Finding Your Literary Voice… Twice

Once I decided I was going to write a book, I did what seemed perfectly logical to me: I bought books and books about how to write a book.

For those who know me, this will not come as a surprise.

At the time, I still didn’t know whether I was writing a novel, a play, a self-help book, a biography, or a memoir. But I studied and studied. Eventually, once I understood what kind of book I was writing, and once I was finally ready to begin, one elusive question remained unanswered:

What is my voice?

Or worse:

What is my literary voice?

I became obsessed with the question.

I knew my business voice. I knew how to write a strategic plan, a board memo, a speech, a marketing brief. But my literary voice? I worried I did not have one.

After all, I cannot sing, even though I can play the piano. So I have no singing voice. What if I didn’t have a writing voice either?

You may be smiling and thinking, Mon Dieu, Marie Lynne, tu te casses le bicycle — which loosely translates as: you are making this way too complicated.

But seriously, I felt that if I didn’t have a voice, nothing meaningful would come out on the page.

A big aha came when I realized that everyone has a Voice. Even me.

Because voice does not come from the vocal cords. It comes from the heart. It is the most personal thing we have to say in this world. It is our uniqueness — the imprint of being one particular human being on this planet.

The “literary” part of literary voice is simply the creative expression of that uniqueness.

So, if you remain true to who you are, the literary voice will follow.

I wish it were quite that simple.

Literary voice does have a few more features. It includes tone, structure, rhythm, emotional register, word choice, and the way a writer sees and shapes the world. For me, the privilege of becoming a writer was discovering and playing with all of this, not only to write a book, but to uncover more of who I was under the hood.

Words are a privilege. They allow self-excavation, reflection, frustration, surprise, and experiences we could never have planned.

Since I began this writing adventure, one of the questions I have been asked most often is:

Why did you write in English, Marie Lynne?

At first, the question did not trouble me. I knew I would eventually translate the book en français.

What I did not expect was that I would not simply translate it.

I rewrote it.

And rewrote it again.

With the help of three human professionals — and a little AI — all of whom helped me listen more closely to the French language.

What an experience it has been.

Steven G. Kellman might say I was using my “translingual imagination.” Since I was translating a memoir — my own lived experience — the process forced me to return to the memories themselves. I had to go back into the stories and find the words that would make them emotionally resonant in French, both for me and for the reader.

It meant reliving the scenes: the sad ones, the frustrating ones, the tender ones, the joyful ones. The emotional roller coaster began all over again.

There is a reason French is often called the language of diplomacy. It is incredibly precise. It requires attention to levels of familiarity, word choice, tone, musicality, and cultural nuance. All writing has music, but French offers a different palette. Sentence composition is different. Punctuation is different. The emotional temperature of a phrase can shift with the smallest word.

I now understand why some AI translations sounded too flowery and why others could not quite capture the emotional resonance. They could translate the sentences, but not always the heartbeat underneath them.

In the end, I discovered that translation is not about having a divided voice.

It is about having a voice that expands.

It is about encountering another emotional register of the self who wrote the first book. Fidelity is not about producing identical sentences. It is about preserving emotional truth.

In some ways, it is as if the memoir was not entirely complete until I met it again in French.

Somewhere in the passage between the two languages, I found another part of myself. And I was reminded that perhaps I am a bridge after all.

What a privilege it is to translate the untranslatable.

What a gift to make my heart sing in two languages.

Bienvenue à L’éveil inattendu.