My Voice is Unrefined and I'm OK With That, How About You?
Living Happy With Poetry Editors and Blogging Bros
Once, when I was submitting poems for a lovely, albeit hoity-toity literary journal, the editor in chief rejected them all, took me aside at a poetry reading at a small cafe in Blue Hill, Maine and said. “Your poems have promise. Your ideas are wonderful.”
I waited because there was a “but” that was coming.
“But your voice is not,” her hand fluttered about as she searched for a word that probably wasn’t as mean as the word she was thinking, “refined enough. Poetry likes refinement—a certain elevation of tone.”
“Oh,” I said.
She nodded. “Work on making your voice less what it is—and more refined.”
“Refined as in ‘improved’ or refinement as ‘more cultured’? Or refinement as in ‘precise phrasing?’” I asked as people bustled around us, nobody noticing that my own world and dreams were spiraling down.
“All of the above,” she answered. “Mostly the middle.”
I stood there as she moved on to the other writers in my writing group, writers with voices of refinement. They hugged, smiled. I swear one went into a half-curtsey as she spoke to the poetry editor.
Me?
I backed into the wall of the Left Bank Cafe and tried to remember how to breathe. I’m pretty sure she was trying to help, but she hit into all my insecurities about voice and poetry and refinement and what it means to be a poor kid who thinks in poems in their own voice.
A nice man also talked to me at that reading. His wife was an internationally bestselling novelist and they summered in Maine. I mean, she was a genre superstar, but I had no idea that he was her husband when we spoke.
Anyway, he told me that of all the writers who read, I was the only one who moved him and the only one that he remembered.
“You remind me of my wife,” he told me.
Why?
“You’re real.”
I managed to move a bit away from the wall and breathe again because of that bit of kindness that I so desperately needed.
I was real.
I was not refined.
I needed refinement apparently.
But I was real.
This was back in the early 2000s, and I like to think times have changed, particularly with own voices movements and the quest for thought and difference in voice, but then I look at publishing statistics and think, “Eh, not so much.”
But expectations of what a poem or a story should sound like or even what a blog post should sound like it isn’t just about traditional publishing. It’s about us, too.
THE BLOGGING BRO
There’s an influencer-style man who has 89,000 (or more) followers on Medium, and every single time I read him, he makes me groan.
His writing style has the same cadence as all the big guy bloggers/writers over there. There’s a tone in their sentences that grates me. Yes, I know! I know! I’m not his audience and what he’s doing is obviously working super well for him, which is awesome for him.
But it makes my soul die a bit when I read him—even when we agree.
Why?
That’s the question, right? Is it his tone? Is it how he’s saying things? Is it that his voice sounds just like all the people who are emulating him?
Or is it that there never seems to be any substance behind those thoughts? That despite the fact that he espouses a philosophical/deep personality, he spouts out random details (I have this many friends, this many followers, make this much money) that have a bit boasting metrics in every single post?
Or is it that he just complains about things (we are lonely) without ever helping. It’s a bit like a political candidate talking in soundbytes to a loving audience without ever throwing out any substance.
He’s not the only person doing this and that might be my worry really. There is an industry doing this. For every deeper thought blog (Andrew Revkin, Heather Cox Richardson, and so on), there are twenty of these much more shallow guys with the same exact voice.
The question is why.
Forbes writes, “As a society, many of us are hungry for people we trust, whether they're disc jockeys or influencers, to make recommendations for us. This puts influencer marketing, when defined more broadly, on very safe ground.”
So that makes me wonder what it is about these guys’ style that makes people trust them. How do you trust someone you only know via the page (or the screen)?
And the same goes for poems. Do we only trust poets’ insights if they have the cadence of Robert Frost, if there is one literary allusion and one landscape and/or biology reference thrown into the poem?
How much does and has “influence” and expectations of voice and presentation influenced us?
THE CONVERSATION’S GAME
Back in the early 2020s, The Conversation held a social experiment to try to understand influence.
“We designed a laboratory model of social influence in the form of a game to be played by three people: one client and two advisers. The client has to buy one of two lottery tickets but has no information about which is better. The advisers, who have private access to such information, and compete for being hired by the client.
“Our model, much like social influence in real life, is a zero-sum game: one adviser’s success is the other’s failure. This allowed us to use game theory to find an optimal strategy for the adviser.
“Our analysis of game theory showed that a clear strategy can be formulated: if you already have influence (if you are hired), be vague and stay close to the truth. If, conversely, you are ignored, be loud, exaggerate and, if necessary, just lie to stand out,” they wrote.
They had over 800 participants. They played multiple versions.
What did they find?
“We found that strategic distortion of the truth outperformed honest advising in winning over and retaining individual clients in up to 80% of the time. When advisers were strategically dishonest, they also succeeded in swaying groups of clients who elected their adviser democratically in each round,” they wrote.
