Writing in other people's voices
Two singers, side by side. One flawless, every syllable in place. The other breathes in the wrong places, is not even beautiful, and you know him in two seconds. Roland Barthes called it the grain of the voice: the part no technique produces and no editor would keep. Writing for other people is listening for it.
Ezra Kedem
Weekly food column on NRG, then the website of the daily Maariv and one of Israel's largest news sites. Published under his name. NRG no longer exists; its archive survives, unkempt, on a successor's servers.
“April is not a good month to be a lamb in Israel. If you are a person who likes eating them, that is another story.”
Subheading, 22 April 2005. Translated.
Two columns, two weeks apart. Same man, same format, same writer. Only one of them is him.
“My grandmother Flora made this every Saturday. She was a one-woman empire: thirteen children, each with a family of their own, so on Saturdays she served a hundred people. I remember the bakery man arriving on a bicycle with a hundred Iraqi pitas, and God help him if the quality slipped.”
6 May 2005, translated from the Hebrew
“This is magical food, with tradition, mysticism, legends and songs written about food. As in life, so in seasoning: be moderate when you need to and bold when you need to.”
20 May 2005, translated from the Hebrew
Ezra Kedem is one of the founders of modern Israeli cuisine, the man behind Arcadia in Jerusalem and the mentor of the generation of chefs after him, most of whom passed through its kitchen. A tremendous storyteller, and a man you cannot sit down to write. Nothing of him existed on a page yet; he did not believe in the press, and this is the only column he ever agreed to. The way he talked, the attitude, the food itself, were one of a kind. I wanted to capture that voice, and he would not write a line, so if I wanted it I would have to do it myself. There was no name for this and no one to ask; the whole brief was one word, in Arabic: tfaddal. Be my guest. I named the column Yemey Kedem, "days of old" and "Kedem's days" at once.
What I was given, what I heard, what I did, and how he talks when I am not writing him
Three years later I interviewed him for Maariv's weekend magazine, the week he went on television. The move is the same, and this time the words are his, quoted:
“So I went crazy and made a thing we called le petit sabich: a quail egg, a small pita baked on the spot, an eggplant, a small potato. But you really don't have to.”
The column, 6 May 2005, in his voice
“I can pull a dish from '95 and put it back on the menu, because I saw the future.” “And there is nothing to inflate here. So yes, it's only food.”
The interview, 7 March 2008, his own words
Kedem read this page in September 2026 and approved his name on it. His review, in full: "World league, the two of us."
- What I was given
- Conversation, nothing written. In April: the market, the butcher, what he knows. In early May: a grandmother and a hundred pitas. In late May: one anecdote about a kilo of sumac in New York, and a thesis about restraint.
- What I heard
- Sentences that end early ("That's it."). Opinions with an edge (he insists "sabich" was a man, not a dish). A chef who talks about food from the eater's side of the plate: how to roll it, which way the greens face, why olive oil and not butter, and a numbered method of his own that he says is unlike everyone else's. Two verbal tics I left in on purpose, including the same "but honestly, you don't have to" twice in adjacent paragraphs. And baladi, the word he uses for his eggplants, which is also the word for him: of this soil, and not for export.
- What I did
- Three grades of raw material, three results. The lamb column, quoted at the top, runs on expertise: accurate, sounds like a chef, and any good chef in Israel could have signed it. The breakfast column runs on memory, and no one else could have signed it. The third had neither, and the intro filled with sentences that belong to nobody. Most clients will give you the first kind, expertise, and the text will be good and not theirs. Knowing which of the three you are holding is most of the job. And the lamb joke at the top is not his. It is mine, and it stays where the writer is allowed to speak: in the headline, never in his mouth.
Cristóbal Valenzuela, co-founder and CEO of Runway
LinkedIn post, 2026.
A voice study, not a commission: built only from his public interviews and talks, and neither he nor Runway has seen it. I wrote Valenzuela to prove a method to myself. Before writing a line, I built a system to capture his voice. First an archive: his spoken material, each item tagged by source, date and reliability, so that a personality is never inferred from a few good sentences. Then a voice map in layers: what he thinks, how he builds an argument, how he sounds when he speaks, and what changes when that speech reaches a page. Then a fidelity check every draft has to pass, starting with the swap test. Only then the post.
Why him: almost childlike images carried by layered, in the end philosophical thinking, inside public writing that is largely what every founder in his field writes. The person is an undercurrent that surfaces a sentence at a time; those flashes were enough to convince me there was a whole voice under them.
