Writing---Finding Your Voice
Without Prejudice
Steven King states in his great little resource book, " On Writing," that if you want to write, sit in the same place every day, same pen or computer, same legal tablet or notebook, and one day your " voice " or " muse " will turn up. Writing is a discipline, a putting on to the screen or paper the words that swirl in your head, that somehow become coherent and make sense.
I recall my V.C.E., Mature Age Teacher saying that writing is drawing a picture but in words. And that you must imagine the person reading them, that you are reaching out to them to evoke a feeling a memory. Easier said than done, but if you love writing, and you would have to love it to keep doing it, then you are blessed. I have read things that even as a child meant so much to me, that gave me such hope, taught me about other people, filled my imagination, entered my dreams, that they resonate with me still.
I can remember as a little girl of 3 or so, seeing another girl write running writing in the dirt on the road. I recall being transfixed by this written thing, jealous of her, as she was already running writing and I wasn't ready yet to print. I wanted this " thing " called writing. I must have ran inside and begged my Mother to teach me, as I could read and write before I went to school.
I can remember that day as if it were yesterday. And yet other memories only come in flashes, little shafts of sun peeping through the white clouds of memory.
The one of the running writing stands out clear, a hot sunny day, a dirt road in Port Augusta, in front of a commission house of pastel blue, kids gathered in bare feet looking at the running writing drawn with a stick in the dirt, a freckle faced boy who then drew dirty pictures and we dispersed. My first introduction to the written word.
I read everything I could get my hands on. The classics, and the Billy Bunters and Williams. My older siblings knowing if their library books went missing who would have them. Beautifully coloured plates inside of religious books that scared me half to death with their crowns of thorns and blood of lambs.
The encyclopaedias Dad brought with him from Scotland, their bindings red and letters of gold, I read them and retained the information, making me good at English and a lover of Trivia, useless trivia unless you are at a Pub Quiz, or so I thought. An Indian man on the boat that took us back to the U.K., when I was 12 was astonished I solved his favourite puzzle immediately.
He knew of adults that couldn't solve it, he said. Neither could Mum and Dad when I asked them. But I had been in training all my life by then. Just reading, learning, reading learning. Always in my room with two or three books at once, read to the end in one go. It was my escape, my hidey hole, my rabbit warren. I would follow Alice down the rabbit hole, sliding down into the world of imagination.
I attended the midnight feasts of boarding schools in England, acted in the plays of William, laced up my pink ribbons on Ballet Shoes, wandered the underground caverns of Wind In The Willows, boated with Ratty, sculling down the river and " messing around in boats ". So much better than the grim realities of poverty struck and parish damned, that was my childhood.
So then I began to write my own stories, cribbing them off Enid Blyton and they were shite, not my voice at all. I wrote a poem for English, shite as well. Gloomy and strange about some Bushranger. But I was a beginner at 10. My voice had to come and it would take practice and screwing up of paper and tossing it.
The hardest part about writing is letting yourself go. Letting go of self consciousness, shyness, stilted words that amuse no one. It's so hard to overcome the self and write as you feel, if you do think about who might read it. You have to overstate the bleeding obvious as if a visitor from mars was reading it but also feel the emotion, feel what it is like to be looking at something. Draw your picture in words. Draw the running writing in the road in explanation.
Who hasn't read something that made them cry ? Made you laugh out loud ? Gripped you so that you keep turning the page ? Changed your life, inspired you ? Not much of a daunting task then to write ? It's the hardest work and the most rewarding, for me, anyway. It's not for the faint hearted. Just sit at a computer and open a vein, commit Hari Kari, exposé your soft underside to ridicule or contempt, not hard at all.
But when you find a voice inside yourself, finally, a voice that is not boring or opinionated or NOISY, or judgmental or trying to convey a hidden message then you are at last at the stage of Flow. And it will flow. And that my friends is why I write, to reach the state of Flow, nothing can make me more satisfied, give me more peace, fulfil me.
