Voice vs. Persona

I don’t think that LoveCraft the man was necessarily the same as LoveCraft the voice, although I do believe that the two were probably very similar. Unfortunately, this was the first example of his writing that I’ve ever encountered so I could be completely wrong. Basically what Thaisia and Wall say is that the voice an author writes with is their own unequivocal personality. If you apply this to an author such as Stephen King then one would assume he went around swearing like a sailor all the time; I don’t know him so maybe he does, but I don’t imagine that is automatically the case. In the case of LoveCraft the language he uses in his writing is pretty typical for the time period in which he wrote. LoveCraft could have used his own personality for inspiration for his characters, but he could also have characters that are vastly different from the one present in this story. While an author’s overall personality must definitely affect the way that he or she writes, it does not mean that every character or story is written with the exact same voice. Many authors draw upon people they know for inspiration for their characters. This means that they aren’t using their own qualities as inspiration, but the behavior of someone else. The very fact that an author can base characters on anyone else shows that an author’s personality and his or her voice is not the same thing. I do think that an author’s personality is intertwined into any given work though. Their sense of humor or their general outlook on life may affect the twists and turns a story goes through before it reaches its dramatic conclusion. The voice of an author is a very important tool for writing, but I don’t agree that it is the same thing as their actual persona.