finished manuscripts. Software tools became involuntary muscles
that no longer got in the way of writing. Technical writing thoroughly taught
me the skill that author James Michener attributed his success to: “I can put the seat of my pants to the seat
of the chair for 8 hours a day, every day.”
As I apprenticed myself to
published women writers through interviews, I started to discover the variety
of ways that creative work can begin.
Some authors begin with a title.
Some begin with setting. Some
create a palette of words, other writers stream words. Some have a character lead them into the
story. John Irving always knows he is
beginning a new novel when he has written the complete last sentence of the
book. He writes the last sentence first,
then plots the whole novel, then writes from the beginning to the end, and
never changes the last sentence. My own
strongest writing begins kinesthetically—it is a physical feeling I get when I
know a piece is ready to be written.
SBWC: In your wonderful book, I Gotta Crow: Women, Voice, and Writing, you identify “three voice
centers,” the voice from our head, the voice from our heart, and the voice from
our bodies. Can you talk a little about the value of this distinction for you,
and the way these centers might work with or against each other? Do our internal voices need to harmonize to
do our best work?
JH: The three voice centers are: the voice from our head (the rational
voice: ideas strike us and set off thoughts and plans), the voice from our hearts (the
emotive voice: feelings,
memories, longings, and passions), and our body voice (language of the gut, hunches, intuition)
.
From rational to emotive, there is a range. No writing is purely from one polarity. Technical
writers deal with hunches
and intuition of how to order their pieces,
even while they may strive
to erase personality. Poets use the logical mathematics intelligence of the rational mind
to manage meter
and form. Each of us has our primary,
favored voice center, but any of the voice centers can lead off effective communication.
Each center has its own
purpose.
For me,
the rational / head voice is useful for plotting, editing, and structure. Working from the heart works for me when
working with dialog and character development.
When my writing is flowing best, I am writing from my gut. Natalie Goldberg discusses that when she
finds herself getting stuck when writing, she drops into her belly.
SBWC: In The Sound on
the Page, Ben Yagoda writes, “…it is frequently the case that writers
entertain, move, and inspire us less with what they say that by how they say
it.”
What role does style play in the idea of voice? Is crafted writing
authentic writing? Is voice learned or
innate or both?
JH: I would suggest that
Yagoda’s “by how they say it” may not be just style—but perhaps something more
than words. There is information that
travels on top of words, which the writer’s voice transmits. Stephen King discusses this in his book On Writing: a memoir of the craft, where
he suggests that writing is a telepathic activity. The writer creates a scene in their own head
which they put on paper and expect their reader to receive months or years
later.
Have you ever noticed, when
listening to non-fiction books on tape, that when the author reads their own
book, it is much easier to grasp the concepts than it is when a professional
voice over artist reads it? King’s
writing book is a good example. I read
the book, and then listened to the audio version, and absorbed much more
information from the audio than the written book. Information traveling on top of the words.
Similarly, in written
format, “the way in which a writer chooses words, the way in which a writer orders things towards meaning” is more than style, and creates impact,
influencing meaning.
SBWC: Voice in fiction is tied to the idea of persona. Is
the idea of voice the same for the novelist, short story writer, or poet as it
is for the technical writer or the memoirist?
JH: Writing voice
“echoes” within the reader. Something resounds. Strike
a tuning fork and move it closer to, but not touching, a second matching
tuning fork. The second fork will begin vibrating, picking up the sound waves from
the first
tuning fork. A strong writing
voice, likewise, moves something
within us. This
resonance, I believe, occurs in novels, short stories, memoir, and poems.
In
good technical writing, the issue is not as much about resonance and voice as
it is about clarity and simplicity. I
once had worked extremely hard to present a complex control panel in an
understandable usable way. My editor
commented to our manager that this was so simple, anyone could have written
it. To this, our manager replied that it
was an excellent piece of technical writing precisely because something so complex
was made simple. I had succeeded in
erasing the person from the piece and writing mute—and handed them the
wrench.
SBWC: In I Gotta Crow,
you explore the ways gender impacts voice.
How do writers historically marginalized or silenced find their
authentic voice?
JH: Gloria Steinem said that
“especially for any group that has been marginalized, you need a time of being
central.” It is important to find a
community that listens and allows the marginalized voices to develop more
fully. Hedgebrook.org on Whidbey
Island, Washington state, was founded to support women writers—particularly
women advocating change. Amy Wheeler, the
executive director of Hedgebrook, said, “when you understand that storytellers
shape our culture, they shape who we are as individuals, as a people, then, who
gets to be the story teller is a really pivotal question.”
