On Voice and Literary Influence

Thank you for reading The Caffeinated Writer, a newsletter about writing and publishing from the perspective of a New York Times bestselling novelist and longtime writing teacher. This post is about how the voices of other writers sometimes seep into one’s own work. If you like this post, you might also enjoy reading my recent post for paid subscribers, The Art of Pared-Down Prose.

Over at my author Substack, I sometimes share story notes and chapter notes, brief insights into where a story came from or what I’m thinking about during or after the writing of it. Yesterday, I posted a new flash fiction.

Although I don’t publish fiction here on The Caffeinated Writer (this newsletter is a different hat), I thought you might enjoy the most recent story notes, which concern something all writers experience: that moment when the voice of something we’re reading seeps into our own writing.

---

I wrote this story in the first half of 2022. At the time, my son was a junior in high school and was reading White Noise by Don Delillo for his AP English class. He loved the book and suggested that I read it.

I did read it and, as I look back on this story, I can see that the book very much influenced the tone of the story. I can see that influence in certain sentences, particularly, “It was not too late for my husband and me, a kind of reconciliation by way of non-traumatic but proximate death.”

I don’t use the word proximate, ever. Except this once, in this story. I know I must have read that word in White Noise.

When I’m reading a writer with a very strong voice, whispers of that voice seep into the writing I’m doing at that time. That’s why the essays I write while reading Deborah Levy sound different than the essays I write while reading Joan Didion. And the stories I write while reading Grace Paley (whose work was in steady rotation when I wrote my first book, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress) have a different sound than, say, No One You Know, during the writing of which I was reading Graham Greene.

When I love a writer’s work and am deeply immersed in it, his/her/their voice gets in my head. I don’t find this problematic. I love that one can absorb all these disparate voices and that these voices become a part of the amalgam that is one’s own voice. Everything goes through a sieve and eventually comes out your own.

I once invited a writing friend to visit a graduate creative writing class I was teaching. Of his newest book, I asked, “Were you by any chance reading Nabokov when you wrote this?” He confirmed that he was. He has since won the Pulitzer Prize for a book that was quite different from the book that drew inspiration from Nabokov—a novel that, like all of his novels, bears the mark of his own distinctive voice. I love every single book this person has written. I like the fact that he has a recognizable voice that is all his own, but with subtle shifts and gradations across books.

I always tell my writing students to “read widely and well,” to read across genres, and to read all the time. None of this “I can’t read while I’m writing” stuff! Always be reading. What you write will reflect those influences to varying degrees. Your voice will change and develop over time, and in any given story, you may surprise yourself.

For further reading: The Art of Pared-Down Prose