If you don’t follow the words when they come,

If you don’t follow the words when they come,

if you fail to pay attention or

if you think you can find them later or

if you make the mistake of ignoring them or

if you believe they’re unimportant or

if you hope you’ll be able to draw them out of thin air sometime later, 

maybe when you have the time, 

or maybe after dinner, 

or maybe just before you get into bed, or

if you put off writing just because you’re embarrassed 

to stand still in the middle of the sidewalk 

typing on your phone or jotting in your notebook 

as people pass you by 

afraid they’ll think you’re rude 

not to say hello or acknowledge those around you, 

if you don’t follow the words the moment they appear, 

listen, I’m telling you 

they’ll fade into the mist and disappear 

and it’s rare—if ever—that you’ll find them again, 

they’ll desert you in search of someone else prepared 

to hear their call, someone listening with an open heart 

the way you need to listen patiently for days or weeks or months, 

for however long it takes, for the sound you’ve been waiting 

and wanting to hear, and you—

you, the one who couldn’t spare a moment, 

who pretended not to hear anything—

if you don't follow the words when they come,

you’ll be left empty handed with nothing more than 

a faint dream of what might have been 

on the blank page in front of you .

Out of thin air

It's always hard to let go,

to put down your pen,

to take a break.

You don't want to lose

the connection you make

with yourself when you write.

So you debate with yourself--

stop or keep going?

Keep listening or not?

The thing is you never 

know what you'll find

if you keep waiting.

You never know if something 

will fly across the sky and 

you'll catch a glimpse

and suddenly the words

you need to write 

will appear

like magic

out of 

thin air.

But only if you

stay in your chair

and keep waiting

listening to the silence,

staring at the page

in anticipation of

whatever 

might come 

out of nowhere.

Listening for words

Listening for words

waiting for a voice

to whisper in my ear

hoping I'll recognize

it when I hear it--

if I hear it--

not knowing what

to expect

sitting in anticipation

of something

(but what?)

not knowing anything

more than the

blank page

and the pen in

my hand

poised over the page

waiting to hear

what I've never heard before

praying I'll be able to

catch the words

with my pen

and bring them

to the page

like pearls

drawn from

the depths

of the sea.

It's like dreaming

Each morning I listen to the silence

and hope to hear a voice and words

I've never heard before.

I listen with my ears

but, really, it's a different

kind of listening

that requires you to open

your heart, to hear

what you're afraid to say

or what you don't yet know

you need to say.

It's your voice and not your voice,

it's your hand holding the pen

and writing down the words

on the page and not your hand.

You hear something, a voice

beyond words. (Are there even 

words to describe it?)

It's like being bathed in light

or immersed in water

and you feel like you're floating

on the page as words 

emerge from your pen

and you see the letters

taking shape and the words

forming on the page

even before the words form

in your mind--as if

you are witnessing your thoughts

coming into being,

what you think and feel

unknown until you can

see the words floating 

in front of you.

It's like dreaming,

and when you open

your eyes the dream vanishes,

and you see instead

a page filled with the words 

you collected from a world

before it disappeared.

Listening for a voice

You think you're listening for words, waiting for them to appear, but really you're listening for a voice, and only when you hear that voice can you hear the words.

It's a voice that whispers in your ear: "I am here. Are you ready?"

And if you're unprepared, not ready to record what you hear, you'll miss it, and the voice will fall silent again.

It's your voice and it's not your voice but all the voices you've ever heard.

And it comes not from some external source but from inside your inner ear, from some place deep within yourself that you can hear only if you're paying attention.

It sounds like the rush of waves rolling into shore or like the flapping of a bird's wings. 

It sounds like the wind blowing through trees, soughing, rustling leaves.

It sounds like rain falling gently on the roof or like the gentle echo of thunder after a flash of lightening.

Your words strike the page just like that flash of lightning.

And then the voice fades like thunder when it's done and disappears until next time.

