the all-important you version

getting comfortable in your own voice

Last week, my son, Henry, said he liked my new essay, but that all the links I included made me look like an influencer trying to sell you something.

Ngl, chat, I low-key fumbled the bag. My aura is negative. See, I thought I was sigma, when I’m mid at best. That’s on me, no cap.

Luckily, Henry is a certified rizzler with real ones energy. Bro can clock an NPC from a mile away and knows when someone’s just glazing for clout.

Richard Cohen, in Making History, drops a line I’ve been turning over for weeks: “It is the further great irony of writing about the past that any author is the prisoner of their character and circumstances yet often they are the making of him.”

Prisoner and making, in the same breath. That’s the part most of us get wrong. We feel the prisoner half (the chances we didn’t get, the mentor who never appeared, the parent who wasn’t a famous novelist, the childhood that just wasn’t interesting enough). We never get around to accepting the second half.

Having spent ten years as a ghostwriter, ten years living inside other people’s circumstances, I’ve learned that a person’s history isn’t a set of occurrences in chronological order. It’s a lens, determining moment by moment what they find obvious and what will always elude their notice.

When I read a famous creator’s memoir, I catch myself doing the math: He’s talented, sure, but his father ran a magazine. She’s gifted, I’ll admit it, but she also happened to share a dorm room wall with a future celebrity. As if there’s always a cheat code.

That’s my lens, shaped by history. The advantages I fixate on in someone else’s story stand out to me because I didn’t receive them. I’m blind to, or at least wildly unappreciative of, all the advantages I’ve been given. They’re as hard to detect as the smell of your own house. If I wrote down all the gifts, opportunities, and moments of pure serendipity I’ve experienced in one place, the envious reader would roll their own eyes. Dave’s not too dim, but he…

We get worked up about authenticity and nepo babies, but it was never about whether your circumstances were “fair.” What can only you write? That’s the whole game.

Maybe that used to be an abstract notion, but not anymore. Ask AI to write your book for you, and it will rapidly generate something that fits the allotted space and meets the assigned specs. Since it’s read everything and lived nothing, the ultimate writer devoid of personal circumstances, it creates prose that could have come from anywhere, i.e., from nowhere. (Henry would clock it in a second, that rizz master.)

Cohen names the only edge left: Your character and circumstances confine what you can write. That’s why your version will always be worth more than the infinitely anonymous version anyone can now generate with a few clicks.

Remember the overworked and misunderstood word: voice. People treat it as something you find or, worse, “develop” with enough books and seminars. Voice is just: how would you say it? If that’s how you’d put it, that’s your voice. It never went missing. You were too busy admiring someone else’s voice to notice you’d been using your own every day of your life.

The skill here is trusting in what’s relevant to you rather than wishing you’d been issued a different set of raw materials.

You’ve got your circumstances, a specific set of ingredients. Resent them or start cooking.