Getting Into Your Voice:
Wendy’s Newsletter No. 2
Thursday February 26nd 2014
A FUN WAY TO FIND YOUR WRITER'S VOICE IN 21 DAYS
Hello again. Thank you for
returning to my Newsletter.
If this is your first
time, welcome.
Here on my Weekly Newsletter I hope
to share with you the inspirations, aspirations, ideas, methods and processes
that have kept me loving my writing process and enjoying some success during
the last twenty years.
I am writing the Newsletter for me
as well as for you, to develop positive creative feelings in these days when
the writing world seems full of gloom, making new and established writers
anxious about recognition by and pleasing agents and publishers, the very
different pressures of social media in selling your work. All these slide the
actual pleasure and joy of creative writing into a very shaky third place.
I have to say that this low level of anxiety is now way to embark on a news piece of creative writing, be is a prose fragment, a story or a novel.
So all this is for me as well as
you, whether you are a new writer, an aspiring writer, or an established writer
who would welcome a fresh surge of creativity.
I thought today we would think about how to find, how to
retrieve and how to develop your writing voice.
We’ve
all met writers who say, ‘I would start/continue writing seriously but I have
so little time.’ I often say in workshops that if we are writers we can cand must carve out time to write. It is
essential to a writer’s life. I wrote piece about it on Lifetwicetasted called Writing is the Sound of the Soul Breathing. find it HERE,
Writer Dorothea Brande* proposes a much less high-falutin’ approach. She
has this great exercise – a way to find or refresh your writing voice. It’s an
excerise which anyone can do.. Like much of Brande's advice it is very simple
on the surface.
ALL IT TAKES IS TWENTY MINUTES A DAY…
.
SO - here's my adapted version of Dorothea’s gig:
- · Write when you wake, before you make tea, get out of your pyjamas, or clean your teeth. Do not embrace the day or worry about having to write. Retain as much of your sleeps self as you can. This will not unless you are in those creative mists between the conscious and the subconscious mind and can catch cobwebs of thought without effort.
- · Be somewhere alone. It may just be your bed. But you should be alone even if is under the dining table or in the pantry. Alone.
- · Leave the lid of you world-in flooding computer or tablet firmly shut. For me this doesn't work on the machine – lovable for editing reasons of course. You will realise that once you open the machine you invite the world into your head and your unique writing self goes out to of the window.
- This approach to your writing self has to be in secret. That's part of the magic of this process.
ESSENTIALS
- · Write with a fluid pen or a 3b pencil on pages that are attached to each other in a bound book.
- · The essential approach is to scribble without consequence. In the very back of your mind you know that this is not IT. No-one else will see it. But you will discover that this is the writer-you on the page. You will come to treasure you r words.
THE WHOLE FIRST STAGE OF THE PROCESS TAKES 21 DAYS
HERE WE GO.
As I have already said - decide on your equipment, your place and perhaps even the day when you will start. The first day of Spring? Your birthday? Tomorrow?
1.
Wake up
2.
GO to your place and write
3.
Do not make coffee. Tea or toast or turn
on the radio or your computer
4.
Write for twenty minutes or two pages.
Write on the right hand side of the page. Leave the left free for further ideas.
What
about? You may say
·
?The
dream you woke up from?
·
?
The tree outside?
·
?The
sound of the weather?
·
?
The distant hum and rush of the early morning
·
?
The feeling you have about being haunted
·
?
The early morning sky is.
·
If your mind is blank just write 'My
mind is Blank’ three times and go on from there.
5.
Words will present themselves if you
keep the still centre of your writing self and scribble on.
6.
STOP after twenty- thirty minutes. Don’t
read through. Don’t correct. Accept your own words.
7.
TURN the page and mark tie next clean
page AND CLOSE YOUR BOOK
8.
NEXT DAY stay on the clean page. Do NOcheck
yesterday’s writing and follow any of the ideas there.
9.
Start the routine again FROM SCRATCH. FORGET
ABOUT YESTERDAY.
10.
Repeat this process for twenty one
days in sequence.
11.
On the 22nd day take your note book to
a different place – the library? A café? A park bench.
12.
Now read through the twenty one day’s
writing (42 PAGES!) with a stranger’s eye. Appreciate this
writer's work!
13.
You are onto the next stage.
Now read through the pages, pencil in hand. Do NOT
score it and ‘mark’ it like a disapproving teacher! Underline the good stuff, whether it is a word,
an image, a phrase or an idea. Write appreciative or extending comments and
extra ideas on the blank facing page.
14.
Note the
ideas that recur, note the language that recurs. How would you characterise
this writer's style. Take a breath. This is you!
NOW PROCEED!
1.
Take the ideas, phrases, and notions
that have engaged you.
2.
Copy these onto a sheet.
3.
Now, under these elements make lists of words
and phrases that they suggest. Go back through your 21 pages and look for
further colour for this new sheet.
4.
Write paragraphs around these words.
Is there a story there? A chapter? A fine prose fragment that holds your writer’s
voice?
I
So now here is your creative writer's voice....
SPECIAL NOTEAccording to Dorothea Brande on these pages you will find the nature of your writer’s voice, your themes, your vocabulary, your intuitive syntax. This is the ground on which you can develop your authenticity as a writer.
*Dorothea Brande believed passionately
that although people have varying amounts of talent, anyone can write. It's
just a question of finding the "writer's magic" - a degree of which
is in us all. She also insists that writing can be both taught and learned. So
she is enraged by the pessimistic authors of so many writing books who rejoice
in trying to put off the aspiring writer by constantly stressing how difficult
it all is. Find her book Becoming a Writer HERE
