Finding a voice

I got a copy of Wil Wheaton’s Just a Geek as part of an e-book ‘Humble Bundle‘ about a week ago, and this morning I picked up my Kindle to browse it and wound up reading the whole thing over the course of the day. It’s a fairly lightweight read, really, but impressively, almost off-puttingly sincere…which I should have expected from my reading of Wil Wheaton’s blog.

Anyway, as I finished the last Appendix (yep, gotta read every last word before I really feel I’m done with a book…I read all of the appendices to the Lord of the Rings, too) and pushed the little ‘home’ button to close the book, I had that feeling I have whenever I finish something I have been engrossed with–a little wistful, a little satisfied, and a little bit like a pause, a breath, right before waking up all of the way to the ‘real’ world around me–and, as often happens, I found myself thinking in the ‘voice’ of the author for a moment, narrating my own life with someone else’s tones and inflections, even themes.

Like I said, this is familiar to me, though not every author can invoke the same level of assimilation of voice and tone. The first time I remember being conscious of it was when I read the Lord of the Rings for perhaps the second or third time (perhaps why it is the example my mind jumped to in my quip above). The first time I read LOTR (see, now my mind is inserting a Wheaton-esque aside about how us real geeks get to use the acronym)…umm….

As I was saying, the first time I read LOTR all the way through, I was 13, and I went on to read it almost annually for years. In any case, this particular time, I put down the book and wandered into the dining room where some of my siblings were talking, and felt suddenly that all of our conversations would be so much more meaningful if we talked like Tolkien’s characters. I could almost hear the dialogue in my head, and I’ll freely admit that I probably used words like ‘behold’, ‘begone’, ‘heed’ and ‘deem’ in a truly ridiculous manner for a few days. It did dawn on me after a while that the reason Tolkien’s characters sounded so noble was because they were talking of noble and brave things, whereas I was talking about schoolyard pettiness and whose turn it was to wash the dishes. In any case, that week made me conscious of the effect that good writing has on my inner dialogue.

I have long felt that reading, whether it is a novel, a work of scholarship, or a blog post, is an act of ‘putting on’ the mind of another, of allowing myself to be subsumed into the author’s narration so that the events and ideas are presented to me, not as something outside of myself, but as emerging as naturally to me as they did to the author. Sometimes the ideas or events are simply too alien or even repulsive to me for this to happen. Sometimes the writing is an obstacle instead of a vehicle to this process, when the prose is clumsy and contains linguistic errors or poor imagery. Sometimes I’m at fault; I’m simply too tired, distracted, or busy to allow myself to enter as fully into the author’s imagination as I would like. But when it does happen, it feels like I imagine a Vulcan mind-meld would feel (I told you I’d been reading Wil Wheaton).  For a little while, I become largely oblivious to my own concerns and my own thoughts–even, at times, my own environment–and feel and see the things the narrator feels and sees.

(An aside: I had a class in college that had exactly two students–myself, and a stunningly brilliant and polished upperclassman. Despite our respect for each other, we clashed in almost every discussion. It took me a few classes to identify why: we simple approached the text in completely different (but effective) manners. She was a barracuda: she constantly tested the text and looked for weaknesses. I say this, not as a put-down, but with admiration for her intellect. In contrast, I empathetically entered the text, and found myself defending the author’s apparent intentions against these criticisms, trying to communicate my sense of the vision of the text…something I could intuit, but not necessarily communicate. Although I apparently communicated something well enough, as I had a perfect grade in that particular philosophy class, as would have the other student, had she not been merely auditing.)

The narrative tone in Just a Geek, as I mentioned above, is almost over-the-top in its sincerity. Wheaton’s prose is clear, direct, and full of personally revealing anecdotes and small, atmospheric details. When I finished the book and experienced this familiar sense of thinking in Wil’s voice, I began to remember something I had forgotten–the sound of my own voice.

You see, when I began blogging years upon years upon a lifetime ago, I quickly stumbled upon a voice similarly authentic, raw, and sincere, if perhaps more given to flowery phrases and earnest statements of eternal truths. I wrote passionately about my own experiences, my thoughts, and my struggles. I over-shared, and after a while, I was burned by the over-sharing. An individual tangentially mentioned in a post shamed me for, in essence, making him potentially look bad to others. I had a sudden insight into the courage and the narcissism involved in the writers of confessional memoirs. When you plumb the depths of your own experiences for insights to share, it is impossible to avoid sharing about the people who are part of your life and of those experiences. I was seized by self-doubt and fear of my own verbosity and openness, and although I continued to write on that blog for some time after that encounter, I slowly lost my voice to that fear. In the end, I shut down that blog, feeling that I was too identifiable.

