Following the voice

George Saunders in "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain," writes about one way that  he produces text (rough drafts here).  He considers a story to be a black box that a reader goes into and leaves in a different state.  "What happens there has to be thrilling and non-trivial."

This approach might be called "following the voice."

An idea for a voice appears, and off you go.  You just "feel like" doing that voice. (And you find that you can.) Sometimes the inspiration for that voice might be a real person. Sometimes it's a tendency in myself that I'll exaggerate (in a story called "The Falls," for example, I gave my main character, Morse, a ratcheted-up version of my own neurotic. worry-prone monkey mind). Sometimes it's a fragment of language that came from elsewhere (like that line from the student paper). The main thing I'd like to say about this mode of writing is that it's fun. When I do it, I'm giving almost no thought to anything but sustaining the voice--not thinking of the story's themes or what needs to happen next or any of that. In the early stages, I might not even be clear about why the person is talking the way he is. My only goal is to keep the energy of the voice high, to keep the character sounding like himself, which means, I've found, that the voice has to keep expanding. Having grasped the approximate "rules" of the voice, the reader will get restless if subjected to a series of sentences that (merely) abide by those rules. So I have to keep finding new ways to make the person sound like himself. The best way to do this is to keep putting new events in front of him, events that are escalatory (new to him), so that he has to find new registers in his voice with which to respond. (If a character, talking along in a certain voice, has never seen a horse before, and I show him one, his voice has to expand, to accommodate the horse.)

In the story mentioned above ("Jon"), what I found myself doing as I sat down to write every day, approximately, was giving myself permission to turn up a certain dial in my head labeled "Level of Inarticulateness:" That is, letting myself be (even) more inarticulate than usual easing up on the self-correction-before-speech we all normally do. I was just, you know, letting it rip, telling myself something like "Okay, do will surfer, part corporate wonk." I was aiming to make sentences that would be funny because of their defective syntax but that would also feel oddly efficient. ("Then came the final straw that broke the back of me saying no to my gonads.") 

 This form of writing reminds me of GBV's (purported) style of writing music by going through yearbooks and writing songs they thought THAT group of people would write.