At Creators Hub, Alexander Chee offers advice on how to listen to your writerly voice and how this voice manifests and changes with each work. “A writer’s voice is always created in relationship to the persona adopted for the piece of writing,” Chee writes. “Some writers are stylists, and each sentence insists on the attention of the reader for not just content but also style; some writers vanish into their characters, and each sentence is never going to ask you to do more than read it with the attention on the performance of the voice. And so I think of these directions as roles of a kind — what I call the Poet or the Ghost. Anne Carson, for example, has an arresting style that is utterly unlike that of others, across different kinds of writing. We go to her for that. Kazuo Ishiguro, on the other hand, is different novel to novel. Those of us who love these writers wouldn’t have them do their work any other way.”
Image credit: Larry D. Moore
