By Brian Bouldrey

AT THE BEGINNING of every term, I hand out the syllabus for my creative writing course, and the undergrads, who have been assured of their genius throughout their lives, gasp. They gasp because I expect them to spend some time in apprenticeship to other writers: reading them, explicating them, and – gasp! – imitating them. "What," they beg of me, "about my voice?"

"I will silence your voice," I say, but not out loud.

This word, this "voice." What do people mean when they use it? It's thrown around in such a sloppy way. It's a marketing word, of course, when a publisher wants to present somebody like Chuck Palahniuk as an "edgy new voice in fiction." Some people confuse "voice" with "tone" – the attitude the author takes toward a subject – part of the voice, but not all. Many will say that "voice" is not "style," not diction and word arrangements and such, but has more to do with content. That may be, but so much effort has been thrown at the content side of voice that style has become a lost art. And if that is the case, what is style?

The answer is a two-parter, I think. The tone, the point of view, the material that creates character if it's fiction, or attitude if it's a nonfiction narrator: that's the substance of style. But it's all the stuff in Strunk and White, the Elements, if you will, that makes up the horse before that cart: diction, syntax, punctuation, irony, and so on.

How does a writer cultivate voice and style? On iVillage (www.ivillage.com), somebody named Jessica Page Morrell has a column called Writing Coach. In an archived online chat about craft, she writes: "How can we deliberately cultivate our voice? How does our voice express that this is us on the page? Let's work towards developing our signature in writing, the way we do when we dress or decorate. Do all of you deliberately work on your voice? Do you practice so that you can have a personal way of looking at and describing the world? My voice came through for me years ago in a summer writing workshop, it was like opening a magic door inside myself. It was fabulous. Has anyone had that experience?" iVillager "mistymorn" responds, "I don't deliberately work on my voice. How do you do that? Is it just writing like you speak?" And Morrell assures her, "Yes. Your voice is natural – like how you speak and think. But it changes as you change and depending on the tone of the piece you're working on. A writer's voice should be real, authentic, honest."

What, for God's sake, is natural in art? Not that I'm the final authority on the subject, but how come I never had a magic door open inside myself? Frankly, I don't want any magic doors opening inside myself. I'm leaky enough already. Poor mistymorn. I ought to fly a helicopter into the cyberpast and lower a rope to her, get her out of this dangerous situation.

"I'm talking more about voice than point of view," Morrell continues. "Voice in fiction is how the character thinks and talks. An unreliable narrator is tricky, and yes, there can be some distance. Voice tells us who is speaking. The best voice is substantive, not gimmicky." I can see mistymorn screw up her eyes when she writes, "What do you mean by 'substantive, not gimmicky'? And Morrell says, "I mean that we don't copy other writers. That we try to sound like ourselves, using words, grammar and punctuation that we're comfortable with."

Let me be blunt: this "Writing Coach" person, this Jessica Page Morrell, has horrifying ideas. In any other time and in any other artistic medium – music composition, painting, cooking, film – there is an apprenticeship period in which you do, indeed, copy other artists. Yes, there must come a moment when the pupil rejects the master, but there is an awful, growing notion that writers, like mold or tartar, spontaneously self-generate and that their stories are golden narratives springing out of the heads of these various Zeuses.

For years I taught an open-enrollment extension course at UC Berkeley called "Developing the Novel." I liked to break the ice by asking everybody to introduce themselves by naming a novel they'd read recently that they liked and explaining why they liked it. A lot of titles, highbrow to low, got tossed out. And every once in a while, some jackass would say, "I don't really read novels."

It was this sort of person, not the one who read Harlequin Romances, who got my goat. And you expect me to read your crap? I wanted to ask them (but then, this sort was easily spooked when I actually assigned, in the syllabus, besides the exercises in imitation, actual novels). That our stories and novels and memoirs are now being written by people who don't read – good God, what if the chef at Delfina never dined at another restaurant, or took a cooking class? You love that your favorite band "exhibits the influences of Santana and Meet Danny Wilson," but if it's writing, what then, Writing Coach? It's gimmicky? Please.

Try to separate out, for the sake of this attack, all the delights of plot and character and fight scenes and consider, for a moment, that there is a pleasure to be had in the flourish of a good sentence, the head of steam built through a fine paragraph. Look for voice and style there, not in Morrell's "thinking and talking characters." Take a look at this passage from Joan Didion's new memoir-American history hybrid, Where I Was From, in which she describes the disconnectedness of different parts of California:

In the north we had San Francisco, with its Beaux Arts buildings and eucalyptus, its yearnings backward and westward, its resolutely anecdotal "color"; a place as remote and mannered as the melancholy colonial capitals of Latin America, and as isolated. When I was at Berkeley and had gone home to Sacramento for a weekend I would sometimes take the Southern Pacific's transcontinental City of San Francisco back down, not the most convenient train (for one thing it was always late) but one that suggested, carrying as it did the glamour of having come across the mountains from the rest of America, that our isolation might not be an indefinite sentence.

