The fall I moved back to Brooklyn after finishing my MFA program, The Cut published an article that sent a shiver through the city. It recounted how a family in a Jersey suburb received mysterious and sinister letters, so sinister that they abandoned their expensive home and sued the former owners. 

While many readers launched into speculation about who wrote the letters, I was investing my energy elsewhere. Desperate to start my literary career, I spent my days sending my first novel Psycho Loser out to countless agents while juggling two substitute teacher jobs. Although I understood most people’s desire to identify the letter-writer (I love a good whodunnit), what intrigued me was the writer's talents. I mean, look at these lines.

"Do you need to fill the house with the young blood I requested? Better for me. Was your old house too small for the growing family? Or was it greed to bring me your children? Once I know their names I will call to them and draw them too [sic] me." 

Positively gothic! 

"The house is crying from all of the pain it is going through. You have changed it and made it so fancy. You are stealing it’s [sic] history. It cries for the past and what used to be in the time when I roamed it’s [sic] halls.” 

I would have killed to have written these words.

.

Sometimes, the possibility of discovering a sparkly new voice feels like the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning. Now I don't even need to leave bed to get my fix. I hold my phone up to my face, and social media takes care of the rest.

Cathleen Allen a.k.a. timeline.alchemy, a self-proclaimed oracle, materialized on my feed this past fall.

Where do I even start with Allen’s voice? One caption reads: I’m a Connecticut hedge fund wife whose lifestyle was obliterated by sudden onset clairvoyance that started showing me evil spirits behind the veil.

Where else have you seen “hedge fund” in the same sentence as “evil spirits behind the veil"?

Her life didn’t her change. No, her “lifestyle” was “obliterated.” There’s an intensity to her words — “LIFETIMES of horrific karmic abuse” she writes in another reel — that clashes with the serene imagery she chooses to accompany them. Her visual aesthetic is rooted in realism (okay, luxurious realism, but still realism) yet she nonchalantly mentions exorcists and third eye openings. 

This practice of confidently mixing lingo from different worlds is a feature of some of my favorite writers’ voices. George Saunders is the first that comes to mind. This passage from his short story "Sea Oak" about a male stripper in a near-future dystopia is a good example:

Lloyd's finished. We give him a round of applause, and Frendt gives him a Farewell Pen and the contents of his locker in a trash bag and out he goes. Poor Lloyd. He's got a wife and two kids and a sad little duplex on Self-Storage Parkway…

…What a stressful workplace. The minute your Cute Rating drops you're a goner. Guests rank us as Knockout, Honeypie, Adequate, or Stinker. Not that I'm complaining. At least I'm working. At least I'm not a Stinker like Lloyd. I'm a solid Honeypie/Adequate, heading home with forty bucks cash.

Tobias Wolff explores the obsession with voice in his short story "Bullet to the Brain." The main character, Anders, a book critic, spends his dying moments remembering a turn of phrase he heard as a boy: 

Anders is strangely roused, elated, by those final two words, their pure unexpectedness and their music…

…The bullet is already in the brain; it won’t be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end, it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce. That can’t be helped. But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is.

My "They is" might be this line from Denis Johnson's short story "Two Men." The story's narrator, the incorrigible Fuckhead, shares that he made aggressive sexual advances towards a woman right before her husband showed up. Then out he comes this gem: 

The rest of the evening I wondered, every second, if he would come back with some friends and make something painful and degrading happen. 

This line is so special to me. I often post it to my Instagram stories with no context. Because it needs none. It encapsulates what I believe lies at the heart of every worthwhile fictional protagonist: a titillating cocktail of equal parts yearning and fear that life will have its way with them. "Oh, please don't let something painful and degrading happen to me. Not something that would change me forever. Not me. Please no."

.

In the process of writing this essay, I’ve tried to formulate a definition for voice. Something like: voice is how the impact of all the forces in your life - where you’re from, who educated you, what traumatized you — trickles out when you attempt to communicate with the world. Voice is psychological leakage.

My professor Steve Erickson told me George Saunders advised that writers should put all of themselves in their first novels. That your manuscript must be “demented by you." I agree. Whatever story pours forth from you should feel like it can’t have been wrought on this earth by anyone else but you. 

.

During the pandemic, I started following the account of a college student who worked part-time as a baker and spelled her name Isobel with an o instead of an a. I didn't covet her life, but I found myself enraptured by how she told the story of her daily routine. Her selection of moments from her day turned the mundane poetic. Driving to work before sunrise. Her pensive, unadorned face. Her puffy eyes scanning the road. Her red fingers drumming her steering wheel. Tying her apron behind her back then adjusting her messy bun. Egg yolk bubbling from the breakfast sandwich she made herself after she finished her shift. She never spoke, but her voice was unmistakable to me. Irreplaceable. I couldn't get enough.

This inspired me to approach social media as a new medium of narrative. Since 2020, I've created two interactive narratives. You can find them here and here. I hope more writers start to embrace social media's narrative potential.

But social media is performative and curated!

You mean like a novel?

Yes, but social media purports to capture real life.

Early epistolary novels used improbable framing devices to package their narratives. "Look at this intact stack of letters I stumbled upon! Let’s take a peek and see if there’s anything of interest within?"

Yes, but social media is voyeuristic! It's parasocial! Creepy!

Call it what you will. I hope I never lose my insatiable curiosity about other people. Not just what has happened to them. But how they choose to conceal and reveal this information whenever they open their mouth.

.

In his interview for the book The Film That Changed My Life: 30 Directors on Their Epiphanies in the Dark, John Waters shares the line from Wizard of Oz that had a profound impact on him:

When they throw the water on the witch, she says, “Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?”

That line inspired my life. I sometimes say it to myself before I go to sleep, like a prayer.

.

I'm not saying that, as a writer, you should consume social media.

I'm asking, as a writer, how can you resist?