Finding Your Voice

On Voice and Telling the Story, Telling the Truth, Guillermoprieto and Orlean address the importance of expressing your voice when writing. As Orlean argues, “voice is -as the world tells us- the way a writer talks.” (159)  By incorporating our voice, we no longer write facts but learn to tell stories that speak to our readers.

They use their personal experiences to depict how they developed a writer’s voice. Guillermoprieto narrates that reporting news led her to find her voice, “my driving desire as a writer is to make it impossible for the U.S. reader to ignore Latin America. I do that by telling stories. Stories are the opposite of hard news…” (155) Orlean explains how reading out loud helped her hear how she told her story, “I find that sometimes when I give reading of my published work, I skip parts that seem boring to me. Then I wonder, would it have been better to edit that out in the first place? When you read aloud, extraneous material falls away.”(158)

In each of the past readings (I have done for my English course) I have disliked some of the author’s quotes or opinions. However, after rereading these pieces I found the exception to the rule: I did not dislike any of Guillermoprieto or Orlean’s views. If anything, I found admiring how much preparation and time these women put into their writings, “I do enormous amounts of reading before I begin reporting…Once I begin to write, I spend days and days working on a lede” (Guillermoprieto 156); “I have to sit at my desk and really work at finding the strongest image possible.” (Orlean 159)

I absolutely loved how Guillermoprieto quoted my favorite book and author, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Gabriel García Márquez, to exemplify how people tend to be ignorant towards people and events outside of their comfort- zone, ““He spends the rest of his life saying, “There was this massacre,” to which people respond, “You’re crazy. That never happened.” I never stopped being angry about that.” (155) Reading this made me reminiscence on how the massacre of the banana plantation workers had struck me when I read it in the book. I could easily relate the moral of the story to daily life experiences in Dominican Republic, where politicians act ignorant to the effects of their corruption on the poor.

After thinking about how much I enjoyed the writings, I asked myself, how were these pieces different from the prior (I had read)?  A single answer came to mind: I could relate to every word they said and apply advises given.  In past writing assignments I had been advised to not be robotically formal in my writing. My writing fellow encouraged me to incorporate more of my voice rather than just explaining facts. If I had read these pieces earlier, I would have prevented many headaches from thinking what I should and should not say in my essays!  Through these pieces I learned that like Guillermoprieto and Orlean, we can all struggle in finding our voice. Among some of the advises provided by them were: to be specific and hook the readers through the details, to blend information, observation and my reaction to the material or assignment in question, change the story’s pace and read your stories out loud. It may take time, but by applying these steps (or advises) and through hard work or harsh experiences we can get there.