Finding The Fresh Voice Within

In some ways, as we get older, we create a more and more complex and rigid system of ideas, concepts, judgements. Our ideas about ourselves – that once came from our society, family and friends and have been internalised – are more fixed. These thoughts are externalised as words.

On one hand, words allow us to create share meanings – to fully meet others and navigate life successfully; on the other hand, our ideas about ourselves can be so overthought and overused, that the words lose their life; they seem dry or even dead. In their lack of flexibility, they can leave us feeling trapped by a cage of our own making.

As writers, part of our job is to find ways to unpeel those layers that have attached themselves over time, by finding word portals back to a freshness of thought and expression.

There are aspects of this journey that are like returning to being a child…and yet it’s nothing about going backwards: the journey, in fact, is to becoming a more expansive, happier, and more connected adult.

I’m always cautious to use the idea of ‘childhood’ as it can reinforce mythic and stereotyped ideas of what ‘childhood’ is but, disclaimer given, I suggest we look again through the eyes we, personally, once had as a child…How is it to see again in that way?

Children have a limited conceptual understanding and much smaller range of associations to draw upon – they haven’t yet had the time to construct and solidify the generalisations, judgements and world views.

They make connections in a ‘clunky’ way – creating unusual metaphors and issuing strangely profound statements. The simplicity, straightforward and matter-of-factness of their language use adds power. Because children have, you could say, fewer layers of meaning overall, they imbue what they see, feel and understand with greater emotional significance. Things, simply, matter more to them.

They see (often literally as they are short!) from unusual viewpoints. Their view of things is also, therefore, both literally and metaphorically limited and partial. Their lives are full of gaps and mysteries to be solved – and that’s exactly what captures a reader or listener on the page.

The subject/object differentiation – I/me and you/he/she/them/it has not quite or not completely fossilised. They can relate to objects outside of themselves, and still allow themselves to converse with them – the inanimate world still lives and has feelings and speaks.

Perhaps most interesting to me is their limited understanding of time and space. They do not need to know much about time and space, and, indeed, are just seeking and finding the words to describe the strange abstract adult world of it. This is reflected in their unusual use of tenses, for example, often showing itself via their use of present tense. So, their words become portals through time and space to an immediacy of experience that those of us who are more grizzled, could only dream of.

Their disjoints and gaps and cracks can take us to the ‘aha’ of the haiku poet, the moment of revelation that every writer, storyteller or poet wants to lead their reader to (or fools themselves they do, as of course, it’s ourselves we most often primarily yearn to take there).

And aren’t these things – emotion, potent words; a fresh, unusual take on things – the holy grail of writing.

In the end, it need be nothing to do with children (bringing them up, knowing them, loving or hating their noise). These skills, this way of seeing and describing the world is the path that all of us interested in words, and connection with ourselves and others through words, travel. To stop the walls of self-consciousness closing in over the years is imperative. To cultivate a fresh voice within is our work, our joy and our arrival.

Experiment: Re-finding the Fresh Voice Within

Write a first draft piece of narrative poetry, flash fiction or a short story about an everyday event: taking a train, eating a meal, a personal or work interaction.

Then rewrite that piece in the following ways:

- See and describe the same event from the viewpoint of a character in the scene who stands at only table height. Be really strict with yourself about what comes in through their senses. Perhaps their vision is partial because a table blocks their view? Perhaps even voices come to them in an unusual way because of that table? What gaps are left in their understanding? What unusual connections do they find in an effort to create a narrative for themselves that makes sense to them?

- Describe the same scene from the viewpoint of an inanimate object in the space. Give yourself free rein. Doesn’t even a bottle of Ketchup have feelings?

Throughout the experiment, allow yourself to fly: exaggerate, believe in magic, open up all possibilities. There is nothing reductive in this play – you’re expanding far beyond your pre-conceived limits.

May those little ink marks on the page roam wide for you this month!

This is the article from the Wild Words Newsletter for November. Sign up on the website homepage to receive the monthly newsletter with upcoming events.

Thank you Peter Reid for the photograph.