Shifting voices, much thinking
Hi all,
I have very little to share - I have written a million and one half-rubbish things, which do not give over or articulate the kind of stories and voices and thoughts of mine I want to share. More journaling, than anything literary, and, well, it’s a distinction I am learning to make, to consider. It’s frustrating realising that the literary writing really is work of sorts, and it requires a fair amount of not only self-reflection, not only literary techniques, but research, and solid foundations to ground your narrative in, even when it is not fiction. And I don’t think I necessarily want the pushing. I am resistant to the ‘work’ of it, just like I am resistant to many things at the moment and that I also trust.
It’s funny how much your settling into your own voice can shift your position as a writer, as a person, in a number of months, but, yes, that is the case, and once more I feel humbled and oh so intimidated by the task I am setting myself for the kind of writer I want to become. Perhaps those expectations are far too lofty, but no one wants bad writing, shit art, there’s plenty of it about already, all subjective, but I would like to enjoy the end product of my own art, for at least a time, that seems like a good distinguisher of satisfaction.
I have been grappling with finishing an essay which I started months ago now, only to realise that there is no way I can finish it in the way I began. And I wrote this paragraph in all of three minutes, unedited, and decided it was a good fragment into the questions I am considering now, and, really, I do enjoy sharing, but, really, there just isn’t that much to share. It is a bunkering in this preparatory phase ahead of a year or two of intensive study. I got into my Masters programme, folks - I suspect that all of you know given it is my nearest and dearest who get these emails anyways - and now I wait with baited breath and hope, hope, hope, for a jammy scholarship.
I wrote the below, for context, having reread back my essay with what can only be described as a pang of cringing when you realise the gaps and shortcomings of your own writing, when you have put down a book reading such an accomplished writer and lament its a long old windy road of a lot of trial and error to get there. Not that I should need to caveat that statement with a glimmer of self-reassurance, that feels partially dismissive, but alongside the dejection, I do feel excited too at weaving this new layer of awareness for the voice into the piece. It seems to me that if I am writing an essay about my changing voice then, well, that voice can shift and change throughout that essay too, and perhaps I need not be consigned to blind self-assurance for the whole piece, which is certainly how the start of it is reading at the moment: short, directive, certain, sentences, which couldn’t be further from how I articulate, or think, or experience the world. You know me, as I say below, I turn things over in my mind, looking for another doorway in. I am reflecting that this layering of awareness is what could be weaved in to a distinctive style.
I edited so much of myself, my doubt, my moments of consideration, out of this writing, as if to be a woman and to speak I must be certain, must be sure, in a turn of phrase that is so alien to me, so decisively masculine, that I now reflect on these words and realise they could not be further from my own, a woman who turns things over in her mind a thousand times around before uttering a sentence to say, ‘I hear you’. I edited it to sound bigger, bolder, assertive, worthy of the alien language that Cixous speaks, and through this lacquering of my tongue, I have stuck a self-blindness over the top that appears so confident of this speaking that it is no longer the reality of my voice, or the lived reality of my language of spaces. It does a disservice to this language of spaces, considers them too cluttered, claused, to achieve an articulation with affect. It makes me want to rewrite and just start again, more intelligently. I wrote in a rage and now the rage has run out. I cannot end this essay how I started it, and yet it seems a disservice to begin it how it will now end, when that language, that feeling, that energy, was with me, inside me, a vessel for me, for months, and now it has given way to something else, which I am uncertain of because I do not think I yet know its name, and for a minute there I thought I was done with this uncertainty, hungering and hunkered instead for a screaming fight. But that teenage girl is dead, I have mourned her and I have rejoiced at her burial. I look at my attempts to write my voice as a teen and it feels clunky, somehow insincere, somehow I can see straight through it, somehow I want something more, something different, something already perfectly, neatly packaged. Somehow, I want that thing called a mature voice. And yet, that is precisely why I must write my teenage voice from such a position of plosive certainty, that cannot be sustained, because that was my reality, rattling in a pressure cooker, just waiting to pop off. Surely that is the reality of being a teen, and then what? How does language recover? What happens when those words slip over the edge, into something new, something unknown?
Might I add that the writer I am lamenting over is Janet Malcom and her essays, ‘Forty One False Starts’. I have only read the first three, she has grown on me with each one, and now I think she is quite amazing and I have many more still left. She really asks, what is your agenda, why do you write?
We persist.
See you,
Eden x