Tag Archives: Writer

Blog

The Trial Surrounding “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg

Leave a comment

Society is capable of strange evils, like burning books or banning them from curriculum. Society can also convict people of thought crimes, because words have a great deal of power. Today, we are going to look at the trial of the poem “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg.

Poetry Readings: “Cops Don’t Allow No Renaissance Here”

Allen Ginsberg hadn’t even started his career as an influential Beat poet (the post-war Baby Boomer radicals) when he got himself into trouble. After giving a reading of his poem “Howl” at the art house Six Gallery in North Beach, San Francisco on Oct. 7 ,1955, Ginsberg was accused of obscenity.

Publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti had read “Howl” before Ginsberg presented it at the gallery that night, and he knew it was a transformative piece. As such, “Howl” is a poem that is technically challenging and impressive in its message. Ginsberg was able to adeptly use his influence with Whitman and Blake and use an amalgamated style to convey new themes. This newness resonated with people of the age.”

“… I knew the world had been waiting for this poem, for this apocalyptic message to be articulated. It was in the air, waiting to be captured in speech. The repressive, conformist, racist, homophobic world of the 1950s cried out for it.”

Ferlinghetti

The reading event featured other notable poets and was a smashing success for the San Francisco poetry scene. It also launched Ginsberg’s career. According to Ferlinghetti, after hearing the poem, and in mimicking Ralph Waldo Emerson’s message to Walt Whitman after hearing “Leaves of Grass,” he sent Ginsberg a Western Union telegram that read: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do we get the manuscript?” (Found SF).

Ferlinghetti called the 29-year-old Beat poet soon after to publish “Howl” in City Lights in 1956. After the poem’s publication in paperback, authorities promptly arrested Ferlinghetti and book seller Shigeyoshi Murao on obscenity charges. The book featured explicit four-letter-words and homosexual overtones, which the moral sensors of the 1950s disliked. After the police made their arrests, one local newspaper headline read: “Cops Don’t Allow No Renaissance Here.”

Opinions on the Poem’s Impact

Ferlinghetti wrote that “Howl” was targeted for more than just being “obscene by cops.” He said that it was because, “it attacked the bare roots of our dominant culture, the very Moloch heart of our consumer society.” As stated by Andrew Spacey in his analysis of “Howl”: the poem is a “game-changer” because it adequately captured the feelings of the era. He writes: “… it expressed for the first time a modern psychological angst, an urban existence fueled by drugs, jazz, travel and expansion,” Spacey writes (Spacey).

The poem was a departure from what most writers and poetry consumers considered verse. It revolutionized an approach to writing. While some wrote letters criticizing Ginsberg’s poem, writers, poets, and artists unanimously criticized the trial. They said it was unnecessary censorship because the court was dealing with a true work of art.

“Mark S. Wittenberg, in the San Francisco Chronicle, represented this perspective. He stated: ‘I should say that when (Federal Collector of Customs) saw too many four letter words, he neither saw nor read anything else. Allen Ginsberg’s poem may be a lot of things…but it is not obscene” (Rehlaender).

The Trial of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”

The trial began in Aug. 1957, and the defense had some support. Lawyer Jake Ehrlich, and Lawrence Speiser and Albert Bendich of the ACLU defended Ferlinghetti and Murao. Meanwhile, Ginsberg, free from arrest, wrote letters of support from outside the judicial circus.

The overall argument from The State of California, represented by Ralph McIntosh, was that the words would harm the American people in mediums other than poetry. Thus, the poetry must be banned, because if it appeared on the radio then it would be inappropriate. Both sets of lawyers brought up expert witnesses to discuss the poem as art or as offensive material.

“Ehrlich closed by arguing the poem is only obscene if you purposefully read it that way; he argued that just because the words may be vulgar, does not mean the message is, so this should not detract from the literature’s value. Ginsberg wrote this way to detail HIS life, HIS experiences, and it is not intended to corrupt readers.”

Howl and Beyond

After spending time in consideration, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem could not be obscene because such a ruling with tamper with the First Amendment. Horn’s ruling was important because it made way for the publication of previously censored works, such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller.

Works Cited

Rehlaender, Jamie. “A Howl of Free Expression: the 1957 Howl Obscenity Trial and Sexual Liberation.” Portland State University. March 19, 2015.