The Harvard Project on
Women’s Psychology
and Girl’s Development confirms this
approach. In a longitudinal study of
girls during their ages of 7 though 13, the study found that girls who had an
older female relative, who was willing to stand outside the dominant culture,
and listen to the girl—these young girls were able to hold on to their own
knowing, and their own voice. The
results of this study were published in Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls,
Race and Relationship, by
Jill McLean Taylor, Carol
Gilligan, and Amy M. Sullivan.
SBWC: I’m very much interested in the idea of elision in
writing; that is, what we leave out of our stories or essay or poems can convey
as much as what we put in. What role does silence play in voice?
JH: Silence is an important language. Not speaking
can be an intensely relational act, as is the struggle to find one’s true voice. Our voice is shaped
by what we do—and do not—voice, and by when we choose to speak and when we choose silence.
The author chooses
what is foreground, what is background.
Repression is a different
kind of silence,
and also shapes voice.
SBWC: We grow as people and as writers. How do you
reconcile the idea of an authentic voice with changes in our abilities, our
interests, and ourselves?
JH: I have wrestled with the myth that, to write and let you read it, my thinking
has to be fully mature,
complete, finished—and that five years
from now, I’d agree 100% with what I wrote. There is something
daunting about the permanence of the written word. A phone call fades, even e-mail is more likely to be deleted than not. But a written
note can be taken out and read over and over again, over time. And it continues to speak from the person who wrote it—who
I might not be in five years.
Annie G. Rogers, when
talking about writing her memoir book, A Shining
Affliction: Tales of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy, said that
one of the most difficult
tasks in the writing was
to go back to the person
she was when she was experiencing this, and write from that voice.
That’s one thing, memoirs.
Somehow, change in that genre is expected.
But, for me anyway, I have had to work at giving myself permission to grow in my writing.
To begin with a piece that I know I will be able to improve on someday, but let it be read, let it go. I struggle with this concept in writing this book. Roni Natov, a professor at Union Institute & University, told me, “Just do your best writing.
It will change. You are still learning
and will always be.” That helped.
Then I thought
about the other arts—specifically, looking at Georgia
O’Keeffe’s work. Her early pieces, in black and white, are very clearly early efforts
with seeds of her later brilliance. Put an early sketch next to a wondrous oil from the end of her career and step back. I can only have admiration for where she began, and where she concluded.
So, I foster my courage and court inspiration
by tucking an early O’Keeffe near my keyboard. And give myself permission to grow.
SBWC: What most surprised you about these discussions? What did you find most helpful to your own
work?
JH: I was surprised by the
generosity of story, and willingness to support and share experiences. Writing can be such a solitary act, and yet,
through these interviews I felt deeply accompanied . The many different ways that writers began
writing was fascinating to me as well as their writing habits and disciplines.
SBWC: If voice is something that is partly learned, how do
beginning writers develop voice? What role does reading play?
JH: When a visual artist first
learns drawing, they often start by studying the masters. A pianist will begin with learning scales
(craft) and then classic pieces as their skill allows. Similarly, it writers helps to read
voraciously to hone their ear. Author
Phyllis Hoge mentioned that she can now see the influence of Rilke and Yeats on
her early work, when she first began writing poems, because she was reading a
lot of their work.
And part of the work of
finding one’s voice is peeling back the inherited voice, which has been layered
onto us by our families, schools, communities and Zeitgeist. I interviewed Nancy Houfek, who was head of
Voice at the American Repetoire Theatre.
When she trains new actors, she begins by peeling back the learned
habits of the environments in which the actors were raised. She mentioned that mid-westerners had a way
of holding their muscles tighter around the mouth than, say, New
Englanders. Getting the budding actors
in touch with these habits gave them awareness to make choices—it develops
their body into a blank canvas that they can layer as they build their
characters for the stage. And this
process helps to unveil their natural abilities and innate skills.
Similarly when we as writers
can examine our inherited voice, and understand our cultural shaping, we may be
able to find our blindspots, our strengths, and make more powerful choices
about the voice we choose.
SBWC: One element you explore in your book is the idea of
“inherited voice”. How do our personal
histories affect our writing voice, and what can writers do to increase awareness
of these invisible or forgotten influences?
JH: There are many ways that our
inherited voice impacts our writing, and we will be exploring some of these
ways in the workshop on September 17th, “Mining Family Stories.”
For example, in family
therapy theory, family systems are rated on a continuum from enmeshed (where
your mother talks to you through a closed bathroom door) or disengaged (when
many things are just not mentioned).
These patterns of communications are learned, and can inform how close
you hold your reader, how you have your characters interact.
SBWC: Strunk and White call the issue of style/voice “high
mysteries.” Are there elements of voice that seem indefinable to you?
JH: We know voice when we feel
its resonance. We know when a piece we
have written comes through so clearly—writing from the bone. What is more challenging to define is one
definition of writing voice since it is the fingerprints we leave all over our
work—and is as unique as each writer’s DNA.
