When you can't stand the sound of your own voice - by Rosalie Warren
No, I don’t mean those times when you hear a recording of
yourself speaking and shudder with humiliation and embarrassment, though I’ve experienced
that too. (Where did that flat-vowelled squeaky-voiced twelve-year-old with a
frog in her throat spring from?) And no, I’m not at all ashamed of my Yorkshire
accent – just amazed that it still survives after all these years of living in
many different places.
Anyway, the subject under discussion is not my speaking but my
writing voice. Anyone else get those times when you can’t write ten words in
succession without recoiling in disgust? You may have an exciting new novel buzzing in
your head, a bunch of characters all ready to express themselves and a plot
worked out, if not down to the last detail then at least with some idea of what’s
happening and when. But the actual words and sentences... it’s not so much that
they won’t come as that when they do they make you want to rip up the page or
clobber your keyboard in fury at their pretentiousness, awkwardness, banality…
whatever the judgment happens to be on that particular day.
And the reason – it’s simply
because the words are your own. You’d never be as hard as that on any other
writer’s work. Even as an editor or critic, you’d read it and perhaps decide
some changes would be a good idea. You’d adjust a comma or two or point out you
couldn’t tell who was speaking or that Mavis had blue eyes in Chapter One – but
you wouldn’t recoil in disgust and hate the writer for ever imagining they
could write at all. Yet you do it to yourself.
Or is that just me?
Anyway, I’ve discovered a way
round it that seems, so far, to be working. It involves tricking your brain
into thinking you are not the author. You take the pen out of your own hand and
give it to one of your characters. Over to you, you say, and you really mean it.
This is your book, or your bit of it, from now on. Of course, this results in
first-person narrative, which is fine by me. If I later decide it would be
better to use third person, I can change it. I can make edits just as though it
were someone else’s work – because it is. I may choose to correct my character’s
style, grammar, consistency of eye colour and anything else I choose, or I may
leave it as it is. I don’t hate it, because I didn’t write it. I’m simply the
scribe and we make a good team. Sometimes, believe it or not, I can almost read
the writer’s mind. Occasionally I might enjoy one of her (or his) turns of
expression. Or maybe not, but that’s OK.
It's such a relief.
I took this remedy/trick/evasion
to such lengths that I’ve just produced a novel that’s the product of an (imaginary)
writing group, where the members take it in turns to have their say. It felt
more like listening (or reading) than writing. It was fun.
My next book, now at the planning
stage, won’t be in this style, or not by the time it’s finished. It can’t be,
because of the nature of the story. But I’m going to write it in a similar
fashion – giving the pen to each character in turn and letting them tell their
own part of the story; giving their own view of things. Later I will edit, and it’s
possible that few if any traces of the hatching process will remain. We’ll
see how it goes. The main thing is (I hope) that I’ll feel free to read the
early drafts and change them, with no need to suffer that awful humiliating
feeling that the words came out of me.
If anyone reading this has
suffered a similar can’t-stand-the-sound-of-your-own-writing-voice and found a
way round it, I’d be really interested to know.
All best wishes
Ros
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Comments
And that all seems to be contrary to the first advice I give any would-be writer who asks for it, which is 'Trust your own voice'. I don't understand the alchemy, but I'm glad I have access to it.