Photo by Carl Van Vechten

What makes a writer unique? What makes him or her stand out? Their voice on the written page. Whatever the subject matter, whatever the story, the singular way an author communicates his or her vision: word choice; sentence structure; story structure; style; pace; point of view; world view; sense of humor. The list goes on and on. It’s not impossible to define the “writer’s voice” but it’s also not that much fun. Don’t tell us when you can show us! bellow the writing gods. Best just to read the work and let it speak for itself, and enjoy what it has to offer.

In that spirit, here are excerpts from a few of my favorite writers, and another, in the case of Aravind Adiga, a writer I’ve just started to read. All inspire me to continue to develop my own authorial voice and make it distinct and memorable.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater or Pearl Before Swine by Kurt Vonnegut (1965): E pluribus unum is surely an ironic motto to inscribe on the currency of this Utopia gone bust, for every grotesquely rich American represents property, privileges, and pleasures that have been denied the many. An even more instructive motto, in the light of history made by the Noah Rosewaters, might be: Grab much too much, or you’ll get nothing at all.

CivilWarLand in bad decline by George Saunders (1996): Next evening Mr. A and I go over the Verisimilitude Irregularities List. We’ve been having some heated discussions about our bird-species percentages. Mr. Grayson, Staff Ornithologist, has recently recalculated and estimates that to accurately approximate the 1865 bird population we’ll need to eliminate a couple hundred orioles or so. He suggests using air guns or poison. Mr. A says that, in his eyes, in fiscally troubled times, an ornithologist is a luxury, and this may be the perfect time to send Grayson packing. I like Grayson. He went way overboard on Howie’s baseball candy. But I’ve got me and mine to think of. So I call Grayson in. Mr. A says did you botch the initial calculations or were you privy to new info. Mr. Grayson admits it was a botch. Mr. A sends him out into the hall and we confab. “You’ll do the telling,” Mr. A says. “I’m getting too old for cruelty.”  

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (1955): Was this the kind of man they would send after him? Was he, wasn’t he, was he? He didn’t look like a policeman or a detective at all. He looked like a businessman, somebody’s father, well-dressed, well-fed, graying at the temples, an air of uncertainty about him. Was that the kind they sent on a job like this, maybe to start chatting with you in a bar, and then bang!—the hand on the shoulder, the other hand displaying a policeman’s badge, Tom Ripley, you’re under arrest. Tom watched the door. Here he came. The man looked around, saw him and immediately looked away. He removed his straw hat, and took a place around the curve of the bar. My God, what did he want? He certainly wasn’t a pervert, Tom thought for the second time, though now his tortured brain groped and produced the actual word, as if the word could protect him, because he would rather the man be a pervert than a policeman. To a pervert he could simply say, “No thank you,” and smile and walk away. Tom slid back on the stool, bracing himself.

Deepest Thoughts by Jack Handey (1994): If you ever crawl inside an old hollow log and go to sleep, and while you’re in there some guys come and seal up both ends and then put it on a truck and take it to another city, boy, I don’t know what to tell you.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008): Mr. Jiabao. Sir. When you get here, you’ll be told we Indians invented everything from the Internet to hard-boiled eggs to spaceships before the British stole it all from us. Nonsense. The greatest thing to come out of this country in the ten thousand years of its history is the Rooster Coop. Go to Old Delhi, behind the Jama Masjid, and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting on each other, jostling for breathing space; the whole cage giving off a horrible stench—the stench of terrified, feathered flesh. On the wooden desk above the coop sits a grinning young butcher, showing off the flesh and organs of a recently chopped-up chicken, still oleaginous with a coating of dark blood. The roosters in the coop smell the blood from above. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they’re next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. They very same thing is done with human beings in this country.

Who are the writers you enjoy? And what is it about their “voice” that makes their work such a pleasure to read?