And the only evidence of its presence are the words your pen leaves on the page.

Learning How to Listen

Open a novel, start reading a poem, or begin a short story, and you’ll hear a writer’s voice immediately.

Each voice is distinct, the author’s voice melded with the narrator’s voice into something never heard before, offering us an invitation into a secret world, an inner world ordinarily hidden from view. It’s this intimacy that we expect as readers. 

But often as writers we take our voices and this intimacy on the page for granted, believing (mistakenly) that our voices—our writer’s voice and our narrator’s voice— are granted us automatically rather than something we need to labor to achieve. 

Using our voice is a skill that we need to learn. It takes a good deal of effort, as you know, to replicate the sound of our voice on the page and in the reader’s ear. For many of us it can take years to find our narrator’s voice before it sounds authentic in our ear, as well as on the page.

How does a writer find his or her voice? What sort of exercises, if any, are helpful? What’s the secret to capturing the sound of a narrator’s voice? 

Lately, I’ve been asking myself these questions because of a severe case of  laryngitis that I came down with six months ago. And I've been wondering if understanding how our speaking voices work can help us understand how to better work with our writer’s voices. 

I hadn’t given much attention to my speaking voice until I lost it last June. Whenever I spoke to people face-to-face or over the phone, I expected my voice to sound as it always sounded. It was my voice, after all, and my voice had a certain sound, a certain timbre, shall we say, as well as a certain cadence and volume. Much like a fingerprint, it identified me to all who knew me. 

But suddenly my voice was gone, and over the next few months doctors told me to rest my voice, which was harder than it might sound. I didn’t realize how much I used my voice. But, my goodness, I discovered I used my voice a lot more than I’d thought. And resting my voice—which meant, essentially, not speaking—was a challenge.

After a while my ENT doctor suggested I take speech therapy to help rehabilitate my voice. He thought therapy might help strengthen the muscles around my strained vocal cords and, in turn, improve my voice. So I started speech therapy sessions, and what I learned about my speaking voice might, I think, help other writers find their writing voices, as well as the voices of their narrators.

1) Learn to relax.

It was almost the first thing that I was advised. Relax! I was given exercises to help me learn to relax my neck and throat, to rid the muscles of tension. In the process of relaxing I learned that forcing myself to speak would only strain the cords and give my voice an unnaturally tense sound. I think it’s the same with writing. Tension will change your voice and how you sound on the page. So, first, try to relax.

2) Warm up.

I had to learn how to physically warm up my voice before speaking. This meant I had to repeat vowel sounds, lift my shoulders in slow circles, massage my jaw. At the start of some sessions I was given a warm towel to wrap around my neck for a few minutes so the heat could help soften the muscles and ligaments in my throat. I was literally warming up my voice to speak before I uttered a word.

And it may be the same for writing. Before you begin writing, you might try some form of physical exercise to help you warm up your writing muscles. What if you spent ten minutes reading someone else’s words (or listening to their voice). Or what if you devoted a few minutes to drawing or doodling? You might be surprised how warming up your hand muscles also warms up your voice muscles. 

3) Reduce the strain.

I had to learn how to project my voice from the front of my mouth in order to reduce the strain on the back of my throat. That meant using lots of words that began with ‘m’… and feeling a kind of buzz on my lips… and making sure that I was using my diaphragm to speak instead of forcing air through my vocal chords and straining to speak from my throat instead of from my belly or core. 

So, if you’re having trouble hearing your voice or your narrator’s voice on the page, or if you feel like the voice doesn’t sound authentic, you might consider changing something about the way you write—the time of day, for instance, or the chair you sit in, or the location of your desk. Or try a new pen.  Or a new journal. 

What if you went to a cafe to write? Or to a bus station? Or to a park? Or just switched rooms? Would your voice sound different if you wrote something there? Maybe that’s something to explore: can the place where you write influence your voice?

4) Learn how to listen. 

