By Ann MacDonald
In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr writes, “Each great memoir lives or dies based 100 percent on voice.” But how do you create a distinct and captivating voice?
Like many aspiring memoir writers, I’ve struggled more with this question than with any other aspect of nonfiction craft.
In Telling True Stories , Susan Orlean describes how pace, word choice, and sentence length all help create voice. With this in mind, I tried to develop my voice by focusing on words and sentences. But my voice on the page still sounded flat. In part, I blame my career as a medical writer. I am paid to deliver health information in a just-the-facts way. (No voice.) It’s hard to shake that habit.
Then one fall weekend, as I sat down to draft my annual holiday letter to friends and family, I realized that I did know how to create a distinct narrative voice. I’d been doing it for years with this very letter.
Let’s face it, many holiday letters are dreadful. Every year I receive one from a friend who is smart, funny, and opinionated—but you’d never know it by reading her letter. Here’s an example (locations changed to preserve her privacy):
In July we drove to Glacier National Park and hiked for hours. In August we took a cruise down the Danube. Next year we look forward to visiting Alaska.
Why bother? I think. Her letter reads like a travel itinerary. Anyone could have written it.
That’s why, when I sit down to write my own holiday letter, I picture the friends and relatives who will receive it. They’ve got busy lives and problems of their own. While writing, I adopt the frame of mind I would have if they were at my house for dinner and I wanted to keep them entertained.
Take the year some bats got into the attic of our six-unit condo. The just-the-facts version: After freaking out, we called an exterminator.
Here’s how I retold the story in my letter:
We didn’t discover our bat infestation until one of the critters developed wanderlust. It flew into a second-floor unit, where it terrorized the occupants, a grad student and his girlfriend. The still-rattled girlfriend emailed me after the exterminator arrived. “Bat Man was just here. He says he can take care of the problem.” I felt so much better now that the Caped Crusader was on the job.
Friends tell me that in my holiday letters I come across as funny, spunky, and upbeat. Nothing gets me down. That’s only part of who I am in real life. I can also be whiny, depressed, and cynical. But those are not the qualities I want to project during the holidays. Without realizing it, I was doing what Orlean and Karr advise.
“Self-analysis is crucial to developing a strong voice,” Orlean writes. “ Who am I? Why do I write? ”
“Voice isn’t just a manner of talking,” Karr writes. “It’s an operative mindset and way of perceiving that naturally stems from feeling oneself alive in the past.” She is challenging writers to adopt a point of view unique to themselves.
And yet in my memoir I still struggled with developing my voice. Like many memoirs, mine involves trauma. I found it difficult to cultivate a detached mindset when writing about events that aren’t funny.
Then I took a class on epistolary memoir with Beth Kephart. We examined a chapter in Mary-Louise Parker’s outstanding book, Dear Mr. You, to understand how writing a letter to someone both develops the character of another person and cultivates the writer’s own voice.
I was struggling with a scene that showed how I ran into my mother’s surgeon a year to the day after she died. The just-the-facts version: I arranged to have lunch with two friends so I could distract myself from focusing on the first anniversary of her death. When I saw my mother’s surgeon seated nearby, I was too stunned to speak with him.
I rewrote the scene as a letter to convey what I wish I’d said to him that day:
Dear Dr. X,
I saw you today at the cafe. You looked my way, but you didn’t remember who I was.
Do you remember my mother?
Exactly one year ago today, she died unexpectedly in your hospital. You were her surgeon, in charge of her care. The last time we spoke, you called to share the results of her pathology tests. “All the lymph nodes came back clear,” you said. “That means the cancer hasn’t spread. She’s lucky.”
Three days later she was dead.
You never explained why she died so quickly. Or why nobody on the medical team seemed to notice she was dying until it was too late to save her.
I think I deserve to know the answer to a question that has plagued me all year. What happened?
I’m still working on this scene. But I found that writing it in the form of a letter enabled me to perform the self-analysis that Orlean advises, to know why I’m writing. It also helped me cultivate the specific point of view that Karr recommends.
If you’re struggling with your own voice on the page, try writing one of your scenes in the form of a letter. It may just help.
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Ann MacDonald is a freelance medical writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times , Newsweek , STAT ( Boston Globe Media), and other publications. You can find her work at her website .
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