Spacey, Andrew. “Analysis of Poem Howl by Allen Ginsberg.” Owlcation. Jan. 10, 2020. Web.

“Howl and Beyond.” URL: https://howlandbeyond.weebly.com/the-obscenity-trial.html

Blog

“Howl” as Read by Allen Ginsberg

Leave a comment

In today’s post, we listen to Allen Ginsberg read his infamous poem “Howl.” While accused of being obscene, this poem conveys a changing dynamic in American culture. The freedom and breakaway from the 1950s-1960s culture was becoming apparent, and this poem embodies that message. There are many universal themes in poetry, but “Howl” tapped into the minds and feelings of a generation.

“Howl” discusses many themes, but relies on its outside approach to conveying themes and messages. It is considered a significant work of the Beat Generation, which was already in full swing against the establishment. The poem has three sections, and each one critiques different aspects of society, discussing personal freedom, mental illness, and oppressive society.

The poem also discuss disillusionment with 1950s culture, and the nature of capitalism as a negative principle. It often refers to “Moloch” within the poem as a monstrous force. Similarly, it discusses how those with different ideas do not fit within the confines of a stratified society. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” Ginsberg writes. In addition, Ginsberg talks about sexuality in varying degrees, from homosexuality to heterosexuality. Lastly, the poem discusses Ginsberg’s outlook on the holy and the reverent by mixing mystical and theological imagery.

“Howl” as Read by Allen Ginsberg

Blog

Four Crucial Blogging Tips to Make a Successful Blog

2 Comments

There is something liberating about frequently publishing posts, as feeling productive and actually being productive work in tandem. Yet, when blogging, it’s difficult to know how to use that productivity. Blogging tips or can help (like understanding the writing process), but a blogging tip should be useful; so, practicality comes into play as well, and practical problem-solving methods are the way to go. Exercises, ideas, and tangible concepts to get everybody moving on the right path. In today’s post, we have assembled some blogging tips and ideas that help you in your blog-writing journey.

Blogging Tips

Tip 1:  Conduct Some Usability Tests

Before you publish your immaculately designed blog, consider performing a few usability tests to improve quality, interface, and user retention. Usability Testing is a fairly simple concept: it asks the designer (or blogger, in your case) to set up a series of one-on-one tests with multiple participants (strangers, preferably) over a small timeframe in order to watch as they interact with your website.  

Authors Don Norman and Steve Krug are big into this UX (user experience) idea. Both of their books on these ideas are excellent as well: The Design of Everyday Things and Rocket Surgery Made Easy. There are two more blogging tips for you, free of charge.

You as the designer decide upon the questions or tasks, but really think about your blog: What is your goal? Where are things located? Is everything easy to find? Can users navigate your blog easily?

Some example questions while conducting a test include:

  • Where would you find the ‘contact’ information?
  • If you wanted to know where the author was, could you find them?
  • Where are the archives and can you tell me where the most recent post is?

You really want the subject to speak aloud while they work through your questions and you should probably record the conversation or take thorough notes so you have “saved data” when it comes time to examine the feedback you collected. The tester typically reinforces the idea that the usability test is not actually a “test” per se, so there isn’t a wrong answer when it comes to any of the questions (this is true and your test subject should be comfortable so they respond in an honest, relaxed way).

Tip 2: Find an Angle

If you are actively trying to gain a following and you are trying to have an extremely original blog—then you may want to try to find an angle. This works on a micro level–each post–or a macro level–your blog in general.

If you’ve spent any time in journalism or wonder why some articles are more engaging than others, then you can probably say with some surety that the writer has a unique angle on the subject material. After all, you have to fight hard to be at the head of the pack when it comes to publishing, and if you aren’t telling an original story, then your prospective audience may gloss over your work.

If you want to write about a famous musician, say, Jimi Hendrix, how are you going to write about him? Are you going to go the usual route and just report his history ? Or will you discuss his guitar technique? Or, are you going to tell his story in a more original way? Like, approaching his life through the stories of others, or writing about the clothes he wore at historic concerts.

In going against this advice, keep in mind that people also like familiar topics, so if you feel compelled to write about Hendrix’s guitar style, then, why not? Aristotle argues that art is cathartic (meant to purify the spirit), so if you are enjoying the material and working on your craft—go for it!