I had begun blogging to reach out to the other bloggers who I read and with whom I felt such affinity–people whose voices resonated with me and whose thoughts inspired. When I killed my eponymous blog (the domain name now belongs to a gambling site), my readership had become dominated by people with real life impact on me, and it had begun to feel awfully one sided to share my inner self so freely and indiscriminately with people who, very often, had little or nothing of any emotional significance to share with me in return. I wanted to be known, but as time passed I realized that being known made me vulnerable, and I was beginning to feel all-too-vulnerable in other areas of my life already. I put the best of those archives on a new blog with the same name but fewer easily-Googled identifiers, and deleted the original blog that bore my name.

That was when I started this blog, and a quick perusal of the archives will show that I have never managed to write with much consistency on this blog–not consistency in frequency, and certainly not consistency of tone. I wanted to make it anonymous, and I wanted to make it neutral, and I wanted to make it ‘safe’. I became sensitive to the irrevocability of things written online, and I didn’t want to be an embarrassment to my friends or family. I wanted to write, but having forbidden myself the realm of the personal, of the actual, of the things and people that hit my heart strings and move my days…well, what was left was simply not compelling enough to move me to write. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I lost my voice.

I’ve been doing a bit of hack writing lately, putting together blog posts on topics I know little about to sell to internet content providers on the internet’s ‘content mills’. Doing that reminded me that I can write, and if I had the discipline and motivation, I could probably churn out 500+ words a day on any topic I was given. Reading Just a Geek though reminded me that, while I can write about anything and be halfway interesting, I am never as fulfilled as when writing of the things that truly, deeply, painfully sincerely move me. I’ve doubted my writing because it was so self-centered, because it was all about me, and what do I have to offer, anyway? I admire writers who share their expertise and knowledge, but my only expertise seemed to be with the realm of my own mind. I admire spiritual writers, but I know myself to be far too deeply flawed and still stuck in the same ruts, far outside the gates of the Interior Castle, to feel I would be anything but a fraud if I were to write spiritual advice. I have no sustained hobbies and no particular talents to share, unlike all of my delightfully crafty friends who post DIY projects and beautiful photo essays.

All I have is this voice, and a passionate desire to understand and be understood. My first blog was named Heart Speaks to Heart, and that summed up, better than I ever realized when I wrote there, why I wrote: I wrote to find communion with others, to incite that moment when one soul looks at another and says, “Yes! Me too!” I wrote to bare my heart to others, to bypass entirely all of the social minutiae I have always sucked at and mistrusted in any case, and go straight to the hearts of my readers, to make myself known as another ‘self’ like them.

I was going to tie all of this in with the experience of watching my daughter, 22 months old, as she discovers words and her own, literal, voice. I was going to touch on my hopes for my children, and my thoughts on the possibility–probability–that they might someday be able to find cached copies of the things I write about myself and about them. I have a lot more to say about the paralysis of writing defensively for an invisible audience of potential critics. This is getting pretty darn long though, so I suppose I ought to wrap it up.

When I was 11, I began to think of myself as a writer. Somewhere under everything I’ve done since then, I’ve kept that self-identification, even though it embarrassed me as being a mere indulgent conceit during the long dry periods when I wrote nothing but shopping lists and drafts of letters I never sent. I begin to think that perhaps it is possible to be, at heart, a writer, and yet write nothing at all. I don’t burn to write, I don’t write compulsively, but I write to find out whether anyone else is out there, whether my interior subjectivity is mirrored out there in all of those people I can only ever see from the outside. I read Just a Geek, and Wil Wheaton wrote about writing and about self-disclosure and about growing up, and even though he and I have little in common in many many ways, I said, “Yes. Me too!”

*I’m posting this at 11:30 pm. I started writing it after getting the kids to bed, probably around 8:30. That probably exemplifies another reason my writing started to dry up–with three kids, it’s not hard to find ways to spend three uninterrupted hours that are more immediately pressing than writing! That’s also why I’m not going to pledge to write more here in the future, though it would be nice if that was the result of this particular small revelation!