BAM! A Recipe for Authentic Voice
Author: Cassondra Murray
Original Publication Date in Love Notes: May 2004

I remember the day I learned how to cook. I’d been married for 11 years. I had managed to put hot meals on the table when I couldn’t come up with a reason to eat out, but frequently we ate what I call “experimental food.” Sometimes it worked out okay; other times the leftovers would go straight into the trash.

It’s not that I was a bad cook. I don’t remember ever fixing a meal that threatened to crawl off the plate. But cooking was a struggle. We ate a lot of spaghetti with jar sauce, and egg-with-bacon sandwiches on toast because anything else required a recipe. I had lots of cookbooks, but I was like a kid in science lab, putting the ingredients together, following the instructions, working the math and passing the tests, but never understanding how the lab results related to real life. None of it made any real sense. I knew how to simmer, sauté, whip, cut in, and even fold. But I wasn’t getting the big picture. My soul did not speak the language of food.

On a Saturday afternoon, my husband, Steve, and I were meandering through an antique mall, discussing, no doubt, where we would eat out that night, and there on a shelf, for $2, was a book titled Spaghetti. And for the price of a Coke at a rest stop, my life was changed. I read chapters titled “All About Noodles” and “Perfect Al Dente”. I started working through the recipes, and over the months that followed I made spaghetti with lemon sauce and spaghetti with basil and pine nuts. I tried (and failed at) the capellini and zucchini omelet.

Then one evening I came home late from a day of committee hell. I was dead-dog tired but couldn’t afford to eat out. I flipped through the cookbook, but didn’t have the ingredients for one single recipe. I stared into the fridge, willing Chinese takeout to appear. It didn’t. My
confidence was shaky, but I started pulling out what I had. Bacon — a pungent, salty meat. Fresh parmesan — instant flavor. Pine nuts — texture and crunch. A box of spinach fettuccini and some basic spices, and as Chef Emeril would say, BAM! The light bulb came on for me, and experimental food rose to a whole new level.

It was in that stress-filled instant that it all gelled. All the months of putting recipes together. The distillation of those chapters on ingredients and combinations of tastes. In a moment when I was hungry, beyond tired, and teetering without the support of my cookbook, the part of my brain was awakened that could understand the language of good food and how to put it together. The dish I made that night has no official name, but we still eat it once or twice a week.

I also remember the day I learned how to write.

Now, first you have to understand that I’d been writing for most of my life. I’d first felt what I call the “flow” — the magic that happens when you almost channel the words onto the paper — when I was in the sixth grade. My teacher looked at my story, written sitting in class as an assignment from one of the color plates of famous paintings in our literature textbook, and looked up at me dumbfounded and said, “How did you do this?” It was the 11 year old equivalent of perfect al dente’.

After that, I nearly always got comments in the margins of my assignments. “You should be a writer,” wrote the head of the learning lab where I tutored English composition. “Have you considered being a writer?” This from the eccentric professor of English Lit who spoke Gaelic and gave us, as a final exam, one surprise essay question over the entire Norton Anthology. He wrote the comment in red ink at the top of my five-page essay.

But the bottom line is that none of this had taught me to write. I understood the noodles, and I could follow the recipes. I could even discuss the spices of writing with some authority; I’ve given a few talks on the finer points of press law, right to privacy and the ethics of writing. And it all tasted just fine. But nobody was asking for the “recipes”. I was getting published when I turned articles in, right along with other novice reporters. My words were put together well, but they did not sing off the page. The words informed, maybe even brilliantly according to the opinions of those who were supposed to know. But with hindsight I see the truth that all those learned professors were missing. Nothing I wrote made people laugh or cry. Or, frankly, care.

I credit one man with teaching me how to write. (This happened years before I learned how to cook.) I’d quit college, married Steve during the summer, and was struggling with laundry, bills and experimental food when I heard that James Ausenbaugh would soon retire from his teaching position at Western Kentucky University. He had one semester left to teach a class called Feature Writing. I don’t remember now how I managed to pay the tuition, but I did. And for $300 — the price of one month’s rent at our tiny first apartment — my life was changed.

I don’t remember, either, what the actual assignment was on the day I learned to write, but I do remember I was too mad to do it. And this is the point at which those days I learned how to write and how to cook begin to look similar.

On the day I learned to write, I’d been shopping for a dress for my brother’s wedding. There was one mauve suit (the required color) in our city’s mall. There was one size five left on the rack (that I was once a size five is the only good part of this memory), and the clerk wouldn’t take my check for a layaway without a credit card number. I didn’t have any credit cards.

“The check might bounce,” she said.