Tip 3: Do Some Research

Blogs thrive on research before one starts to actively write. Doing research takes no time and it actually find it to be pretty fun, because I get to see what other blogs are doing and how they handle mundane and complex information in different ways.

First, you might consider a broad research strategy where you go to the most popular websites right now and check them out. Ideally, you want to examine their page design first: find out where they keep information and find out what each page has in common and what each page has different (and why). Finally, find out how they engage with their customers. Is there a form to fill out? Is there an open dialogue? Do you think the way this company interacts with their customers is effective? Why?

And don’t just focus on those questions! Brainstorm questions you might have for a digital design specialist and see how they apply to the websites you are examining.

Second, bring your research strategy into the realm of the microcosm. In other words, find websites and blogs that inspired you or have similar information and topics. Are you a self-help blog? Find other self-help blogs! Are you a literature blog? Find other literature blogs!

Next, examine the design of each blog. What works well, and what does not work well? How could you improve your site? Again, dream up questions that will give you solid answers, which you can then use to build an effective and successful blog.

Tip 4: Interact and Engage

I will keep this one brief, but I think people forget to deliver on this particular part of blogging, and it’s certainly one that I need to spend more time on:

Interact and engage with other blogs and writers.

Writing is communal and so is blogging. While we may feel as though writing is a solitary function, academic research does not show that the best work comes from individuals sitting alone in dark, smoky rooms. You may feel cool, but your writing and craft will suffer. In fact, research shows that engaging with others and discussing writing improves one’s craft immensely. Even the greatest authors of all time had writing circles, editors, publishers, beta readers, and so on. They wrote, they shared, and they created excellent work.

Conclusion

By engaging with other blogs and writers, you are sharing your work and you are earning something in return. You are putting those blogging tips to use. Additionally, that something includes important feedback from other writers (suffering criticism is a threshold we all have to cross), and confidence in your writing, which will help you write better because you spend less time second-guessing yourself. And, lastly, by interacting and engaging with other writers, you are seeing how other websites function (Blog Tip 1), you are seeing other story angles (Blog Tip 2), you are conducting research through interaction (Blog Tip 3), and you are having meaningful conversations with people who have similar interests (so you are building a writing community).

Blog

“Hap” by Thomas Hardy Analysis

4 Comments

Thomas Hardy wrote “Hap” in the 1860s and it was one of his earliest poems. It details happenstance, misfortune, and the random nature of the world. Hardy, who was in his 20s, was touching on a theme that would dominate much of his work throughout his life: that there is no Gods’ plan and that chance rules our lives instead.

Background and Analysis

We could look at this poem, ideally, from a previously discussed discipline that appears in the neutral form of “naturalism,” which doesn’t “care about humanity and (is) neither good nor bad” (BA English Notes). This, of course, is a more rational appeal toward nature and our own lives because we aren’t necessarily looking to the mystical for knowledge, but, rather, our own abilities and intuition.

“Hap” is a blending of Italian and English sonnet forms because “the first eight lines rhyme ababcdcd rather than abbaabba,” and this, “makes the poem a curious hybrid of the English and Italian sonnet forms, lending the poem’s rhyme scheme an air of uncertainty …”  (BA English Notes). So, the structure is definitely an amalgamation of styles, which suits the topic perfectly.

What follows is the poem in its entirety.

“Hap” By Thomas Hardy

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!” 

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so.   How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

Conclusion

We often stumble upon all sorts of good poems by happenstance, and “Hap” is one of those. The poem takes a few styles and transcends with an interesting theme and excellent imagery. Using naturalism as a center, it conveys the fight against nature and the dangers of

Blog

An Analysis of “My Voice” by Oscar Wilde

1 Comment

Oscar Wilde has had many popular pieces of writing shared since he put pen to paper. He also has some great poetry. “My Voice” by Oscar Wilde is one such poem that is singularly sweet and important to identity and understanding.

Analysis of “My Voice” by Oscar Wilde

“My Voice” by Oscar Wilde appeared sometime between 1854-1900. It is written in a ballad or ode form, and it contains three stanzas that have four lines in each paragraph. Additionally, it is written in iambic pentameter with rhyme scheme that follows abab / cdcd / efef.

