Finding your voice: Part 2 of 10

In the first section, we discussed that voice in your head. That running dialogue that you maintain during your waking state. When you're asleep, it's called dreaming. Entire epic stories are created, fabricated, while you sleep. While you're awake, going through the motions of work, play, associating with co-workers, salespeople, negotiating your way through traffic, on the road, on the side-walks, you're taking in the sights and analysing them. Thinking about them, comparing them with sights, smells, sounds that you've heard before. Creating your own story. Imagining your own history. Later, when you're back in your home, you can retell it to your spouse, your children, your brother or sister, or simply sit and think about it.

There's no way to stop the analysis from happening and two friends watching a sports game will each be watching a different game. Their viewpoint is what makes the story. Like that scene from the television show Seinfeld where Kramer and Newman are telling Jerry, George and Elaine what happened outside a ballgame. It's where they accuse Keith Hernandez of spitting on them after a Mets game. It's a short idea but well played out. The story's funny and Jerry, who wasn't at the game provides the analysis, and the joke. I like detail like that. It's part of my personality. I'll be walking across the street and see someone walking towards me and I can assume, by the way they walk, by their demeanour, what type of mood they're in and I try to guess what they're thinking about. Most people are inside their heads all the time and I believe that most of us, even when we're out and about, we're preoccupied by what's going on in our heads.

George Carlin, a man who I believe to be extremely intelligent once did a skit about the stuff that people have. In the skit, he talks about the number of cars that American families own. The gadgets that they carry around with them when they go on vacation. In particular, video cameras. The craziness of videotaping everything that we encounter and not taking the time just to stop and enjoy it, live. We're saving it for later so that we can relive the thing that we're missing while videotaping it. As though it's not important for us to be in the moment, rather it's important for us to collect the imagery, the sounds and the pictures, so that we can show them off to our friends and relatives who couldn't make it.

In the first section we also discussed Natalie Goldberg's writing practice. The art of sitting down for a timed writing session and keeping your pen on the paper, not letting yourself stop and edit words. It's important to make it as realistic as it really is. When you're inside your head, your dialogue with yourself isn't edited. However, when you sit down to write, you feel pressed to make sure that the words you put down actually say what you mean to say. Even though, you will probably construct about ten sentences in your head, and only write one of them down. Having discarded the other nine. The tenth, you think, is the real thought.

And so the challenge in this second part is to try out Natalie Goldberg's writing practice, but with a twist. The words that are in your head should not be edited, but should be written as thought. But there's a problem here, a real problem. Your mind works lightning fast, and your hand isn't so fast. Even if you decide that your writing instrument of choice is the computer, and you're a very fast typist, you'll find that your hand slows you down greatly. While it was possible to take in a view from a lookout in one great sweep, writing down that one great sweep takes time.

And so here's my suggestion to get over this handicap, this disability. Edit the writing, but not the imagery. See the scene in your head and ask your hand to move and write, but as your mind moves on to the next thought, cut yourself off and continue with that next thought. Just don't stop your mind from moving on and thinking. And the reason for this is that you really can't stop your mind from thinking. While you sit and write the words, the auto mobile was moving along the German autobahn and blurring the landscape behind it, you couldn't make out the trees any more, only smudged green and brown tones, and some blue from the sky peeking behind. The black car also a smudge on a grey background, the lines on the road, invisible. Your mind's already thinking of the weather and the other cars around the one you're writing about. So at some point you continue with red smudges of red cars, blue smudges of blue cars and bright yellow smudges of yellow cars, mostly Volkswagens, the German car of choice, of course the latest Volkswagens, not those unsightly beetles that they sold in mass in the late seventies, but gorgeous, sleek, aerodynamic engineering marvels, the sharks of the land. And again you're already switched to the engines and the noise and the other stuff that cars and motion mean to you.

And when you get stuck, and bored, you can imagine, what would it be like for one of these things to take flight? How about something falling from the sky? How about falling asleep on the wheel, lulled to sleep by the quietness of everything? You can even get crazy and interrupt yourself because you are now thinking of that boss that grinds you at work, and you're all of a sudden feeling the angst of loss of power. Doesn't matter what you write, the important thing is to keep your hand moving.

Get the point. The car, the autobahn was my example, but yours could be the lion chasing you, in the zoo, you transforming into spider-man and swinging to safety. Or winning the Nobel prize for physics, or chemistry. Or the underwater coral growing so fast that the ships are unaware of the dangers. The sharks in the water. The rain falling so hard that they knock the squirrels unconscious. It's the heavy water, the deuterium in the water that's causing the density. How on earth did you move from the autobahn to the heavy deuterium? Who cares, the point is, that's how your brain's working and that's all that really matters. Writing the stuff that's in your head.

You can begin your writing with the words, I see... and continue from there. Or I think... and continue from there. Or The noise... and so on. I think's a particularly good one since you can extrapolate from that point to anywhere in the universe. Same with I see. I see a day when the African continent reclaims the Sahara desert, much like the Dutch reclaimed parts of the sea and made it into habitable land. Windmills are also interesting and can provide a few minutes of writing.

So the idea behind this second post, Finding your voice: Part 2, urges you to write, anything, the more disconnected, the better. You can review it later and see how your mind actually works. You'll be surprised that it isn't as disconnected as you might think originally.