“It’s a layaway,” I said, in the tone I save for explaining simple things to five year olds. “If the check bounces, you can keep the clothes.” You idiot.

After an hour and a half of arguing, the ninny finally took the check for the layaway, and I stormed home, so worked up I couldn’t do a damn thing but walk the floor and consider using some of the psychological warfare techniques I’d learned from my ex-Special Forces husband. I’d haunt her. I’d torture her. I’d make her life hell. I’d…

I’d write my assignment for Feature Writing class the next afternoon if I knew what was good for me. But I couldn’t. I was too mad. The kind of mad that makes you pace and rant. I sat down at the typewriter (yes, it was a long time ago) and got right back up again. I tried to focus on one of my interviews — to decipher a quote from the scribbles in my reporter’s notebook. But it was no good. All I could think about was a new curse word to call the twit who’d unleashed my ugly inner monster.

So instead of writing about the local Kung Fu master or the fire that had burned the First Baptist Church to the ground, I started writing about that clerk and her asinine lack of logic.
And BAM! It happened.

Voice.

It was the distillation of all the classes and all the assignments and the ruthless critique, designed to turn novice writing into a saleable product. The talk of lead paragraphs and quotable dialogue. The lectures on self-editing and reading your work out loud to yourself and banishing what Ausenbaugh called “diarrhea of the typewriter” with its redundancies and adverbs. The talks from that master editor about how all good writing, even prose, has rhythm and pacing, and moves the reader along — like a dance with the perfect partner — all those things mingled with the burning anger inside me, just as years later, practice at making noodles would one day
mix itself with exhaustion to make good quick food.

The craft had been ingrained in me (more like beaten in with a big red pencil), but in that moment I was far too angry to edit myself. I just wrote. It was the stress of physical exhaustion that would, years later, free me to cook. On that day, seething anger freed me to write. And what came out was voice. MY voice. Gritty and earthy, with an edge. A bite my writing had not shown before. Ausenbaugh looked up at me during the critique and said words I’d never thought to hear from him.

“I love it,” he said. “It’s so angry.” He snarled when he said the words. And that was exactly how I’d felt when I wrote it. That snarl. That sarcastic sneer I felt when I wanted, with everything in me, to call that store clerk a frigging idiot. Thank God for that stupid featherbrain and that ugly mauve suit. I had leaned how to write.

“Can I please run this in Thursday’s paper?” the editor said to me later that day. My writing life was never the same. Instead of assigning me a length for an article, the editors started calling me a few days before it was due.

“How many column inches will you need for Tuesday’s feature?” they’d ask. Then, “Are you working on anything else?” New reporters on the staff asked me to edit their articles. To show them how I made people laugh and cry. Ausenbaugh offered to help me get space in big newspapers — for money.

Reality check. Can I do this very cool thing in my book manuscripts? Only sometimes. Good journalism is a far cry from fiction. Can I make people laugh and cry with my characters? It’s a struggle. For me, finding and telling the heart-ripping truth about real people is a completely different art form than creating made-up characters that readers will care about. Even if this wanna-be-published novelist gets the voice right, there’s still plot and characterization and all the other spokes in the wheel of a solid piece of fiction. But how about we just ignore those for now (as I so often do) and focus on voice.

We’ve all heard about voice. We’ve heard the speakers talk about that “indefinable something” that makes a good writer great. We’ve been told that a strong, distinctive voice is what makes the difference between midlist scraping and fly-to-the-beach-in-our-private-jet-multibestsellerdom. And the proof is in the reading. The books I have on my keeper shelf — new and from years ago — are the ones by authors with a powerful voice. One that distinguishes her, on the first page, from all other writers. Though the titles and authors may be different, I bet your shelf is the same.

Don’t get offended here. I’m about to voice an opinion that’s probably not politically correct (Or politically savvy. My whole life, I’ve been cursed with the role of looking at the Emperor and saying what everyone else is reluctant to say… “That man is naked.”) For all this talk of voice, in the several genre lines I read, a small percentage of the books on the shelf actually have it. A strong voice, to me, is not one that’s discernible after you read 10 of an author’s books. If the author doesn’t have it, I won’t read 10 of his books. A strong voice is recognizable after one book. It’s the thing that makes me love or hate a particular author’s work. Immediately. Bam.

If I get brutally honest, (this is dangerous, I know) it’s the thing that makes me take the stack of
authors whose names I can’t remember unless I’m going to a conference where they might be  books and trade them at the used book store for the backlist of Suzanne Brockman and LaVyrle Spencer. Based on the reading I do, it would appear that a strong voice is not necessary to get a book published.

But a strong voice is good writing. Published or not, I know this. It is laugh and cry, love it or hate it writing. That “indefinable something” is what all the editors say they’re begging for but can’t find.