Didion, pardon my French, has style and voice out the ying-yang. One could teach a semesterlong class on this paragraph alone. Every sentence is exemplary in showing principles of rhetoric, figures of speech and thought and repetition. You feel as if you are on that late inconvenient train as it chugs along with phrase after phrase, not a run-on sentence but one whose ending you anticipate; there's a guaranteed surprise of a sort there at the end. And the girl's got rhythm: you can almost tumble about with the inverted beats of "a place as remote and mannered as the melancholy colonial capitals of Latin America." This, Ms. Morrell, is voice. It's not just an "authentic natural voice" but something artificially constructed. That's why it's called "art," dahlink. Real voice is style, captured in deftly deployed syntax, diction, punctuation, irony both verbal and dramatic (and have you noticed that sarcasm, irony's trailer-trash cousin, looks just great on the page – not), rhythm, and cliché-free word choice. Yes, style involves a certain amount of personal genius, your inner child. But your inner child still needs to be kept away from power outlets and cleaning solvents and must be toilet trained too.

The word "voice" seems to be confused even more, today, by two things: blogging on the Internet and actual voice, that is, voices on the radio, books on tape in your car, stand-up reruns on Comedy Central. Some years ago a guy named Danny Drennan used to write a weekly wrap-up of Beverly Hills 90210 (www.inquisitor.com/90210), and I'd faithfully download his www.synopsis:

Clare is all, "Hi, guys," and Donna is all, "Hey Tara, welcome back," and Clare is all wanting some juice only there isn't any and she is all, "No juice?" and Tara is all, "I'm so sorry, I'll replace it," and Kelly is all, "What is her problem, it's only juice," and Donna is all, "Yeah, well, I used the last of her hair conditioner this morning," and someone should probably clue Donna in to the fact that you're supposed to RINSE OUT hair conditioner.

Yes, agreed: a lot of fun. Even more fun, and easy, to read out loud too, and the deployment of fully-capitalized words lets readers know which ones to stress. No doubt about it: Drennan has captured the voice of our generation.

Now consider the voice of another generation, grown ever more remote in space and time. Gertrude Stein is writing from the 1930s, from France, to Thornton Wilder in Los Angeles:

I just read in this morning's paper that P.G. Wodehouse says that they give him $104,000 for doing nothing at Hollywood they keep him there but they do not use what they ask him to do, now that would just suit us fine, we want a payed vacation which is à la mode here now and of course we are not valuable like he is, but for considerable less would we write dialogue and titles that they do not want to use, not all do we insist that they use our works printed or unprinted not at all, we just want to run around and do nothing and be payed largely for it, that is as everything they do not want, it is a pleasant xtravagence and we are just pining for pleasant xtravagence.

People love to reject Stein these days, but brother, you better believe she thought a lot more about how she was and was not punctuating and spelling and constructing these sentences than Danny Drennan did on his Web site. As the various fads and constructs of language shizzle and fizzle over time, I guaran-damn-tee you that Drennan's (and your) "he's all" and "I'm all" will puzzle future readers like ancient cuneiform. Cut Gertrude some slack – there's still some style there among the creaky archaisms.

Too, writers like David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell, rightly beloved, are more effective on the radio than they are on the page. As with predecessors like Groucho Marx and Paul Harvey, it's pretty much impossible to separate Sedaris's voice from his less-accomplished text when sitting alone in a room with one of his books. Here's a short sample report from our main man, culled from Salon.com:

I was at a medical examiner's office doing research for a magazine article I was working on, and they let me put on scrubs and watch an autopsy. What struck me was the music. The only fights the medical examiners ever have is over the radio – it's just this little clock radio that's covered with blood. A 72-year-old man came in, and he was autopsied during a heavy metal mini-set, which included songs by Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin and Suzi Quatro. And then another doctor came in and changed the radio station. His case was a 22-year-old kid who had heavy metal tattooed all over what was left of his face. And he was autopsied to Kenny G and Toni Braxton. It just didn't seem fair.

My red pen squirms in my pocket. I want to write "obscure" and "shorthand" and "run-on" and "tortured syntax" and, yikes!, "isocolon." For reading, I suggest, take out the "just"s – "it's just this little clock", "it just didn't seem fair." "Just" is just for talking.

I'm harshing. But consider for a moment that there really is a difference between words spoken and words written. Here in Chicago, Second City is offering writing classes to transfer stand-up routines onto the page, and I'm all, oh great, ONE MORE battle I have to wage as fledgling writers become puzzled and hurt when their very funny anecdotes and jokes fall flat when they've transferred the tales from the air onto the page and spangled them with the requisite punctuation and their grammar is cleaned up and they've thought harder about word choice. News flash, hairdo: there's a big difference in how material looks on the page and how it turns out in performance. I beg you to go to any Poetry Slammer Web page and look at how limp and lifeless the performance pieces look when transcribed. And this isn't an attack on poetry performance. You'll see me on any given Sunday down at the Green Mill, my Above Paradise away from home, shucking and jiving with the slam nation.