The poem details the end of a relationship, with the narrator’s ex-lover not reciprocating in the heartache that he feels. Wilde writes in the first stanza that, “Within the restless, hurried, modern world / We took our hearts’ full pleasure–You and I, / And Now the white sails of our ships are furled / And spent the lading of our agony.” Wilde is telling us that the relationship began, but now it is over, and the “agony” has set in. In other ways, Wilde is discussing emotional separation, and the strain that it causes.

Similarly, this individual has had a profound impact on him through voice and evocation of memories. He writes in line 8 of the second stanza, “And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed,” which further builds on the theme of loss and desolation after love has gone. Meanwhile, in stanza three he states that though he feels this intense pain, the subject of his loss does not feel the same way. “Of viols, or the music of the sea,” he writes, “That sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.” There are some interpretations that pull optimism from the passage, but “echo, in the shell” seems to indicate his own voice coming back to him no matter how he calls for his love.

It’s an extremely relatable poem, and Wilde handles the theme well with heartbreaking tones.

Conclusion

Wilde’s style and ability to craft an ambitious atmosphere of debate and apprehension enamors, but, by the same token, Wilde has such a strong writing voice that either through prose or verse–there is similarity. This makes all of his writing appealing to me, and this poem is a prime example of telling a story, alluding to love, while also encapsulating a heart-breaking theme of calling for a loved one and immortalizing them in our minds.

“My Voice” by Oscar Wilde

Within the restless, hurried, modern world
   We took our hearts’ full pleasure—You and I,
And now the white sails of our ships are furled,
   And spent the lading of our argosy.

Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,
   For very weeping is my gladness fled,
Sorrow hath paled my lip’s vermilion
   And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.

But all this crowded life has been to thee
   No more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spell
   That sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.
Of viols, or the music of the sea

Blog

Claude McKay, writer, poet, and political activist

1 Comment

The Harlem Renaissance writers had skill and audacity, and they were committed to writing transcendent work to show history and community. Similarly, their works were politically-minded and spoke to a generation of marginalized Americans. In this post, we examine Claude McKay, a writer who wrote from his moral center.

Biography

Claude McKay was born Festus Claudius McKay on Sept. 15, 1889, in Clarendon Parish, Jamaica. As a youth, McKay was instantly attracted to British poetry even though his parents had utmost pride in their Malagasy and Ashanti Heritage. McKay would blend both cultures together to form a strong writing voice with the help of a few friends:

“Under the tutelage of his brother, schoolteacher Uriah Thephilus McKay, and a neighboring Englishman, Walter Jekyll, McKay studied the British masters, including John Milton, Alexander Pope, and the later Romantics—and European philosophers …” (poetryfoundation.org)

McKay’s Writing Life

With education under his belt, McKay explored other aspects of culture and civilization. He wrote about the life of poorer Jamaicans and explored inequality. In 1912, McKay published Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads under a London publisher. Afterward, he moved to the US to study at the Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State College. He remained at the institute for a few short months.

Two years later, in 1914, he moved to Harlem, New York. In 1917, McKay published more poems in Pearson’s Magazine and Liberator, which featured his poem “If We Must Die.” The poem details the lengths that people should strive in order to see themselves vindicated in the eyes of the establishment.

Here’s the poem in its entirety:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursed lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

“If We Must Die” by Claude McKay

Political Activism

McKay would leave the US for a few years and publish Spring in New Hampshire in 1920 during his European travels. After returning to the US, McKay began his journey into political activism. He involved himself with communists and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. He would leave the US again to travel to Europe and North Africa, where he stayed for over 10 years, publishing a few notable works, including Home to Harlem and Banjo.

While he had dabbled in communism, he later began to dismiss the idea. After he returned to the US once more, he started engaging in more spiritual pursuits with the theologians in Harlem. Eventually, he converted to Catholicism, and toward the end of his life, he worked as an educator for a Catholic organization.

He died of a heart attack in Chicago on May 22, 1948.

Conclusion

Due to his monumental literary and political pursuits in life, he left a lasting impression.

“McKay’s viewpoints and poetic achievements in the earlier part of the twentieth century set the tone for the Harlem Renaissance and gained the deep respect of younger black poets of the time, including Langston Hughes.”

