‘Unless you’re George Saunders, it’s an illusion to suppose that revision will necessarily make the voice more and more individual’

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Where I’m from, in the American South, grace is a virtue, and not just the religious kind. It’s about courtesy, dignity, decency, control. Staying cool and keeping the peace. It’s smoothing over the cracks, even when – especially when – you’re burning to prise them open.

As a dance critic, I find grace in suspended leaps and liquid poses, in lines that bend to the rhythm of a ragged primal scream. My own days as a dancer showed me how to take something alive and whip it back on itself, uncovering its elegant pulse. Dancerly grace, in its stillest moments and its stormier ones too, brings order to the wild topography of the body. It’s an organising of self that requires immense discipline.

Outside of the studio, though, away from the stage, grace can take on a different complexion, losing some of its warm animal potential. It’s mainly expected of women, in my experience, part of a broader pressure we face to stay composed in a world where flared tempers are reserved for important men in important meetings. Every day we’re asked to abide, appease and accommodate. To make ourselves smaller and less needy. To avoid giving anyone cause to think we are, even for just a second and in this one small way, difficult.

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Nonfiction titles considered this month

Politics Without Politicians — Hélène Landemore
On Morrison — Namwali Serpell
Gordon Brown — James Macintyre
Leaving Home — Mark Haddon
The Good Society — Kate Pickett
Wise — Frank Tallis
David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God — Peter Ormerod
The Bed Trick — Izabella Scott
Everybody Loves Our Dollars — Oliver Bullough
On Censorship — Ai Weiwei
Black Dahlia — William J. Mann
My Father, the Messiah — Gil Z. Hochberg
Freedom Lost, Freedom Won: A Personal History of America — Eugene Robinson
Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie — Alexander Larman
Hannibal Lecter — Brian Raftery
Wild Grace: The Untamed Women of Modern Dance — Sara Veale
Nonviolent: A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation, and Love — James Lawson Jr. and Emily Yellin
The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster — Shelley Puhak
The Science of Second Chances — Jennifer Doleac
A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness — Michael Pollan
Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria — Loubna Mrie

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‘Unless you’re George Saunders, it’s an illusion to suppose that revision will necessarily make the voice more and more individual’

George Saunders proposed on his substack that it’s in the editing process that literary voice can emerge -- the more a writer edits the more they’ll make choices different to other writers, resulting in a voice and style unique to them.

I think George Saunders believes that it’s in editing a writer’s voice emerges because of a particular, iterative way of working that he has. I get that strong impression too from reading his A Swim in a Pond in the Rain – a wonderful book – that continually talks of a story as something that gets discovered, by writer as well as reader, one move at a time; one unexpected yet logical move, taking what’s latent in the decisions already taken and moving them on another step, in a direction that declares itself by being found. Revision then clarifies and solidifies. That works for him.

But it’s not the only way to write. Not everyone is taking a line for a walk. Not everybody is capable of keeping a whole draft still provisional and mentally sculptable, as you’d need to keep working it and working it in the way George Saunders suggests. (I’m one of the people who can’t go on with a project unless they feel that what’s already done is solid and dependable. I revise and revise as I go, making umpteen drafts by one calculation, or just a single very intensive draft, looked at another way. When I reach the last sentence of a book, I want to have finished).

Also I suspect that, unless you’re George Saunders, it’s an illusion to suppose that revision will necessarily make the voice more and more individual. It might just give you endless opportunities to be dragged toward the attractor of convention.

Read on at the link below.