After six weeks in speech therapy, I was given another test to see how my voice sounded… and the printout showed me what my ear told me. I could hear a difference between when I’d first started therapy and six weeks later. 

This, too, offers a clue to how we can find our voices on the page. We need to learn how to listen for our voice, and to recognize it when we hear it so that we can reproduce it again and again. That’s why sometimes it can be helpful to read one’s work aloud, or to listen to someone else—a trusted friend, a helpful colleague—read one’s work so we can hear our voice as it sounds on the page.

After six months I’m lucky that I have regained a good deal of my voice. Although not all of it has returned, enough has come back so that I sound almost like I remember sounding. It’s my speaking voice, just not quite my voice! That means there’s still more work to do and more exams to determine if the vocal cords have healed yet.

But I’ve learned a lot that I hadn’t known about my voice. (Did you know, for instance, the human vocal cord is a half-inch to an inch long?) And in the process I learned a lot about my writing voice, too.

May the pages that you write in the days ahead be filled with the magical sound of your voice.

Many thanks to all for following wordswimmer over the past year. I’m looking forward to spending more time with you in the year ahead. Happy writing in 2019!!

Long Haul Revisions

Sometimes I think revising one’s work is all about letting go.

Like when you fly a kite and the wind pulls the string out of your hand and you have to let go (or get burned by the string) and you watch the kite flying off on its own?

That’s a little bit what revising feels like at the moment.

I’m feeling helpless to guide the characters. They're on their own now, like the kite, free-floating, each character guided by his or her own inner compass, not mine.

But I’m also feeling, after just a half-dozen revisions, that I’m a much more intent observer, trying to take everything in and get it on paper. 

It’s as if I’ve become a recorder of events as they unfold, a conduit, so to speak, for a story that’s happening inside my head as it spins itself out into the world line by line.

If I’m patient and willing to wait quietly—like a fisherman waiting for a fish to bite—I will eventually feel the tug on the hook and know that it won’t be long before I’ll learn something more about the story and the characters in it.

At the moment I’m printing out the latest batch of revisions for a manuscript that I started back in January.

I’m forging forward using one of my writing teacher’s methods of revising, which means that I’ll need to revise these pages in front of me at least 30 more times (thanks, Norma!) before I consider the manuscript finished (or decide if I need to revise for another 30 drafts).

Well, okay, thirty drafts may seem like a stretch--and sixty drafts, well, that's a bit mind-boggling at the moment--but if that’s what it takes, then I’m willing to aim for a high number of revisions, even though it’s daunting to think of revising the same pages that many times.

But here’s one of the surprises that I've learned over the past half-dozen revisions of this particular manuscript.

Revising over and over again is liberating!

The manuscript is still malleable, still a work-in-progress. It can change and grow.

And thinking about revisions in this way—revisions over the long haul—has taken a lot of the pressure off the process.

Instead of trying to shoo the manuscript out the door like a reluctant calf or puppy, I can take my time. I can give myself permission to look at each character with care. I can listen more closely to each character’s voice. I can better understand their struggles.

Until recently I hadn’t realized the manuscripts that I was shooing out the door earlier in my career were too young, too immature, for the world, unable to stand on their own.

In my head they were finished, but on paper they weren’t done and not quite ready to share with readers.

Long haul revisions may seem like a slow process, but, really, it’s just a process of taking the time it takes to get acquainted with my characters and to learn about them on a deeper level, to understand what’s going on beneath the surface of their lives.

This kind of long haul revising is also a process of waiting for characters to talk, to divulge their stories, to share their secrets, so the story itself expands and deepens in ways that I could never have envisioned if I’d stopped revising in an earlier draft.

Truths and lies slip out of their mouths, or they act in ways that I might never have expected. 

And these unexpected moments of discovery take the story on a path that I could never have predicted. They invest the story with life so the story becomes a living, breathing thing, no longer lifeless words on a page but a record of lives in the process of living, searching for answers, exploring the world, and finding… well, each character finds something different, unique to him or her.