“When Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, he could not have imagined someone one day saying: "Give Mary a mustache."
No brush. No layers. No selection tool. No need to know which pixels make up her face. Just describe the change.
Written as a LinkedIn post in his voice, not his wordsRead the rest of the post
For most of computing history, you had to meet the machine at its representation. You saw a face. The software gave you pixels, coordinates and selections. That gap is where most creative software has lived.
The gap is not closing because machines started understanding us. It is closing because we stopped having to operate the representation ourselves.
Which means the interesting question is not what these systems understand. It is what is left of a tool once nobody has to hold it.”
What I was given, what I heard, what I did
- What I was given
- Nothing from him. One spoken segment from a 2026 podcast, chosen where he was still thinking aloud rather than delivering a packaged answer. His published essays served only to calibrate how his voice lands on a page, never as text to borrow from.
- What I heard
- He argues from a scene, not from a claim, and the scene is usually art history rather than technology. Short declaratives. A habit of refusing the hype word and replacing it with what actually changed.
- What I did
- Five drafts against seven criteria, the first of them: could this run under another founder's name. One art-historical claim in an earlier draft was checked and turned out to be wrong, and was cut. The mustache is Duchamp's, which he would know.
Two summit scripts, one summer
Full-day summits with ministers, directors general and mayors on stage. Scripts and panel questions for Yael Odem, news anchor, 20 June 2023, and Aviv Frenkel, 4 September 2023. Two regional clusters, the same sector, the same government speaker on both stages.
The same brief twice in three months: every transition, every introduction, and the questions written for each of them to put to their panels. No full recording of either day exists; the Mishor HaHof cluster published a short edited clip. What exists is the two scripts, one with my name on the cover, and the press coverage of both days.
Mishor HaHof, 20 June 2023: press report with photographs, and the cluster's official gallery. Beit HaKerem, 4 September 2023: program announcement.
“Now you're probably asking yourselves what data-driven decisions actually means. And then you say: let's Google it. And I say: Google is itself a database, and your search will help you make a data-driven decision about what the hell I'm talking about.
So what did we have today: 12 speakers, 1,402 words I've said so far, and one shared vision.”
Aviv Frenkel, from the opening and the closing, translated
“I don't need to tell you that you live in one of the most beautiful regions in the country. But beauty isn't everything in life.”
Yael Odem, from the opening and the closing, translated
What I was given, what I heard, what I did
- What I was given
- No interviews with either of them. A program, a speaker list, research on the region and on each panelist, and two public personas: a prime-time anchor, poised and representative, whose authority the audience already trusts; and a charming, quick-witted geek who is never threatening, and who could carry a joke on stage.
- What I heard
- Odem holds a room with transitions; her jokes are quiet and never at a minister's expense. Frenkel holds it with rhythm; the laugh has to land before the next speaker is up. The difference runs into the panel questions too. Hers are an interviewer's: "What did you discover matters to him, and surprised you?" "Where did you fail to compromise?" His are a moderator's, brisk and factual, with one aside about municipalities that still send faxes.
- What I did
- Wrote two host scripts that cannot be confused with each other under near-identical conditions. The two scripts share one paragraph, the introduction of the same government speaker, and it is the least alive paragraph in either. When the material is identical, the text is identical. That is the control group.
A founder's About page
Public-relations agency, founded 1995. Written in the voice of its founder and CEO, 2025. Live on her site under her name.
The same method as the food column, twenty years later, for a positioning text instead of a column. She is not named because the page is hers and one quoted sentence would lead to it. What I can show is the other end: a sentence from the interview that did not go in.
“I didn't finish the degree. I was more interested in crossing America on a motorcycle with my boyfriend, after Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. A year on the motorcycle interested me more.”
From the interview recording, translated. Not in the final text.
What I was given, what I heard, what I did
- What I was given
- One long recorded interview, conducted for this text only. No brief beyond "the About page needs rewriting".
- What I heard
- The word "invented", three times, about three different things, and each time she meant it. "I didn't know anything. What did I do? I started. I just started." A woman who tells her career as a series of rooms she walked into without a job description. And a cadence: "both, and both, and both."
- What I did
- Kept the cadence and the pioneer claim; they are the spine of the page. Left out the motorcycle. An About page is read by a client who wants to know what the outsider does for them, so the motorcycle became one word, outsider, and the year on the road became the list of things she studied instead of public relations. The concrete scene that made the food column work would have made this page about her, not about them. Same method, opposite decision, because the text has a different job.