I’ve been trying to write a poem about a cactus ever since I came home from holiday in Fuerteventura but somehow the words just won’t come. I’ve written poems about an old windmill on the island and about Fuerteventura’s capital, Corralejo, neither of which was too difficult, but I simply can’t get my mind around the problem of the cactus.
Re-reading the second part of L.L. Barkat’s Rumors of Water has given me pointers to some possible reasons for my struggle:
- I am really not passionate about cacti.
- Cacti don’t form an extensive part of my experience, which is hardly surprising since they are not commonly found in Scotland.
- My voice is probably all wrong for writing about cacti. Cactus is a staccato word, and it seems that I don’t have a naturally staccato voice. In contrast, capturing the slow, languorous pace of an abandoned windmill or a hot, sleepy town came fairly easily to me; my voice suited the subject or, maybe better, the subject suited my voice.
The issue of voice is apparently quite a thorny one for writers. Apparently we writers worry a lot about it, about whether we have a voice or not and, if not, how we can find one. Barkat’s view is clear.
“Every writer has a voice” which “is probably best heard by listening to oneself speak” (p. 48).
I want to question whether things are really this straightforward though.
The reason for my doubt is this: in my experience no person has only one voice. We speak differently depending on who we are speaking to. We would not use the same voice when speaking to a toddler as we would when speaking to a university professor or to a visiting dignitary. We would use different vocabulary, different intonations and inflections. We might even slow the natural rhythm of our speech if we thought it might help towards clear communication.
I believe that writers may well have more than one voice, although I suspect that one voice will be more natural than the others. In my life I have been both a research chemist and a pastor, and it is only relatively recently that I have rediscovered creative writing. This means that I have learned to write in many styles – as a writer I have more than one voice that I can use. An academic chemistry paper is supposed to be totally objective – all traces of personality, passion and place should be squashed out, an aim largely achieved by writing in a passive voice. A theology essay is a little more flexible, but not much. At least here the reader wants to know what I think, and might like me to express myself in an engaging way. If I had delivered sermons that had been written in an academic style, then I would have bored the church congregation to death. But neither of my academic voices nor my didactic preaching voice would be appropriate for writing poetry or children’s stories, for example.
All that being said, it is likely that a writer has a single, natural voice – that distinct mixture of sound, rhythm and cadence that is uniquely theirs. However, to think of a writer’s voice as static would be a mistake. Every writer should also be a reader. Reading opens us up to the voices of others, and it is inevitable that those voices will influence our writing, just as the language of those around us influences the way that we speak, even if we are not aware of it happening. So a writer’s voice, like the personality of which it is an expression, is constantly developing, although it should have fairly stable foundations.
Development of a writer’s voice, like the development of a child’s personality, requires careful nurturing. Passions should be encouraged, entered into, enjoyed and expressed:
“Our voice will be better developed if we spend time with our passions” (p.56).
There needs to be an active engagement with our environment – the people, places and language that surrounds us in our day to day lives – if we are to develop a true sense of place.
There is one other ingredient that is vital to developing a writer’s voice – critique. Every writer needs people around them who will, when necessary, gently but firmly tell them, “That just doesn’t sound like you. Let me have it in your voice, not in someone else’s.” And the writer needs to receive such criticism well. Maybe she/he was experimenting in their writing and the experiment didn’t quite come off. That’s OK. In fact, it’s more than OK. If we don’t try out new things, our voice will stagnate rather than develop and, to my mind at least, that would be a shame.
On the tweetspeak poetry blog a group of people led by Lyla Lindquist are discussing L.L. Barkat’s book Rumors of Water. You might want to pop over there and see what the others are saying.
Lyla suggested that we might like to record a piece we have written and add it to our posts. Here’s one of my recent poems, One Small Step:
