Finding your voice

A masterclass with Amanthi Harris

by Tara Joshi

The concept of ‘finding your voice’ as a writer can feel a slightly nebulous one. It is something that feels like it should be innate, and therefore as though it would be impossible to teach. And yet, for all this supposed innateness, our voice can feel unwieldy to grasp, and our trust in it is so easy to falter in the face of self-doubt. In her thoughtful masterclass, Sri Lanka-born, London-raised novelist and short story author Amanthi Harris talked us through the process of looking both inward and out to hone that hard-to-quantify thing.

Amanthi used our time together to read passages from a number of books piled in front of her (in a way that felt pleasantly like story time in a classroom), before deftly elaborating on them. In quoting people as varied as Jean Rhys, Michael Ondaatje, Dorothea Brande, Carson McCullers and more, she drew attention to how there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to come to or think of our voice. Each of these writers has spoken of their own methods and their differing aims and desires for what their voice should be. Take Ondaatje’s reference to trying to communicate the story of his dead family “who stood in [his] memory like a frozen opera,” so that he could “touch them into words”; here, his voice is a conduit for the dead, a solidification of dream-like memories. Then there’s Rhys’ idea that writers imbue shape to their lives and Brande’s assertion that “Not even twins will see the same story idea from the same angle”.

Amanthi wanted us to see that we all have our own stories that we need to tell – stories that no one else will be able to tell – and it is through harnessing that belief that we can find our own voice. She ruminated on the tussle of storytelling as both an inward and outward practice, referencing the fairytale The Goose Girl, in which we see the story as it occurs to the young princess, and then again as it is told via the elderly king. Amanthi suggested a need to think about this in our own work: our stories as things sifted from our deeper most selves, formed in an almost dream state, but then presented in a more robust form that might draw the outside viewer in. Here, her reference to Christopher Isherwood’s writing on DH Lawrence felt particularly useful. She noted his idea that good writing should be considered as a physical artform like sculpture or an impressionist painting.

When we got into the group discussion, we asked Amanthi questions about characterisation. In the class, she had spoken about imbuing our writing with ourselves and our convictions; but it led to a conversation about learning to trust our voices when it came to bringing to life people who are extremely different to us. There was a concern among a few of us that it might be hard to embody the voices of other characters without relying on reductive tropes. Amanthi spoke about how, in her own work, she had based aspects of a character on her grandfather, and noted how it is in observing these little details and nuggets of truth that we can embody different voices in our work.

We spoke about the fear of losing our voice in overzealous editing and redrafting, too. Amanthi suggested that holding onto the parts that make our voices unique would become easier with practice, and that in part this was about fearlessness, originality and instinct.

Finding and trusting your voice seems, in some ways, to be the life’s work of a writer. Amanthi told us about a David Hare talk she went to where he spoke about his doubts; about the rats in his head scratching away, gnawing in his head. She emphasised how trusting our voices becomes about learning to ignore and blast through those doubts. This class was a useful framing for all the different ways we might seek to build and explore our voices and styles, and become more at ease with the concept of trusting the process.