Voice Lessons

Today's prompt on the BlogHer NaBloPoMo site is: "Do you feel you have found your voice on your blog? What techniques have you tried to develop your voice in your writing? What are some characteristics of your personality in your writing?"

"Voice shape" by Jacob Whittaker

Answer to first question: Hell yes. I've said it over and over again. When I tried to write short stories, I couldn't develop a credible character. I started writing a cheesy mystery romance novel once. My husband read the first few chapters and said: "She's you." I said "She is not!" He said "she's in graduate school for comparative literature and she's of Polish descent." I said "shut up, she has different coloured hair and she's plucky and confident." He said "isn't this other character just your Irony Professor?" I said "I hate you." 

I wrote two short stories in six years that I thought were not terrible. I sent one to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I got a very nice rejection letter from the editor that said the prose style was interesting but he just couldn't get into the subject matter, which should have been encouraging, but I was stuck for more subject matter. I didn't know WHAT I wanted to write about. Also, the story made everybody who read it, including my husband, think that I didn't want children, which was a bit of a concern for him since we were trying to get pregnant at the time. I said "fuck OFF, not every character is me!" I proceeded to have a kid or two and not endeavour to get them kidnapped or killed, so I think by now he's probably convinced.

I kept trying to write short stories, but it didn't work. I couldn't work up a character, and if I did I couldn't get them from the kitchen to the laundry room without everything being painfully awkward - it was like my writing took them all out at the knees - "I want to be a good protagonist but these tortured similes won't let me move forward!"

I became aware of blogging at some point, and I thought it was ridiculous. Who would be colossally arrogant enough to put their diary on the internet, and if they did, who would possibly care to read it? I believe I said the words "I will never have a blog" on more than one occasion. On the other hand, I was more and more aware that all my friends would say they loved getting emails from me because they were so smart and funny and entertaining, and when I asked them to read my short stories they would read them and say "hey, your last email was so smart and funny and entertaining, and here, I made you some cookies."

So then I thought, hmm, if I started a blog, it would kind of be like writing emails to the world. And since I couldn't possibly be any less successful as a writer than I already was, I gleefully tossed my principles to the wind and googled "how to start a blog". Whenever I read my short stories over, I'm in an agony of cringing mortification. When I reread my blog posts, I'm generally thinking "goddamn, I really am quite amusing." I haven't written the Great Canadian Anything. My readership is small (but kickass). