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 yo...