Finding your voice: Part 4 of 10

In the first three sections, parts, we've discussed the voice in the head and how to make use of that dialogue to keep the pen on the paper, or the fingers on the keyboard. Keep moving because there's no silence in your train of thought and so the words coming off your hand shouldn't be edited.

We've also seen how the written word is often edited because it exposes us to the world. The thoughts in our head can't get us fired. We can think what we want and nobody, not even the police or the best judge, can really know what's there. But when we write it, we commit it to the world. We expose ourselves and say, hey! Here's what I think about you and your show, and we stand the risk of a million "boos" coming back our way. We need to be able to write without fear.

We've touched a bit on the procrastination theme, how other things surrounding you seem so much more fun to do but that if you time yourself, give yourself that five minutes to write down anything, or that half a page, then it's easier to get going. Once you start, it's normally easy to get going until, of course, you run into a wall, a blank. Your character's dead. They've been sitting there idly doing nothing but contemplating and they need some action to get the blood moving. That's the time you let that beast out of your head and let them patrol the grounds. Don't be afraid to just say what's wrong with the picture, you can always edit it out later.

And so now we reach the next part of keeping yourself motivated and going. In his memory building book, and course, Dr. Bruno First describes various techniques for building a strong memory. One of them is placing unusual situations, or unusual objects next to each other. For example, say you have to go to the grocery store and buy some milk, you know that you'll forget it when you get there, so you close your eyes and picture the grocery store, but it's damaged. There's a huge milk leak and volumes of milk, like the Niagara falls, are pouring out of the front doors of the grocery store in tidal waves. People are drowning and the parking lot's a debris of washed up cars smashed against each other from the torrential milk storm coming out of the store. You can hear the screaming of anguished people and the sirens of approaching fire engines. The trick is that when you approach the grocery store, the image of the store will conjure up the disaster you saw so clearly in your mind. You'll be able to conjure up the image since it was so graphic. And so unusual. Don't imagine yourself walking up to the cash to pay for the milk. Imagine yourself lugging a huge carton of milk, about six times your size, on your back, grunting and groaning, all the way to the cash and you slip as you're about to put it on the cashier's conveyor, where it wouldn't have fit anyway, and you fall down the milk carton crushing you under it. That's how graphic it has to be.

But it doesn't have to be all about pain. That was fun for me to write since I like to put together stuff like that, but you need to take the familiar and put it adjacent the unfamiliar. When you see the familiar, it will evoke the unfamiliar and your memory will be that much better.

How do we use this in our writing. Well, you're moving along and things are going honkey dorey.  Your character isn't setting up the scene very well. They're kinda boring, lethargic and you need to inject them with something. Well, here's where you break into the scene and fast forward them into the future, or the past. Yes, the past is always interesting, all kinds of things lurking in the dark. And you do something that I've repeatedly asked you not to do. You pause, for an instant as you put this character in an unusual situation. The inquisition perhaps. The Indianapolis 500 perhaps. In the middle of an airline descent, on one engine. Running for their life, being chased by a werewolf that was her brother. You get the picture. All of a sudden, your character has to save themselves. Yes, it's a way to continue to go on to keep trucking on. Your image doesn't have to veer completely off track. You might be stuck because you were going too deeply into the financial problems that brought your character to their despicable state. They were screwed royally by their accountant and you're relating tax issues that got the mortgage payment re-assessed. They were destitute on the verge of being kicked out of their home. You're putting your reader to sleep and boom, all of a sudden, your character is stalking the accountant. You've got them pinned and are asking them a dozen questions in the basement of a building a mile under the ground. Nobody's going to hear them scream. Not a soul. Your sharp instruments are prepared but you're not quite ready. You're now a hacker and you need to see if you can reduce this snivelling worm to dust, like he's done with your life. You don't want to overplay this since we're only looking for breath so that we can continue. Later, we'll come back to edit out the parts we don't need.

Unusual circumstances are great for the writing practises. You can combine anything you want and it will work because your mind works that way. You look at the keyboard and you feel the letters, and see the words. The constant backspacing irritates you if you're a good typist. You tell yourself that perhaps it's the keyboard's fault. You continue to analyse your feelings and then you burst into another thought. What would happen, just think about this for a minute, what would happen if you didn't have to use your hands to write. If your thoughts could display themselves on paper. Would it be the same thing or is there a craft, a sense of work ethic, if you are using your hands to craft something. Like a painting that appears because you close your eyes and see it. Is it better, different than one that slowly is formed by painstakingly dipping a brush into paint and placing strokes on the paper?

Even in this article, there's been a fair amount of play, jumping from one thought to the next, not structured or formed. Something that would make an English literature teacher scream and run for their gun, or rope. But this type of censorship doesn't happen in your head and this is what finding your voice is all about. It's about not judging what you're writing, not censoring immediately, till you've had a chance to put it aside and read it later. You're mind is a wandering vessel always doing things you don't want it to do and that's what you want to capture. If you stop and think and try to arrange things in your mind, then it will feel fake and stifled.