Finding your voice: Part 3 of 10

So it's all in your head, and you need to write it as it sounds. You shouldn't care, at least not initially, about political correctness, but should just wander about the literary landscape painting the colours you see and chopping down the walls with your bare hands. Sometimes it might be necessary to trip up small children and laugh but it's not evil, it's only rolling about in your head.

And there are times when you'll reach a road block. You can't seem to go further. Or in runners terms, you hit the wall. Your muscles are laced with lactic acid and you can't move an additional step. But somehow, you take one more. You stop thinking about the distance, about the pain, about how long its taking you and how much further you still have to go. You're down to the sub atomic level. Thinking only about that next step.

And so it is with writing. During writing practice, you'll be tempted to go over to the fridge and fetch a glass of water. Perhaps just a quick drink. You remember suddenly that all important email you were supposed to send, and it's amazing how communicative we are on email. We can write volumes. But it's back to writing practise and you're stumped. You can't move a muscle.

With writing practise, writing exercises, and writing novels, short stories or anything else that you're trying to communicate, you have to free your mind to think and put down anything that it wants to. It makes no sense to censor yourself at the start line since you won't be able to get off the blocks when the gun goes off. When the gun goes off, you won't be ready to race to the finish and you'll stay where you are, adjusting your shoes, untying and tying your shoe laces, since they aren't just right. Wondering if you look OK in those blue shorts, or perhaps you should wear something brighter. Perhaps you should take a sip of water before you run, after all, you want to be properly hydrated before you run. And that's another excuse. Sometimes when we sit down to write, we want to pen down our best thoughts, we don't want to just write anything, we want the stuff that comes out to have been filtered to purity. Like cool refreshing aqua spring water, but with all the minerals and deposits ionised and then the water distilled. There's nothing in there but hydrogen and oxygen molecules.

But we know the truth. We aren't on our best form all the time. We're barely at our best for more than a few seconds each day, and some days are best forgotten altogether. Yet we're still able to do some of the most basic things. Writing isn't one of them. Thinking is. We're able to think through good feelings and bad feelings. We're even able to relate these feelings to our friends and co-workers. "You'll never believe the weekend I just had!" you exclaim as you launch into a fifteen minute monologue over lunch. And our ancestors knew that this was the best way to pass on information, from person to person, word of mouth. I watched the movie Shaka Zulu, sometime back. In it, the movie, Shaka's introduced to writing as a means of communication or preservation of history. In that movie, we're led to believe that Shaka distrusts the written word though he learns enough to write down his name and sign a dubious treaty giving away land to some British explorers.

And our ancestors acted out plays in the evening. These plays, drama, supposed to pass on their knowledge to the youth and entertain as well. By repeating various parts of the story, the message is continually reinforced. Stories of victories won, loves lost, growing up and becoming a warrior, judging good and evil, praying, respect. These lessons were taught by the spoken word and by the acted play. Not transmitted by writing.

In the second lesson in this series, we talked about non-stop writing without thinking. Just pour out what's in your head. Just write and not edit. Don't even stop to think about the words you just wrote or the sentence you just constructed. You'll come back to it later. Later it will be easier to kill it, erase it and forget it, because you didn't put too much effort into putting it down. Shouldn't take much to kill it. But don't think of that now. You'll come to that later. Right now it's time to direct our attention to that table, or that person, or that latte, or that cup of coffee. It's time to keep the hand moving.

In this lesson, we're emphasising the ability to talk to ourselves in stories, whole complete stories. Where in writing practise we don't stop but we do things in a disconnected way, here, we do the same thing, but when we get tired, when that call for a drink of water comes, we don't stop. In order to do this, we'll have to have a mechanism of timing ourselves. This could be time, but I think the better measure is distance. When I run, I have a loop that's about 14 kilometres that I must run. If I run fast, I can make it in about an hour and fifteen minutes. If I'm slow, an additional five minutes appears from nowhere. I've even been known to finish this in an hour and thirty minutes. I was really tired that morning and that's my excuse. In any case, when constructing a story, I'd encourage the use of distance, this time by using a page as a measure of distance. So, start your story, and commit yourself to writing at least two pages. If it takes you thirty minutes, woo hoo! Of you go, perhaps add another page, consider it a lap of honour for your first place finish. If it takes you fifteen minutes, boy, were you hot that day or what! If it takes an hour to write two pages, well, perhaps we'll do better next time. Glad that's over. Whew, it was tough getting past that last four or five sentences. When you're on that second page, you're heading down the home stretch, you know you only have to do half the distance you've already done. One word at a time. And so, even though you can find something else to do, just keep typing, or writing, watching the lines as they roll off, one at a time.

Sometimes, it's not about fidgeting with the quality of the thought, but just making the thought. You have this idea in your head, you just can't get it on paper, but it has something to do with paper, and something also about roughness, colours are there also, but you can't define it. It's during the day and slowly as you're thinking out loud, and on paper, much like I'm doing right now, you begin to define the path you're walking on. At first it's a grassy opening, and as you walk up and down, trampling the grass, you begin to form a path that's defined. You can see the earth. You recognise how you should walk. And later, you'll be able to lead people down that path.

This section then emphasises what we stared in part 2. Just write, find that voice in your head, catch it and transfer it to paper. And when distractions come, like those moments when you feel better if you just switch on the television, for background noise you tell yourself, or go get a glass of water, pass by the washroom and then you're suddenly fascinated by the dust on the living room floor, give yourself a quota. A set of pages that must be completed before you get up. Consider it the 35 kilometer mark in the 42 kilometer marathon. You have seven more kilometres left. They may not be your best work, but if you keep running daily, writing daily, thinking out loud daily, you'll form a habit and it will get easier and easier to pen things down.