The point of all this is that most of us have either found our writers voices or we’re looking for them. And the trouble is this: Voice is so “indefinable” that even people who’ve found theirs usually can’t tell other writers how to do it.

Just like me, you’ve read the articles, listened to the tapes. You’ve read the books about dialogue, conflict, plotting and characterization. You’ve internalized the rules of grammar. You’ve studied the great masters who paint with words and attempted to copy their brush strokes; learn their techniques. To go back to my original analogy, you know how to cook the noodles. You know that if the recipe calls for Parmesan, you can substitute Romano in a pinch. You’ve learned the rules so you’re qualified to break them to good effect.

But maybe it hasn’t happened for you yet. Maybe, despite all the workshops and exercises, you’ve never found your particular voice. So if you’re still struggling, looking for your own recipe — your own distinctive way to combine the spices and ingredients in your pantry into a dish that will leave readers hungry for more — here’s an idea you might try.

I have figured out that when I’m writing a scene where my character is afraid, I’d better find a way to make myself honest to God shaky and scared. If she’s livid, I’d better be so mad that I snap at Steve if he interrupts me (This, I might add, is a side hazard to the method). This is exactly what I did, albeit inadvertently, on the day I learned to write, and it’s what I still do to get inside my character’s emotions — not just her head. You’ve heard it before — if you want to see what your character is made of, turn up the heat. Put on the pressure and take her to the wall. People get real when they’re seething mad, grieving, or believe they’re in danger.

If you want to see what you sound like down and dirty as a writer, find a way to take yourself to the same emotional wall. Don’t just get mad, sad or happy. Get livid, desperate, or ecstatic. It’s been 13 years, but I still wrinkle up my nose and shake my head when I think about that store clerk and that mauve suit. I finally gave the suit away because every time I saw the thing in my closet, I got mad all over again.

I have another searing memory of running off of the road when I was 17. I stomped the gas instead of the brake, and learned what deep, blind panic feels like. When my character was abducted, panicked and ran, that’s exactly where I went to find the “panic” ingredient in the spice cupboard of my writer’s voice. For some reason, it’s the rotten memories that carry the strongest feeling for me, and it’s these that take me most easily to my strongest voice, not to mention making the experience “read” as real.

Try sitting down at the computer when you’ve just had a huge fight with you mom or spouse. Instead of using the writing as therapy to escape, stay in that emotion and set your character free to act out her own shadow side. Or try pulling out an old memory of when you felt the way your character would feel and let yourself feel all of it. It doesn’t matter if your emotion is justified or not. The point is that it makes you feel. It takes you straight to your gut, and this strong emotion gets you past your internal editor.

My voice, though applied differently in fiction than in journalism, still has the same edge. The same tendency toward a subtle sarcastic bite. It’s blunt; never flowery. It speaks too often in three adjectives per noun, and uses WAY too many italicized words and parenthetical expressions, and it overuses hyphenated phrases. Look back over this article and you’ll see these very things. Yes, sometimes I misjudge how many to leave in. My internal editor would take out practically all of them, as would a bad “real” editor, and this article might convey the same information, but would sound more generic. Any voice I might have managed would be edited out. It would not sound like me.

I believe voice is actually the core personality of the writer. It’s who you are when you take off the mask. Like snowflakes, each personality is profoundly unique.

But for many of us, the internal editor sits in the front seat like a gatekeeper, demanding that if we sit down at the computer, we must put on our mask, smoosh our real, tainted, messy human selves into the closet so we won’t offend anybody, and prance out our high heeled, legs shaved, cologne spritzed fresh face. After all, we are writing for the rest of the world, and we’d never behave like a brat (or other b-word) in front of other people.

I hope the skill will come with years of practice, but right now, I cannot get to my authentic voice writing a scene about a pleasant, chatty dinner at the local steak house. Because writing is such a powerful mental exercise, it is the opposite — strong emotion — that is able to shut my editor down long enough for me to slip into that subtle, indefinable space that is voice. And it takes the uglier, inner monster feelings to free me. Once in that voice, I find it much easier to stay there through the “nicer” scenes.

It’s a helluva lot of effort. But maybe, just maybe this recipe will work for you the way it works for me. With the craft internalized from months or years of study, if you can get yourself worked up into an absolute spitting-mad snit, or torn all to pieces over the biggest loss in your whole life, and then put it on the page through your character the way you’d act if nobody was looking, BAM, magic could happen.The noodles of craft will mingle with the spice of your distinct inner self. A recipe all your own that will keep readers coming back to your table, asking for more.

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In addition to cooking some mean noodles, MCRW member Cassondra Murray makes a mean story collage!

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