Consider a piece of 2003 National Poetry Slam champ Mike McGee's "Static":

Hip-hop is a language of the street anyone who speaks it well is an artist of the world / because the world is covered in streets – we all live on streets / the street is where you go to find out what the world is up to / I wanna be hip-hop / I want to be so in tune with the world that I am a language / that every line I write is almost an unimaginable concept, like becoming static / When you turn on the TV to a channel that isn't there, you hit static / most of us change the channel to find silly situations to escape with.

OK, this isn't fair, and Mike knows it. He makes MP3s and they are mighty fine, and he's something to watch and hear. But if I place this bit of poetry next to Didion's prose, I find myself preferring her train-trestle waltz to the clunky, preposition-ending, multisyllabic abstracts, clotted phrasing and, well, static of "Static." I'm betting McGee, who really is the best in the country at slam solo performance, would agree with this.

Voice and style often get mixed up in a notion of point of view too. But the "I" of stories by emerging writers may seem the only component of style (and I'll agree that style is, in a somewhat cosmic sense, a point of view, a culmination of experience and ability that exhibits itself in everything an artist does, the way Leonard Michaels explained the way Walt Frazier jump-shot a basketball through the net, unchallenged). There seems to be, however, only one kind of first-person point of view, that same radio point of view, or if it's literary and written in the last two years, it's basically the Lorrie Moore point of view. And that, Ms. Morrell, is indeed gimmicky, because it's easy. I beg my undergraduates to imitate other writers, but it's harder to imitate the truly great, the Flannery O'Connors and the Alice Munros. It's a breeze to imitate Raymond Carver and Richard Ford and Lorrie Moore because they're those rare authors who have a one-of-a-kind style, and because their characters are, in the first two cases, stripped down by previous various toxins or are quiet, unexpressive sorts or, in the last case, are neurotic and comically self-absorbed. Do we want to build an American literature filled only with recovering alcoholics and neurotic singles using humor as a weapon?

In the 2004 installment in the Best New American Voices series (guest edited by John Casey), so many of the first-person selections could just as well be Lorrie Moore, inimitable yet imitated over and over. The opening line of "Irregularities," by Courtney Jones: "My body stopped being able to tolerate onions around the time the baby inside me, who I sometimes forget about but who never forgets about me, stopped tolerating them. This was right after I had started trying New Things – onions were a New Thing for me." And Peyton Marshall's opener for "Bunnymoon": "I stood in my filthy overalls and boots serving deviled eggs to a drunk woman who had lost her rabbit." Liza Ward opens "Dancing Lessons" like this: "In June of 1959, the day before Charles Starkweather was to be electrocuted, my mother went out and bought a Studebaker Golden Hawk." Wacky.

The truly fine stylish writers are confident that their point of view comes through even when using a third person point of view. Take the new biography of Francisco Goya by Evan Connell. In a late passage, Connell describes the untimely death of the duchess of Alba, suspected to be Goya's lover. For more a century the duchess's family believed she had been poisoned, and in the late 1950s they received permission from the Spanish government to exhume her body. They found she wasn't poisoned but died of encephalitis. They also found that her feet had been cut off to fit her into a smaller coffin, an event that occurred a few years after her initial interment. "As to the missing foot, pathologists concluded that somebody in 1842/3 had forgotten it," Connell writes, and then, in full voice and style, steps in without ever using the first person: "Nonsense. You don't forget a foot. Somebody stole it. The female foot has excited men since Aurignacian days – perched on tiny platforms, naked, sheathed in silk." That is a voice for the page. Appreciate, again, as you might with Didion, Connell's deployment of dashes and commas and one-word sentences and the friction between high and low diction. The man can write on the page, and that is why you can hear the way these sentences are meant to be heard; there can be no doubt.

And so I beg both readers and writers to reconsider these sloppy mistakings of voice and style. I ask that some acknowledgment might be made of a pleasure to be had in beautiful, stylish sentences. I ask writers to read, and fall under the influence of, other writers, great writers. I ask them to believe in the artifice of art. I ask them to look for something a little more sophisticated, cultivated, than "natural voice." Natural voice can't be killed, no matter how often you discipline it, how often you spank it, as any inner moppet needs spanking. It is, as Isak Dinesen (a writer I apprenticed myself to for a bit) wrote in her story "The Dreaming Child," quite durable: "The fine things of the world you cannot wrong or harm; they are much too strong for that." She might as well have been talking, or writing, about our voices.

Brian Bouldrey is the author of, most recently, the novel The Boom Economy, or, Scenes from Clerical Life. He is visiting assistant professor of English and interim director of the creative writing program at Northwestern University and lives in Chicago.

Where I Was From
By Joan Didion. Knopf, 240 pages, $23.

Best New American Voices 2004
Edited by John Casey. Harcourt, 324 pages, $14 (paper).