Anyway, I’m enjoying the process of long haul revisions (even on days when I have no idea what will happen next or where the story might be going).

I hope you are finding ways to enjoy revising your work, too!

Sitting and Waiting

Are you willing to sit and wait for a while?

Are you prepared to sit and wait for more than a few hours a day, more than a few days a week, more than a few weeks a month, more than a few months a year?

Are you capable of sitting and waiting for more than a year?

If you’re not willing to sit and wait for your characters to reveal themselves to you—however long it might take—then how can you expect to write about their world?

One of my teachers told me long ago that she rarely wrote fewer than thirty drafts of a novel or short story. Thirty drafts! 

Sometimes that's just how long it takes.

So, when you finish one draft, or two, or even three, perhaps you’re only starting the process, and there’s more sitting and waiting ahead.

Writing requires patience. Not just the patience to sit and wait for words to come, but the patience to wait until a character is forthcoming and willing to open himself or herself up to you.

Your characters need to trust you, and they can sense your impatience, your doubts, your discomfort sitting and waiting. They can sense when you are afraid of their story, fearful of the truths that may emerge from their lives, reluctant to face the events they want to share with you, unwilling—or unable—to confront the challenges in their day-to-day existence.

If they sense the slightest hint of fear, uncertainty, or doubt, they will remain silent.

They may show you the surface of their lives, but they will withhold the deeper issues, hide the fissures that cause them pain, and conceal the cracks that reveal their need for love and acceptance.

If you can sit and wait, though, they may grant you a gift.

They may tell you who they truly are and how they live their lives and what they want and what they fear and what they’re willing to do for love.

They may give you the gift of a story.

Sometimes writing isn’t just about getting words on paper.

It’s about trusting and doubting, and about being afraid and being able to love, and about hoping and believing in a story that you can't yet see and in characters who you can't yet hear.

It’s about sitting.

And waiting.

Sitting and waiting

Over the years I’ve learned to sit and wait in silence for the words to come, and to sit in silence if they don’t come, and to wait in patience for whatever will come—words or silence.

It's taken more than four decades, maybe five, to learn this, to sit with a pen poised in my hand, a blank page waiting beneath it, mute, and wait for thoughts to appear or, if nothing appears and the page remains blank, to sit and wait in patience for words to come or silence, whichever the moment might bring.

I learned to accept it wasn’t in my power to force words to come or to disarm the silence as if it was an enemy waiting to ensnare me, but to let go of the idea that I had any power at all, to let the pen lead me wherever it needed  to go, even if it meant entering the thicket of silence.

Sitting and waiting was just sitting and waiting, not failure, not frustration, just another form of seeing that allowed me to view the world from a different perspective, a different angle, and if the words remained frozen or stuck behind an invisible dam, I learned not to worry if they never appeared and listened to my breath and observed the changing color of the light and let my thoughts wander without the distraction of the scratch-scratch sound of pen on paper.

I learned that writing wasn’t always writing but listening and watching, that my pen didn’t have to move across the page, didn’t even have to be in my hand, for me to write, for the words to come and to appear on the screen of my inner eye—which required a different kind of awareness, a different way of seeing (and listening for) words.

Sitting and waiting for the moment when a thought glimmers, just out of reach, and leaps like a silver fish out of the water, that’s the moment that writing begins, and you can feel the desire to describe that moment, to catch that fish and reel it in so you can see its fins and scales and jewel-like eyes (quickly clouding) and feel its mystery and the way it links you to life before life fades.

You sit and wait and hope to make that connection with your pen, and with the words that flow through it, but if the day brings no sightings, no tug on your line, and you sit and wait in silence, listening to your breath, the page blank before you, as empty when you get up as when you sat down hours ago, it’s okay because it was all part of the writing process, all part of the mystery.