On (Surprisingly) Sounding Like Me

Is it really so hard to do what's most natural?

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

Some books or pieces of writing have beautiful beginnings. Like Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin. The sky had lifted at least thirty feet, it starts. Such an elegant, engaging, captivating first line. Anne, a nineteen-year-old girl sentenced to seven years for armed robbery, leaps over the prison wall -- a thirty-foot drop -- cracking her ankle in the process. As you read that line, and try to fathom what in the world could make the sky lift, a combination of mystery, rhythm, and choice of words keeps you glued to the page. 

I was thinking of how critical the beginning of a piece is to capture attention, to keep readers at it. For me, if I’m not hooked within the first couple of paragraphs, I stop short and switch to something else. Before starting to write regularly, I was overly preoccupied with getting readers interested in my pieces. What should I write about to make people read me, I’d think. And how should I start a piece to capture readers’ attention? And of course I could never find a compelling enough subject and a captivating enough beginning, and nothing happened. And nothing kept happening. The perfect recipe for writer’s block. I was the definition of writer’s block.

But I knew that I wanted to write. And that it was a matter of confidence. A matter of unlocking something inside. I knew that, once unlocked, that something would ignite a domino effect. And that I’d never stop, probably. So I took Write of Passage and understood the importance of the community, that writing is a social phenomenon. Find your people, they say. I did, and my people got me started. I immediately realized that I didn’t have to please anyone -- I just had to write for myself. And that, by writing for myself, I’d naturally please my people.

This past Sunday was my birthday, and, as a present, I gave myself permission to go and re-read some of my old essays, those I wrote right after I started this substack. Something I’ve never done before. Something I’ve always been afraid to do. They say that when you go back and re-read your early pieces, you’d want to rewrite them completely. That you realize how bad they suck. You’d want to tear them apart into small pieces, chew them, and spit them out.

Surprisingly, I liked them. Not only that, I wouldn’t change anything. And the strangest thing happened: I could hear my voice reading them. As if another me was reading them to me, as if he wanted to make me hear my own voice. It felt like they’d been written by me. I tried focusing on the beginnings. As biased as I was, I wanted to see whether, in the shoes of an external reader, I was hooked right off the bat. I think I was. But then again, I was reading my own writing. So, what do I know.

I’m not into celebrations. And I don’t particularly like to celebrate my birthday. But this wasn’t a bad way to spend the recurrence of my birth -- re-reading my early pieces and finding consistency. Finding something recognizable, a voice. My voice. An old song by The Waterboys goes “I just found god where he always was”. Well, I (just) found my voice where it always was. 

When we start writing, improving our craft is generally a priority. We want to get better at it. But what does getting better really mean? Does it involve moving closer and closer to a universally accepted definition of “good writing”? And what exactly is that definition? Like with porn, I know it when I see it, you might say. So, presumably, good writing possesses traits that make it universally and instantly recognizable. And getting better at writing, for many, entails working (hard) to incorporate these traits. 

Aiming to write in the style of successful authors, for example, might guarantee a certain appeal, but it reflects a desire for compliance rather than experimentation, for playing it safe rather than taking risks. Taste (as I wrote last week) exhibits a similar dynamic -- if liking nineteenth-century Russian authors is universally regarded as a sign of good taste in literature, many find themselves compelled to embrace these authors, often without even knowing why, simply because they wish to be perceived as people of taste.

If I examine the greats -- the Nobokovs, the Kerouacs, the Roths, the Pasolinis, the Didions, the Houellebecqs, the Dostoevskijs, the Moravias, the García Márquezs -- each of them has a unique, distinct style that I’m sure they didn’t develop by consciously wanting to get better at writing, or by emulating some other writer. If someone reads them out loud to me, I can immediately tell who they are. They have a voice. I guess their unique, distinct style -- their voice -- naturally emerged because they wrote for themselves and didn’t care much about what people wanted to read, or about rejection.    

Now, having a voice in writing isn’t a particularly distinctive trait per se. Everybody has a voice. When I say that I have discovered my voice, I’m not really praising my writing. I’m simply acknowledging that something pleasant happened. Some voices are interesting, others aren’t. Maybe mine isn’t that interesting. But the very fact that I can recognize myself in my writing, that I sound like me, that I have my own style (whether good or bad), is a reason for pride. 

What I’m saying is that everybody should cultivate their own voice; this is a good thing, no matter how humble or cringe-worthy they believe their writing to be. Don’t judge it, make mistakes, invent new words, let it flow -- your people are out there waiting, and chances are there’s a lot of them. Authenticity may be an overused term, but it holds immense value.

Back to the habit of revisiting our early writing, in an interview, Bob Dylan says that he doesn’t know how he got to write some of his early songs. That they seemed almost magically written. And he goes on citing the starting verses of “It’s Alright Ma (I’m only bleeding)”, released in 1965 (a masterpiece; the first Dylan lyrics I always show to those who ask “Why did they give him the Nobel Prize in Literature?”): Darkness at the break of noon/ Shadows even the silver spoon/ The handmade blade, the child's balloon/ Eclipses both the sun and moon/ To understand you know too soon/ There is no sense in trying. A kind of penetrating magic that he could only conjure back then. I can do other things now, but I can’t do that, he says. Dylan surely never thought about getting better at writing. He just let his voice out. He just wrote. And he clearly and unmistakably still sounds like him several decades later.

I don’t know if there’s a secret to this, a way to train one’s writing voice, to make it emerge more spontaneously and transparently. Perhaps it’s merely a matter of courage, of self-confidence. When he started out, Bob Dylan had the demeanor of someone with nothing to lose and nothing to expect. The demeanor of someone who derives ample pleasure and satisfaction from writing and playing for himself. Maybe that’s the key.

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