Poets.org

Notable Works

  • Songs of Jamaica
  • Constab Ballads
  • Spring in New Hampshire, and Other Poems
  • Harlem: Negro Metropollis
Blog

The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson

Leave a comment

Emily Dickinson crafted phenomenal poetry and led an interesting life, albeit a quiet one. Her poems, such as “Faith” and “Much Madness is Divinest Sense” give credence to her ability to craft verse, and her body of work is more than exceptional in the face of modern literary studies. Nevertheless, the mark of a good artist is someone whose art is worth talking about and someone whose life is worth discussing (e.g. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein). This is regardless of their interest in abstaining from the broader culture. For today’s post, we will examine Dickinson’s life and a few of her achievements.

Dickinson’s Biography

Early Years

Dickinson was born on Dec. 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. She was the middle child of three children and grew up in a strongly devout area of New England. She was close with her two siblings and by all accounts experienced a lovely childhood under the roof of her lawyer father and housekeeper mother.

Dickinson went to Amherst Academy and was an excellent student and later attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary; however, according to researchers, she may have left school for a variety of reasons.

“… theories offered say that her fragile emotional state may have played a role and/or that her father decided to pull her from the school. Dickenson ultimately never joined a particular church or denomination, steadfastly going against the religious norms of the time.”

(biography.com)

Other research claims that her leaving school was due to Holyoke’s “strict rules and invasive religious practices, along with her own homesickness and growing rebelliousness, help explain why she did not return for a second year” (Britannica.com).

Budding Poet

In her youth, Dickinson was writing and crafting hundreds of poems, which explored ideas of the burlesque (“Valentines”) and viewing the world through a more altruistic lens. She was also a letter writer and had crafted a great deal in her youth, with a few letters from as early as age 11 still in existence. By the age of 35, Dickinson had written more than 1,100 poems about a variety of subjects, from grief to nature. Many of these poems were put down in fascicles, or handmade booklets.

Here is an example of a short poem titled “Faith is a fine invention” that was penned by Dickinson in 1891:

“Faith”is a fine invention

For Gentlemen who see!

But Microscopes are prudent

In an Emergency!


Poetryfoundation.org

And, while Dickinson didn’t share many poems through publication, she certainly sent a great deal to friends and family, sending her mother Susan “more than 250 poems” and to her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson “about 100 poems”(emilydickinsonmuseum.org).

I don’t even think I’ve sent that many emails in my life.

Later Years and Seclusion

Dickinson’s hermit lifestyle in her late years is almost as famous as her poetry. She lived a quiet life (always had seemingly) with her sister and extended family—her brother even bought the lot next door to the family home to raise his own children. Speculation is somewhat rampant as to why Dickinson decided to dive deeper into isolation in her later years.

“Scholars have thought that she suffered from conditions such as agoraphobia, depression and/or anxiety, or may have been sequestered due to her responsibilities as guardian of her sick mother. Dickinson was also treated for a painful ailment of her eyes.”

(biography.com)

Emily Dickinson died of kidney disease in Amherst on May 15, 1886.

Notable Works

  • Success is counted sweetest (1859)
  • Hope is the thing with feathers (1861)
  • I felt a funeral in my brain (1861)
  • Wild Nights! – Wild Nights! (1861)
  • Because I could not stop for death (1863)
Blog

Neoclassical Literature Explained: Swift, Pope, and Their Impact

2 Comments

What is neoclassical literature, and who wrote during this time?

Two big names out of the Neoclassical movement included Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Yet, there were many more. If you are familiar with the former due to “A Modest Proposal” (1729), then you already have some familiarity. If not, it’s never too late to dig into the satirical elements of the movement.

However, there is much in the movement that it is necessary to explore for a better understanding of literature in general.

What was the neoclassical literature period?

The era in which this period thrived was somewhere between 1660 and 1798. The movement features three important sections, that include the Restoration Period, the Augustan Period, and The Enlightenment Period.

Furthermore, the Neoclassical literature era was marked by an attempt to mimic the Greek and Roman writers of the past. Additionally, writers tried to blend the ideas of enlightenment into the overall writing style of the time. Some sources state that the neoclassical movement in literature was based on these past ideals and skepticism, which took a stern look at societal norms of the time.

With it, came a great deal of satire.

Important Works and Themes

Some works that popped up during this time included The Dunciad by Alexander Pope. He published this anonymously, as it was an unsavory look at his critics. There was also Gulliver’s Travels by Johnathan Swift, which satirized society at large and the inconsistencies in what the norms and mores were espoused.

