In Lots of Them I was agreeing that loving the sound of your own voice is a bad thing in a writer; it's like the dinner-party talker who is so busy singing their song that they ignore who their audience is and how they're reacting. And of course the fact that with a novel the singer and the audience are at one remove from each other doesn't absolve you of the duty - not to mention the common commercial horse-sense - to consider them. Then, as I said in Fiddling, hangovers and the Paris Review, we all love the sound of our own voice, except when we're hating it. That's fair enough: if something is a real pleasure for you to read, it probably will be for others; if it clunks each time you read it, however subliminally you register the clunk, it will never be right till you act on that subliminal recognition. Having said that, this kind of "hate", in particular, is as much to do with your nature as the quality of the writing: is your Inner Critic on the rampage? And is "love" actually a "that'll do" reaction which is born of resistance, and so needs interrogating?
And then I started wondering if this question has another side. And, of course, it does. Taking "loving the sound of your own voice" in a different sense, I think it's essential for a writer to love the sound of their voice on the page. Not in the closed-off sense of refusing to consider your audience, but in the sense that this is a piece of writing which only you could have done. It's your voice and/or the voice of characters only you could have created, your sensibility which has imagined and refined and developed the story, your take on life which has formed how it works out. It may not be James Joyce, but it's right, and it's yours.That's not to say that we all think we're geniuses, not least because just about everyone's first efforts at writing will be largely derivative of what they read. That's as it should be: where else would you start your apprenticeship, but in the workshop of a master, doing the kind of writing which has worked on you as you want to work on your future readers? And most of us never will be geniuses. But a shrewd post on Victoria Mixon's blog suggests that it's important to get used to recognising when you're blessed. The very words set off my smug-alarm, but it's true. Once you've discovered how to stand outside your own work, and got through the Ugly Duckling stage of realising just how bad you are, realising that your voice on the page, just sometimes, is absolutely right, is a sign that all those wonky ducks are paying off. You're on your way to mastery, because your craft skills are good enough that what you want to say, the story you want to tell - what you are, in some fundamental sense - is making it onto the page.
Realising what and how you write best will, of course, include recognising that there are things which you couldn't possibly write, or not write well enough to be worth trying. Stradivarius no doubt sent percussionists to the drum-maker down the street. I like to pretend that I can write anything, and in the sense of being able to write a one-page parody of most kinds of modern novel, perhaps it's true-ish. But if leaving your models behind is the moment when you move from apprentice to journeyman in the craft of writing, the moment when you move from journeyman to craftsman is when you stand four-square before the Masters of the Guild, not to mention the parents who always wanted you to stick to that safe clerk's job in the Town Council, and say, "This is what I do".
It's at once a cry of triumph, and a sense of loss: an acknowledgement of your limits, but also a blessing.