Cancer (or its treatment) has robbed Christopher Hitchens of his speaking voice, and in his latest Vanity Fair column he ponders what this means in terms of writing and life and the writing life. The essay is wonderful for his tips on writing -- which make sense to me -- but it is also full of the kind of grace notes that only Hitchens, and perhaps only Hitchens under a death warrant, can produce. A taste:

When you fall ill, people send you CDs. Very often, in my experience, these are by Leonard Cohen. So I have recently learned a song, entitled If It Be Your Will. Its a tiny bit saccharine, but its beautifully rendered and it opens like this:If it be your will,That I speak no more:And my voice be still,As it was before ...I find its best not to listen to this late at night. Leonard Cohen is unimaginable without, and indissoluble from, his voice. (I now doubt that I could be bothered, or bear, to hear that song done by anybody else.) In some ways, I tell myself, I could hobble along by communicating only in writing. But this is really only because of my age. If I had been robbed of my voice earlier, I doubt that I could ever have achieved much on the page. I owe a vast debt to Simon Hoggart of The Guardian (son of the author of The Uses of Literacy), who about 35 years ago informed me that an article of mine was well argued but dull, and advised me briskly to write more like the way that you talk. At the time, I was near speechless at the charge of being boring and never thanked him properly, but in time I appreciated that my fear of self-indulgence and the personal pronoun was its own form of indulgence.To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk? That had its duly woeful effect. I told them to read every composition aloud, preferably to a trusted friend. The rules are much the same: Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Dont say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, its very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.

H/T: The Dish