I’m Always Shocked When I Hear a Writer’s Real Voice

Think about people whose writing you read, but voices you’ve never actually heard.

When we talk about writing, “voice” is often used to describe an author’s style and the quality that makes their writing unique.

Here, however, I want to focus on when we hear a writer’s real voice, like when we hear them speak. When I was on my lunch break at Amazon, I listened to an NPR feature of one of my favorite authors. He spoke, and I was bewildered.

His voice was nothing like I expected it to sound. It was much deeper, much slower, and I could conjecture that in person, he was the type of person who didn’t speak much, but when he did speak, the whole room stopped to listen. As a writer, the author has a style that is very much the opposite — fast, long-winded, and extremely eloquent.

It goes to show that writers, as real people and speakers, have almost different identities.

But that got me thinking too of how I expected him to sound. I expected him to sound, well, like me, or the voice in my head whenever I read anything. And that voice sounds like me. When the person behind the writing doesn’t sound like me, it shocks me. I don’t know why.

And then I got to realize that I haven’t heard many of the authors and writers I read actually speak. J.K. Rowling? Yeah, no idea what her voice sounds like. George R.R. Martin? No idea either. New York Times columnists like Maureen Dowd, Nicholas Kristof, and Charles Blow are also people that I read all the time, but actually have no idea what they sound like.

And what about dead people? I will never know what Abraham Lincoln or Frederick Douglass sounded like. I have no idea what authors like Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charlotte Bronte sounded like. What about Shakespeare? As iconic as Shakespeare is in the English language, does anyone actually know what his voice sounds like? What was his accent?

I might be the only person amazed by how you can know so much about a person through their writing (or at least think you do), while not ever actually knowing the real person, or something as simple as what their voice sounds like.

I am always shocked when I hear other writers actually speak. They might have an accent I wasn’t expecting. They might have a softer or deeper voice. When you read someone else’s texts or read their writing, the qualifier words like “um”, “you know” and “like” obviously aren’t read, but are very commonly used in person.

I can’t help but think that other people feel the same about me. I have a pretty thick New York, American accent. My voice is pretty deep and nasally. I pronounce the word “syrup” as “seer-up” and caramel as “care-a-mell”, and it surprises me that not everyone else does. I use a lot of those qualifier words in my speaking. Foreign language speakers have said that I speak very fast.

My voice is a lot deeper in reality and in recordings than it sounds to me. We hear our voice as reverberations of sound waves in our skulls. If you want to know how it sounds, I contemplated doing an audio reading of this article, but decided against it because I didn’t want to embarrass myself. However, here’s a podcast I did with Meredith.

I wish I could find a psychological phenomenon for the surprise and awe that comes when you hear a writer’s voice, and it completely wasn’t what you expected — which is the case for about 99% of writers once I hear their voice. I can’t find it, so I’ll just listen to the voices of the writers who I’d never heard speak before.

Call me stupid, but it actually caught me off guard that J.K. Rowling has a British accent. It completely makes sense given that she’s, you know, British, but that doesn’t occur to me when I read Harry Potter. Hearing George R.R. Martin speak also baffles me in the reverse direction — because most of the Game of Thrones actors are British, I expected him to have a British accent. But he’s actually American. All of the columnists sound very different than I expected too.

In a way, hearing someone’s voice humanizes them in a way that reading their writing does not. Again, when I read someone’s work, I hear my voice. It’s just like talking to yourself in your head — it’s the sound of your mental voice. However, hearing someone speak makes them realize “oh wow, they don’t actually speak like the voice in my head.”

I find it surprising and I realize how much I don’t know about that writer. I realize that they’re actual human beings rather than just people behind a screen on Twitter or a byline or a voice in my head. No longer are they defined by some amorphous words and sentences on a page.

No, you don’t know everything about a person by the mere sound of their voice, but it’s just a lesson that you don’t know everything about a person through their writing. I have always thought of writing as a window into my and other people’s minds, but it’s a very limited window. Someone’s voice adds a whole other dimension. Lord knows that on the Internet, or on a newspaper page, everyone sounds the same.

But they don’t. And you don’t sound like them either. So maybe do the same experiment and think about people whose writing you read, but voices you’ve never actually heard. I bet it’s a lot of people.

Take yourself on a journey and rejoice, realizing how much you actually don’t know about that person.