wrestling with subordinate clauses

Much is made in books on writing and writing workshops on "finding your voice." Most often "finding your voice" means writing with emotional honesty about the life you know. The promise is, having engaged in this type of raw and patient practice, that your voice will emerge naturally, producing in its "echoes" work that is original and authentic.

Okay, 1) I'm not arguing with this theory and 2) I generally agree with this practice, to a point. My problem with this technique, especially to the exclusion of other techniques, is that it doesn't help the young writer fully understand and appreciate the nature of style and allow for a means by which he or she may try out or adopt certain stylistic features, finding that perfect fit, suited to the writer.

And so, the young writer hears in a workshop that one shouldn't begin a novel with dialogue (though Ayn Rand does it strikingly in Atlas Shrugged, or one shouldn't employ the use of multiple first person points of view (except Faulkner does it hauntingly in As I Lay Dying). I know, I know. I hear it already, "But you're not Ayn Rand, dear." And, "He's William Faulkner, so he can." Poppycock. Emulation is, in part, how we learn. It's how we learn to tie our shoes, ride a bike, cook a meal. Emulation, practice, and trial and error.

I've debated this issue with writers before, especially when it comes to employing techniques used by "the greats," but discouraged for beginning writers, and most often times from short-sighted, though well-meaning, workshop hosts. So, it was refreshing today to stumble upon Nicholas Delbanco's essay "From Echoes Emerge Original Voices," published in print and online in Collected Essays from The New York Times. Delbanco's premise is that "To engage in imitation is to begin to understand what originality means."

In the article, Delbanco describes a course he teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan, during which students study and imitate the styles of great writers in order to understand how style may be reflective of a system of values and an author's perception of "reality" and how the writer conveys that reality to the reader. What Delbanco hopes emerges is not young writers trying to sound like older writers but writers whose emerging voices emanate from an awareness of style and the importance of the small details: punctuation choices, short, clipped sentences, incantatory repetition, or (as has been criticized in my work) the selective use of subordinate clauses. I see the world as a dependent clause, joined by a series of subordinate clauses, finished by a period. It's my style. Don't tell me not to do it because I'm not yet recognized.

Delbanco explains, "We can tell the way a writer thinks by looking at his or her desire to use say, the apposite comma or, as a sentence nears completion, the subordinate clause." In the following paragraph, he points to Virgina Woolf's use of parenthesis in To the Lighthouse. I'm no Virgina Woolf, but neither was she (until she was).

I say, carry on beginning writers. Emulate. Practice. Try on different styles, studying every choice the greats make, or don't make. In doing so, you will begin to understand what you are trying to say to the world and the best way to say it.