I once claimed in an undergraduate term paper that a certain novel employed a “voiceless, journalistic prose, practically devoid of style.” The professor scribbled his objection in the margin: “Journalistic prose is highly stylized!” Like any insouciant English major, I dismissed his criticism, believing that he didn’t get my overall point. It hadn’t occurred to me that the conscientious avoidance of any discernible voice typically made the author’s voice, well, more discernible. Put another way, it hadn’t occurred to me that I was just plain wrong.
Between then and now I worked for a spell as a journalist; and I currently spend much of my day reading a ton of journalistic prose. Now I concede the point. Moreover, much of today’s journalistic writing projects a voice that cannot be denied or ignored, precisely because of its ostensible voicelessness. I remember once speaking to family and friends of a fisherman lost in a storm at sea. The story I wrote was rigid, people and events hammered into the conventions of journalistic prose. I had to do that (every reporter does) so that the voices and experiences of the people involved could come through all the more. To consciously foist a voice onto those events would have been misguided, self-centered, and maudlin.
In general, why do we change our voices for different genres, or different platforms? Partly this has to do with convention. The 700-word news report has its own conventions and forms; as does the journal entry, the novel, the magazine story, the blog post. But something that challenges me is how the notion of audience can impact the author’s decisions about voice. I think a small part of every scribe would like to believe this isn’t so: “Nevermind who reads my work. If it is good, everyone will read it!” The idea is that the audience is irrelevant. Only the voice matters. It’s like a Field of Dreams whisper while your fingers hover above the keys: “If you write it, they will come.” They won’t.
Let’s call this the hubristic fallacy.
I think the only way to combat the hubristic fallacy is to develop a heightened understanding of your audience. I take this cue from none other than the Boss, who told Jon Stewart last week how he and the E Street Band develop their live shows:
“You try to find the show that you haven’t done before, that both sort of contains the history that you share with your audience, contains the new music that you’ve written, and contains some way to capture the moment that’s occurring out in the world right now.”
Granted Springsteen is describing performance in the musical sphere, but I submit that writing and musical performance are not all that different in this instance. This approach works precisely because it relies so much on knowing not only what your audience wants, but what your audience is living through. In the context of writing as a performance, writing becomes an act of empathy rather than grandstanding, reading an act of gratitude and not subservience.
The reason I’m thinking about all of this is simply the usual peg I offer for most of my posts in this space: there exist a plethora of places to write today online and off, and consequently at least as many ways for people to find one’s writing and respond to it. So the logic might necessarily follow that today’s writer has so many more ways to be in communion with an audience of readers ??? at least, more so than a novelist did perched atop an Underwood five decades ago, who had neither email nor blogs nor Twitter with which to interact with said audience.
But let me pose what may be a counterintuitive question: does today’s writer really understand her audience any better? Let me phrase it a different way. Are the voices of our contemporary writers, on the whole, any clearer?