every voice has its own kind of silence

If you find a story - I say find, because stories are half-found, half-invented. When there is a story there, this is only the beginning of the task because then the voice for telling that story has to be found and that's the most difficult part of all. Each story, ideally, has its right voice. Sometimes voice can actually mean the voice of the narrator who takes over the telling of the story. But even if the story is told completely in the third person, the story has a voice and that voice has to be found, and only that voice can do justice to that story. I think this question of voice is so important because stories depend not only on what is said, but maybe even more on what is not said. They depend upon silences. And every voice has its own kind of silence, jumping over the unsaid.

 

- John Berger, in conversation with Eleanor Wachtel. As published in More Writers & Company: New Conversations with CBC Radio's Eleanor Wachtel.