Scintilla Day 3: Finding my voice

Scintilla Day 3: 

B: Talk about a time when you were driving and you sang in the car, all alone. Why do you remember this song and that stretch of road?

I'm finding it difficult to get any real traction on the prompts this year. Last year I had to reach but it still felt within my grasp; this year I'm just starting to emerge from weeks of leaden, joyless trudging, and I'm wondering if maybe I'm just not up to this right now. I'm torn between not wanting to submit what feels like mediocre splattering and wondering if just making the effort will help me move out of the Slough of Despond.

I don't think I drive anywhere alone without singing. Once a year I drive four or five hours to Barrie to visit my best friend, and I think I usually choose the music for the drive before I decide what clothes to bring. Angus and I used to measure how long it took to drive to somebody's house by how many times we could sing the Spiderman theme song before we got there. Eve sings in three languages. I don't have nearly the upper register that I used to - asthma medication, hormones, lack of practice, whatever - but in the car I still reach for all the high notes with a complete lack of self-consciousness, and sometimes I get there and sometimes I crack and squeak horribly and then kill myself laughing. There's no way I could pick one song and one stretch of road.

So I'm going metaphorical. 

I was told from the age of seven or so that I had writing ability way above my grade level. I was always praised extravagantly for my essays, short stories and any other assignment where I could string words together (long division and completing the square were another matter entirely). I sailed through a few years taking it for granted that I would have some kind of career featuring writing. 

Then I started really thinking about what that meant. I considered journalism, until I realized that my crippling fear of questioning, talking to or in any way interacting with people I didn't know would probably be a bit of a hindrance. I went to university, got undergraduate and graduate degrees in Comparative Literature and then realized that, although I was pretty good at it, I didn't really love academic writing. Engaging in exhaustive, analytical, recursive discussion of brilliant literature by other people was engaging and amusing up to a certain point, but I didn't think I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing it and teaching other people to do it. 

I left school. I got married. I went to work for an audio publisher, thinking I would start writing fiction in my spare time.

I wrote some fiction. The fiction sucked real bad.

I tried a variety of attack points. I wrote literary short stories based on pivotal moments in a character's life. I wrote science fiction short stories. I started collaborating with a friend on a mystery novel with a strong romantic sub-plot. It was all bad. I couldn't find my voice. I knew the way my favourite books spoke to me, and I knew without a doubt that nothing I wrote was going to speak to anyone in that way. It wasn't going to say anything, in fact, except "hello, I am some really grotesquely bad fiction written by a complete waste of a human being who hates her job and still watches Beverly Hills 90210 even though she's well above the appropriate demographic". 

I took some time off to be horribly depressed. I worked in a couple of bookstores, which was twenty percent good and eighty percent wretched, on account of a large proportion of humanity being absolute wanking assholes. I quit working and had a couple of kids. Someone said once again to me that I was a really great writer. 

I said "but I never write anything."

And I didn't. I gave up. I read somewhere that if you hadn't been published by the time you were thirty that it was really all over. I felt, in a lot of ways, that I had already wasted whatever early promise I had, that I had missed some crucial turning and lost all my chances.

I heard about blogging. I rolled my eyes and mocked and wondered why anyone would think the world desired access to their thoughts, and declared that I would never, ever blog.

I started blogging. And within a very short period of time, I felt like I was singing the most soaring of arias after years of laryngitis. Trying to give a thoughtful or entertaining shape to my thoughts was vastly different from just.... trying to make things up. When I was trying to write fiction, every single sentence seemed limping, crooked, pitiful. When I was blogging, words flew faster than I could type them. I had a place to put all those thoughts that hummed or chanted or raged in my head, and see what I could do with them. Reading my own words over MADE ME SMILE. 

I often say that one of the most wonderful gifts that blogging confers is the almost-instantaneous knowledge and comfort and reassurance that, no matter what your burden, you are most assuredly not alone. But the other thing, for me, is that it gave me my voice. Some people seem to look on their blogging as a kind of consolation prize or second-best endeavour that either salves their regret for not having fiction published or keeps them from writing more fiction. And I get that, because some people are meant to write fiction, and many of them probably deserve to be published, and it's hard to get published, and maybe blogging IS sort of second-best. For me? It feels a lot like I finally found the song that I was meant to sing, the song that gives me the greatest joy and peace, and blogging is my long, straight stretch of road.