I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry; I really am trying not to post too often about Doctor Who, but I am apparently failing. But I found this amazing extract from The Writer's Tale online this morning, with some amazing insights into that most meaningless of phrases, "finding your voice."
You can view the full article here, and it contains lots of lovely spoilerage for the Christmas special, as well as some things that make me sad (like, referring to River Song as "the Doctor's wife" - I really can't deal with the idea of him marrying that irritating woman. Too bad they couldn't get Kate Winslet, I probably would have loved her then...ANYway!).
But for those of you who don't suffer from Who addiction, I'll just extract the best bit, the bit any writer might be interested in:
You ask how a writer finds their voice. Now, that's a question!... Gaining a voice, whatever that is, comes with experience and practice - and the writing, again, is indivisible from the person. Your voice tends to be something that other people talk about, about you. It's not something that you think about much yourself, and certainly not whilst writing. I never - never - sit here thinking, what's my voice? You might as well ponder, who am I? It is, in fact, exactly the same thing. You can wonder your whole life and you'll never get an answer to that. After all these years of wondering, I've never realised those last four sentences quite so clearly! This Great Correspondence does me good.
So the voice exists simply because you exist. You find your voice by writing, by experience. You can see voices in scripts, can't you?...
...Again, again, again, scripts don't just live in Script World; they exist alongside everything else that you love and hate in your whole, wide, mad, lovely life. You copy from - or rather, are influenced by - everything...
It's so important to start writing, because then the process never, ever ends. Finding your voice isn't the last stage, just another stage along the way. You reach the top of that mountain, only to see a whole bloody, endless range of mountains waiting beyond. You've a million more things to reach for, a million more variations on your voice to articulate.
Awesome! I love the quote from RTD and I love the spoiler for the Christmas special! :-)
ReplyDeleteOften a writer begins his career as an imitator of someone he admires. Rod Serling said he started out mimicking Hemingway, for instance. ("It was hot.") So I think "finding your voice" also means assimilating your influences into your own style of writing, since you probably never forget them. Would that occur naturally with experience or is it something you need to think about carefully, I wonder?
ReplyDeleteI find that self-consciousness is often ineffective, for me personally anyway. When I was writing more poetry back in the day, I would constantly sit down and say, "OK, now I'm going to write this in blank verse," or "I'm going to try my hand at a villanelle," being very conscious that I needed to work on my technique and virtuosity with regard to form. But a lot of times those were my least successful poems...and then when I went back and looked at my less "studied" poems I discovered that I was already writing with relatively sophisticated meter or repetition just by reading widely among the most skilled poets. Weird. It's something I still struggle with, that drive to be "intentional" about my craft that I think is actually, quite often, a way to devalue to myself what I'm writing now.
ReplyDeleteSo...I think the answer to the question you pose, for me at least, is probably that it occurs naturally. But I'm not sure.