The neoclassical movement was also the time of wit and cynicism. The writing reached more people, which was great for the down-trodden because education–a factor in reformation–became a reality. As such, themes of social needs and the belief in society, religion, and government were important aspects in published works. As some sources stated, the literature of the time featured “common sense, order, accuracy, and structure,” and showed humanity as “flawed and more human.”

Blog

Emulation and Immersion: Key to Writing Voice

2 Comments

As a short story and novel dabbler, I often wonder how my voice can come through in some sections of a story and then totally fall flat in others. Am I not being true to myself? Am I not tapping into the muse? Are the writing gods forsaking me? What other myths can I use to convince myself there is an easy track to developing my own voice as a writer? For this post, I am going to look at what is typically recommended for writers to develop a distinctive writing voice.

Developing Your Voice as a Writer

Before we get there, we should get a concrete sense of what writing voice is in a theoretical sense. In so many ways, you want to be able to engage with the text you are writing by developing languages associated with that style of writing. Through that, you come up with a specialized language and then a more universal and specific language. In other words, know your genre and know your tone. If you can lock down the language associated with a particular topic, then your voice becomes apparent.

Yet, we can go even farther than that and explore a few traditional methods of developing voice. There are a few main recommendations I see often, and they fall into two categories:

  • Emulation
  • Immersion

Emulation

Emulation is the focus of writing using the style of an author you like each time you sit down to write with the sole purpose of taking the things you enjoy from their style. An example of this would be your 13-year-old self sitting at a desk and trying to write a pulp story because you think the author’s diction and syntax is interesting.

By doing this, you are practicing another author’s tone in order to perfect your own. Allegedly, Hunter S. Thompson engaged with this sort of writing technique by emulating Faulkner.

Another example would be a musician listening to a record and playing the music back. Eventually, the idea is that the musician (or writer in this case) will adopt the nuances of the person they are emulating. Then, that will mesh with an existing skill set (or other emulations) to create a new style of writing wholly original to the author.

Other writers have talked about this very thing.

Immersion

Immersion is literally just a writer focusing on a style and in a genre for a sustained amount of time until a style grows from trial and error. That is, if you read and write in sci-fi for long enough, you will adopt a style that is beneficial to explain science fiction ideas or that adopts a voice you are comfortable with.

I like to think of pulp writers during the turn of the 1900s. You could tell there were a lot of good writers there, but you could also tell a lot of them were adopting a style befitting a pulp writer (a style beneficial to quickly cranking out prose for money). This goes for any other genre of writing as well.

Other Ideas Regarding Voice

There are other ways and explanations, too. Writer Leah McClellan states that a writer’s voice is a combination of “Attitude, tone, and personal style.”

“Attitude is about emotion, values, and beliefs,” she writes. “ … Tone of voice in your writing is similar to tone of voice while talking … it’s not what you say—the facts—but how you say it (or write it).”

Furthermore, personal style are all of the little choices one makes when writing. These choices include diction, syntax, structure, mood, tone, and so much more. I think these are definitely fair points and if it’s beneficial for you to think of writing as an extended metaphor, I think you will find her advice useful.

Final Thoughts on Writing Voice

Writing is a skill that you have to practice. You have to learn the rules and use them to the best of your ability, and outside of the application of prescriptive grammar, you have to practice conveying a message to people who probably understand descriptive grammar. That isn’t to say that prescriptive grammar is the right approach or the be-all and end-all. I’m also not saying because we live in descriptive grammar bubbles online that we should simply throw out the rules.

However, you as a writer have to start with the mechanics and then learn how to break the rules. This will extend your writing in more digestible ways and impact your audience awareness. In other words, if you have a new and unique style, can you explain why it works without saying “It just does.” You also don’t have to say that it comes from some special place from beyond the pale.

Rationale does wonders for development and progression.

With that being said, you also have to dispel the myths of writing, which include things like “writing is a God-given gift,” “writers are depressed geniuses,” “substance abuse makes writing better,” or “you need a degree in writing to be a writer.” Similarly, you can implement poetic strategies to engage your readers more and spice up your writing.

All of these ideas inhibit creativity and get in the way of style and voice, and these myths perpetuate crappy narratives about an otherwise normal skill that needs to be practiced and honed if one wants it to develop into something better—like a piece of writing with an original voice.