THE CHARACTERISTICS OF COMPETITION FOR INFLUENCE
There are three things that stand out in the study:
information asymmetry,
delegation of future decisions
intractable uncertainty.
Information assymmetry is just that the influencer/blogger/politician seems to (or does) know more about things than you do. It’s how I felt about that very brilliant poetry editor. It’s how many authors feel about agents and editors. It’s how we feel about people in law and medical fields and other specialties. And lots of times they truly know so much more than we might. That’s the beauty of specialization, right?
Delegation of future decisions just means we give people the power to make decisions for us. Politicians do this. City councilors often make budget choices for a community. In book clubs, you are sent pre-selected books. In box clubs, boxes of products (art, food, meals, beauty products) are preselected and sent to us. Doctors often do this. DOT engineers do this when it comes to designing roads even.
Intractable uncertainty is a bit harder. It’s basically when we can’t figure out the answer to a question easily or using traditional methods. Our decision making methods are challenged because the issue might be really complex.
When people compete for social influence they often say they know the future. We often believe them. They are often very very wrong.
Think:
Someone says, “I know how to get your book published. And we will absolutely get it published. It will be an international best seller if you just listen to me.”
You think, “You are awesome! Yes! I will listen to you.”
Then your book does not get published.
WHY DOES THIS MATTER?
It matters because I say it does. Just kidding! Just kidding! Working on a little information asymmetry there.
It matters because I see this happening in big and small ways that impact our communities and our stories and even our time at poetry readings in small Maine towns.
In the novel writing world, influencers (some who have never published a book) teach others about how to write a novel, parroting the words of their favorite writing coach who is tweaking it from another who is tweaking it from another. The result? Everyone thinks that this one form of writing a novel is the ONLY way to write a novel.
Spoiler: It isn’t.
What is doing is diminishing diversity in plot structure, in voice, and even in topic.
It matters because in the news world (national, international, local), what gets covered and what doesn’t, how it gets covered, what articles get talked about, shape the conversation in that community.
The loudest voices shouldn’t always determine our communities, our news, and our beliefs.
If I dishonestly jump to conclusions in a news article, say that our local group of thespians is corrupt and dishonest (or allude to that) and say that the community is falling apart, then eventually someone is going to yell during a theater performance that they are evil like Sauron (LORD OF THE RINGS) or Napolean (ANIMAL FARM) or just that guy who loudly sucks on chicken wings in the work place. The future I predicted has happened (the community falls apart).
THE SUCCESS OF DISHONESTY
I’m not saying that all the popular bloggers and influencers or politicians or writing coaches or reporters are dishonest. I’m just saying that dishonesty is a strategy a lot of people use in communication. And we have to stop letting that strategy work.
The Conversation writes,
“Our findings suggest that the success of dishonesty is due to our willingness to jump to conclusions in hindsight. This chimes with what research shows on how we assess the choices we have made.
“If an adviser was the only one to predict a bad outcome before it happened, we tend to think that they must have known something that others did not. While this may sometimes be true, often it is just pure luck. A strategic adviser takes advantage of this willingness we have to trust our hindsight to inflate their confidence or even, dishonestly advise against the available evidence simply to stand out.
“An honest adviser, when ignored, is less effective (than their dishonest rival) in persuading the client to shift: commitment to honesty stops them from positioning themselves as a radical alternative if there is no evidence to justify it.
“These kinds of strategies are repeatedly and ruthlessly employed by attention-hungry influencers because they work.”
Let’s say a politician lies. They get caught. They lie again. They get caught again. Still, they have supporters. Still, they win an election. Their influence? It gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
Going back to just influencing, there is a huge market there.
“If you’re a marketer, by now you probably know the numbers — or you’re just not paying attention. Influencer marketing is on a tear. The industry is expected to grow to a worth of $13.8 billion this year, compared to $9.7 billion in 2020, and it's predicted to grow 30.3% annually through 2028,” Forbes wrote in 2021.
HOW DOES THIS CIRCLE BACK TO THAT POETRY EDITOR?
What I worry about mostly is that in our attempts to fit in, to survive monetarily or even just with our desire to be accepted and succeed, that we might change our voice to fit what is popular and accepted.
There’s a lot that can go wrong when we don’t sound like the expectation. We might not get a publishing deal, get into the poetry journal, find enough subscribers/readers to warrant sponsorships so we can pay for food.
But there’s also a lot that can go wrong by changing our voice to fit those expectations. We can lose ourselves and the people who find us and read us (or finds us and just hang out with us) can lose their voice too, lose another example of difference for the sake of sameness or refinement.
That’s not necessarily an awesome trade-off even if you do get 89,000 followers eventually or a poem published in that journal. Not if you lose who you are. And your voice? That’s a huge part of who you are.