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| by ~I don't have a DSLR, but... |
It's almost laughable, isn't it, that we writers struggle to find our own voice?
Our voices come out loud and clear during our every waking moment, while we're talking to family and friends.
And then when we sit down to write. IT'S GONE!
It's like another personality takes over, the one that was always trying to impress the teachers back in school, the essay voice, the term paper voice, the journal voice (heaven forbid). It's like we've been put under a spell, the English Teacher's Curse, which has left us
voiceless.
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| by pareeerica |
When I started writing fiction, my loss became embarrassingly clear. After reading my first novel, agents came back with: "I don't feel connected to your protagonist. I don't feel I know her." Actually, they were being nice. My protagonist sounded like an uptight, judgmental, Miss-Goody-Two Shoes, who nobody would want to spend ten minutes with, let alone the hours it takes to read a novel.
Yet people in my creative writing classes loved the words that miraculously sprang onto my paper during our in-class assignments, you know, where the teacher gives you a prompt and then ten minutes to respond? Mainly because of lack of time, I wrote from the gut, and often in the viewpoint of a man or a child. Sometimes I was even funny. I was having a ball.
But the protagonist of my novel still wasn't getting it! What was her problem?
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| by Kristina B |
So, I decided to start my own blog and make regular posts in the hopes that if I kept practicing, I'd find my voice and be able to share it with my heroine.
Anyway, I have things to say. And to do it through newspapers and magazines is hard. The competition is fierce, and I don't have the experience. You know, you can't get the job without the experience, and you can't get the experience without the job.
It's also hard to write something that
everyone wants to read, or at least the bulk of readers who frequent a particular newspaper or magazine.
With a blog, I can write what
I care about, and, in time, I hope people will stop by. They'll come voluntarily and thus be more receptive to my message. Maybe they'll find a key word on the Internet that leads to my site, or maybe another site will bring them in.
Hopefully, with practice, the voice visitors hear will be my own. Sure, some of the content of my posts will be available elsewhere on the Internet, from much greater authority, but I'll provide posts that come from "the gut," and, in my case, that means from a technologically-challenged, struggling writer, trying to find her voice.
