Finding your voice: Part 1 of 10

Nathalie Goldberg in her book Writing Down The Bones emphasises the importance of writing practice. Until I read that book, it seemed that the advice that writers give to aspiring writers is to go out and write. You can't teach creativity, that's something inside you, or so it's assumed to be. Just write.

There's the story of novelist Lewis Sinclair when asked to give a lecture at Columbia University, walked up to the podium and asked the students, how many of you here are really serious about being writers? Many hands shot up. And then he said, well then, why the hell aren't you at home writing? And he walked off the podium. Now that was instructive in some way. The message, that the only way to learn something is to do it. The only way to get better at writing is to write. Nathalie Goldberg takes this a step further and introduces writing practice. An exercise in which you sit down and you pen down what comes. Thinking, but not. Not worrying about the things that normally you'd worry about when writing. Sentence structure, grammar, punctuation and even, logic. Just going on and on. Letting your hand get used to putting down letters, words, sentences and paragraphs. Just keeping the pen on the paper and not lifting it up, so to speak.

It's a wonderful book and if you haven't read it, I suggest you do. What I found, during writing practice, is that it's easy to start. It's amazingly easy to put down a couple of thoughts and then you lose that trail. What Natalie calls, the monkey brain starts to edit your words. And when this editing starts, you lose traction and stop. That's probably why it's easy to write simple comments, short stories, observations, make witty comments. But it's difficult to pen entire novels and weave whole stories. After a while your hand gets tired. Writing practice engages your hands so that when you are doing serious writing, it doesn't get tired. After all, your brain doesn't get tired.

Have you ever wondered how easy it is to keep that running dialogue in your head going? It's easy to have a conversation with yourself for a long time. You can sit down, close your eyes and have a discussion about anything and this discussion can last for hours. But to sit down and do the same thing on paper is difficult. Why? How different is that discussion in your head from the one on paper?

The first reason has to do with censorship. In your head, you're brainstorming. Literally. There's no censor in there and if she's in there, the censorship becomes part of the discussion. That's your own voice arguing with itself. On paper, it's different. You're putting down words that the world might see. You're baring your soul, and that's difficult to do. The mumbled, garbled thoughts that cancel each other out, going nowhere sometimes, aren't confusing. Even if you're in a dreamlike state, thinking about something that's going to happen. Say, a vacation. You imagine in your head packing your stuff, getting the suitcase from the store. Finding everything that you need in your closet and buying the ones that you don't have. Toothpaste, brush, towels, hoping that they have soap and toiletries. You anticipate calling the cab to take you to the airport if you're flying. You can see this cab in your head clearly. It's a black cab driven by a foreigner. You could describe this person and the musty smell in the cab. The small talk all the way to the airport. Checking in and eventually taking off. You are comfortable. Probably it's a cruise and you can see the ship. Walking up the gangway, wondering why they even call it a gangway. You're excited now and as you sit there dreamily, all you can think of is how small your cabin might be. But you don't care since all you need to do is drop your stuff in there and head for the bar. It's the bar that you were thinking of all that time that you were packing. All the time that you were buying the suitcase and putting your clothes in it, you were imagining sitting at the bar, on a barstool, or perhaps on one of those comfy chairs as they served you a nice cool drink. Perhaps it's a beer, or a Martini.

You see, all of this can run around in your head quickly, fast and furious and you can sit and even dream up people you're going to meet. The captain, who you don't take a liking to immediately, but later proves to be an asset as they help you use ships services that are off limits. That guy you're going to meet, handsome, perhaps, or rich. The money that you wish you had, you now have. Perhaps this entire trip was forged in your mind from having imagined to have won the lottery. You're rich beyond imagination and your first item is to take this long deserved vacation.

Thinking is fast, writing is slow but you still have the ability to keep the hand moving, like the mind. The main difference is that in the mind, you never censor your thoughts. You never think consciously about correct grammar or word placement. If the words aren't there, the pictures take their place. The description of the car isn't a literal one. It's a picture in your mind but you can see the details. You just don't need to mouth them. It occurs in your mind in a vivid flash.

Natalie's book taught me something really important about that aspect of writing. That monkey brain needs to be quietened. That you can write down what comes to your mind without thinking and then later censor, or edit, it. Not worrying about who's going to read it and what they're going to say about it. It doesn't matter, in much the same way as thinking and feeling. You are sitting in a meeting, the speaker is going on and on about something or the other, boring you to tears. You're trying majestically to stay awake and so you recede into your mind. As they flick the PowerPoint slide to display a graph that you care nothing about, you're already on the beach in Honolulu. Doesn't matter that you've never actually been there, the only thing is that you've seen magazine pictures of Honolulu and can overlay feelings of beaches that you've actually been to. Looking around the conference room, you can see that other people are also on vacation. Nobody's writing. They're all just staring at the speaker, but many of them aren't here.

That's the first part of finding your voice. Your writing voice. Quietening down monkey brain. Taking a pen and keeping the hand moving. Not worrying about what you're writing. In Writing Down The Bones, Natalie Goldberg has some excellent ideas on how to keep the hand moving and the ideas flowing. Stephen King in his book On Writing discusses how he does his craft, writing. He starts with a question. What if... and that leads to the movement of the hand. In the book Cujo he talks about what would happen if the family dog decided to attack the family. Natalie also has some ideas on questions that you might ask yourself as you continue to write. When you get to that point where you put a period, the sentence ended, having forgotten what you were going to say next, and you pause. That pause lasting a few seconds, coming dangerously close to lasting minutes and then to the point where you get up to get a drink of water. Natalie shows us how to ask the next question to start the hand moving again.

You talk to yourself all the time in your head, so you need to learn to talk to yourself on paper. It's something like I'm doing right now. Having a conversation with you. This is actually the way we'd talk. In our discussion though, you'd be an active participant, and you'd have your own input, things to say. In a novel, I'd make those up, just like I'd make up the dialogue that would happen as I walked up the gangway onto the cruise ship. I can already see the crew at the top in their ship's whites waiting to check my boarding ticket. Welcome to the QEW, may I see your boarding pass please? Or something like that. Maybe not as rigid, but when you're thinking in your head, you don't have to worry about being impressive all the time.

Just talk to yourself, yatter about, yak on without a care as to who's listening. Once you get the hang of writing practice, you'll be able to go on for pages, and hours, without stopping.

In the next segment, we'll talk more about that voice. How does it actually sound in your head and how to we extract it onto paper.