Finding your Voice

And to a meeting of a group of women who, by the group name and their general demeanour, clearly wish to be considered Thoughtful and Up With Things, and not like those other ladies groups that do flower arranging and try out Wartime Recipes. They were too. Thoughful, I mean. Nice people. I did a taster session for the life story course and told them a bit about my writing. The opening is a bit like going to AA (I’m told). “Hello, this is my name, and I’m a writer”.

I told them about journaling, and the local magazine column I do, and then mentioned blogging. Blank looks. I explained about the internet and Facebook and Blogger, and incomprehension was replaced by horror on some faces. Surely, very dangerous, one said. I tried to explain that it didn’t need to be, and how I write anonymously, because I feel free to express myself. Everyone now looked very suspicious.

Why do I find this complicated and hard to explain? Here I’m racingdemon, but that’s not really me, or entirely me, and there’s another me, or even several me’s (now I sound mentally ill); all this is based in reality, but a slightly adapted form of reality, and it may not have happened in this order, and I probably didn’t think of the various examples of rapier wit and dazzling humour until I got home and started to write. I don’t write posts directly on line, but on the word processor, and work on them and edit them, so it might be a few days before something appears on the blog. “So you lie, and make things up then!” said one of them. “If it’s true, and not scurrilous, why do you hide your identity?” said another. Oh dear, I’m not doing very well at this. Anyone out there got any better explanation?

Read Lucy Mangan in the Guardian, and there are some good examples. This week she writes about starting a vegetable patch, and her boyfriend and parent’s reactions. Do I believe that everything was said verbatim? No. Was the gist of it true? I expect so. Did it make for an entertaining column? Certainly.

Is what we bloggers write fiction, or fact, or faction? Sometimes all three. Anyone remember David Lodge writing his series of articles in the Independent on Sunday, around 1991, “The Art of Fiction”. I have the Penguin paperback with the collected articles. He says that writing is “essentially a rhetorical art …” where the writer “persuades us to share a certain view of the world for the duration of the reading experience, effecting when successful, that rapt immersion in an imagined reality, that Van Gogh captured so well in his painting “The Novel Reader””. Wow, yes.

I’ve just finished Ian Banks “Raw Spirit”. Banks is a novelist, but this is part travelogue, part memoir, part biography, as he tours Scotland in various cars, visiting distilleries, sampling whisky and writing down his thoughts, reactions, reminiscences, and stories. I haven’t read any of Banks novels (sorry Ian); I don’t drink much whisky; I’m not a great fan of Scotland (only been three times; too many midges; Banks writes about them at one point); I’m not that interested in cars, and Banks on driving. So why have I read it? What makes the book good, indeed hard to put down, is that in the process of writing, and throughout the whole book, Banks Finds His Own Voice. One of the best examples I have of this illusive gift. When I write, I am constantly trying to find out how to do this, and how to sustain it. Sometimes I think I manage it for a paragraph or two, often I don’t.

John Fairfax and John Moat, founders of the Arvon Foundation, wrote on writing some years ago: “It is by working, by writing, by practicing the art long and regularly that the writer develops his ear, ie that sense which eventually enables the writer to hear where the power of the word lies, and ultimately, his own voice.”

Epictetus wrote, “If you wish to be a good writer, then write.”

Surely that is what the great democratic exercise of the blog is all about, giving all the chance to practice and practice at all times of the day and night, anywhere in the world, and to give us the chance to read and comment on one another’s efforts.

With this group, it was in the free writing exercises and the opportunity to just let the pen run across the page, to let the ideas come, almost bypassing the conscious mind, to find their own voice, as if they were in relaxed conversation with one trusted friend, that the group enjoyed themselves most and, I think, saw the point. So it was worth going. And a good supper too.