Before you put pen to paper

Before you put pen to paper

you listen for a voice,

for words, 

for something--

a sound, an image, anything--

but hear nothing 

except silence,

see nothing 

except an empty page.

It's only once you touch 

the page with your pen 

and begin moving your hand 

that you can hear something, 

see a shadow cross the page, 

and hurry to catch it

the way you might try 

to catch a rabbit 

or a butterfly.

It's as if nothing can happen

until the pen parts 

the sea of silence 

and reveals a path 

that you can follow 

(even if you still can't see it, 

can only feel your way), 

knowing the ground 

beneath your feet

is solid and you're not 

walking on clouds 

or thin air.

Maybe you can see a bridge 

high above a river, 

and you can see the light 

reflecting in starbursts 

off the surface of the water below 

as you cross the bridge 

drawn by the sound of music in the distance, 

notes you've never heard before 

that keep drawing you closer to its source, 

hidden in the woods, 

waiting for you to arrive.

Listen closely

You need to listen closely

to what’s in your heart

even if you can’t always

understand the language

it’s speaking.

You can feel it beating

in your chest, just beneath

your ribcage, pulsing

with life, with words

that flow onto the page

like an endless running

stream, 

like ice melting off the mountain

filling the page with

what you need to hear

just the softest of sounds, 

nearly inaudible on some mornings,

sounds you can’t always decipher, 

on some days just silence

flowing through your pen

leaving no marks on the page,

while on other days 

a rush of words,

a wave, a tsunami of words

that nearly carries

your pen away,

that’s almost impossible

to contain on the page,

words spilling

overflowing

washing over you

leaving you soaked to the skin 

your pen exhausted in your hand, 

your heart content, 

grateful for each word.

—

How do you go deep?

How do you go deep

and dive into places

that might hurt or

feel uncomfortable?

How do you feel

your way past pain

to a new understanding

of what's causing you

to shy away?

How do you listen

for words you can't

yet hear?

How do you write

despite uncertainty 

and doubt?

How do you admit

what you don't know

and keep writing day after

day to push past ignorance?

How do you learn

what you need to learn?

How do you keep going?

What do you have to say this morning?

The blank page is waiting.

All you hear is silence.

No words, yet.

Try not to panic.

Try not to think OMG, I'll never write anything.

Try not to listen to the negative 

voice in your head telling you 

how could you ever think 

you could write anything?

Instead, take a breath.

Close your eyes and exhale.

Take another breath and open your eyes.

Do you see the blank page in front of you?

What if you imagine it's like a still body of water

waiting for you to step into it?

Or like a snow-covered path

before anyone else has set foot on it?

Or maybe like a beach in the early morning

after the tide has retreated, leaving behind

a pristine patch of sand waiting for

your footprints to mark the start of the day?

Begin wherever you are and go from there.

Begin with a memory of someone who brings you joy

or with a wound that refuses to heal.

Put down a word --"grasshopper," say, or "grass" 

or "sunlight" or "coffee" -- and see where the word leads you.

Put aside your fears of making a mess--writing is a messy process!

Put aside your doubts that your words won't mean anything.

Listen to the voice encouraging you to begin,

the voice that you first heard urging you

to put words on paper.

Open yourself the way you'd open a book.

Let your pen touch the page.

Make a mark on the paper--a star, perhaps,

to guide you on your way--and listen 

to the words that come to you now.

Listen to the wind whispering

"Write! Before it's too late!"

Now turn the page and begin.

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.

You can't know how or why

You can't know

how or why

you can only know

what you know

the feel of the pen

in your hand

the scrape of the nib

on paper

the smoothness of

a blank page

the joy of seeing

the page fill

with words

ink flowing onto

the page

your hand rushing

to keep up

with your thoughts

that feeling of

wishing you could

stay in this place

forever

writing

feeling a connection

with something larger

than yourself

a part of the universe

inside you

that you touch each time

you hold a pen

and move your hand across

the page

like plugging 

into your heart

like hearing

the song

your soul

sings

like praying

to God

and knowing 

God is there

listening

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.

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!!