Steven King states in his great little resource book, " On Writing," that if you want to write, sit in the same place every day, same pen or computer, same legal tablet or notebook, and one day your " voice " or " muse " will turn up. Writing is a discipline, a putting on to the screen or paper the words that swirl in your head, that somehow become coherent and make sense.
I recall my V.C.E., Mature Age Teacher saying that writing is drawing a picture but in words. And that you must imagine the person reading them, that you are reaching out to them to evoke a feeling a memory. Easier said than done, but if you love writing, and you would have to love it to keep doing it, then you are blessed. I have read things that even as a child meant so much to me, that gave me such hope, taught me about other people, filled my imagination, entered my dreams, that they resonate with me still.
I can remember as a little girl of 3 or so, seeing another girl write running writing in the dirt on the road. I recall being transfixed by this written thing, jealous of her, as she was already running writing and I wasn't ready yet to print. I wanted this " thing " called writing. I must have ran inside and begged my Mother to teach me, as I could read and write before I went to school.
I can remember that day as if it were yesterday. And yet other memories only come in flashes, little shafts of sun peeping through the white clouds of memory.
The one of the running writing stands out clear, a hot sunny day, a dirt road in Port Augusta, in front of a commission house of pastel blue, kids gathered in bare feet looking at the running writing drawn with a stick in the dirt, a freckle faced boy who then drew dirty pictures and we dispersed. My first introduction to the written word.
I read everything I could get my hands on. The classics, and the Billy Bunters and Williams. My older siblings knowing if their library books went missing who would have them. Beautifully coloured plates inside of religious books that scared me half to death with their crowns of thorns and blood of lambs.
The encyclopaedias Dad brought with him from Scotland, their bindings red and letters of gold, I read them and retained the information, making me good at English and a lover of Trivia, useless trivia unless you are at a Pub Quiz, or so I thought. An Indian man on the boat that took us back to the U.K., when I was 12 was astonished I solved his favourite puzzle immediately.
He knew of adults that couldn't solve it, he said. Neither could Mum and Dad when I asked them. But I had been in training all my life by then. Just reading, learning, reading learning. Always in my room with two or three books at once, read to the end in one go. It was my escape, my hidey hole, my rabbit warren. I would follow Alice down the rabbit hole, sliding down into the world of imagination.
I attended the midnight feasts of boarding schools in England, acted in the plays of William, laced up my pink ribbons on Ballet Shoes, wandered the underground caverns of Wind In The Willows, boated with Ratty, sculling down the river and " messing around in boats ". So much better than the grim realities of poverty struck and parish damned, that was my childhood.
So then I began to write my own stories, cribbing them off Enid Blyton and they were shite, not my voice at all. I wrote a poem for English, shite as well. Gloomy and strange about some Bushranger. But I was a beginner at 10. My voice had to come and it would take practice and screwing up of paper and tossing it.
The hardest part about writing is letting yourself go. Letting go of self consciousness, shyness, stilted words that amuse no one. It's so hard to overcome the self and write as you feel, if you do think about who might read it. You have to overstate the bleeding obvious as if a visitor from mars was reading it but also feel the emotion, feel what it is like to be looking at something. Draw your picture in words. Draw the running writing in the road in explanation.
Who hasn't read something that made them cry ? Made you laugh out loud ? Gripped you so that you keep turning the page ? Changed your life, inspired you ? Not much of a daunting task then to write ? It's the hardest work and the most rewarding, for me, anyway. It's not for the faint hearted. Just sit at a computer and open a vein, commit Hari Kari, exposé your soft underside to ridicule or contempt, not hard at all.
But when you find a voice inside yourself, finally, a voice that is not boring or opinionated or NOISY, or judgmental or trying to convey a hidden message then you are at last at the stage of Flow. And it will flow. And that my friends is why I write, to reach the state of Flow, nothing can make me more satisfied, give me more peace, fulfil me.
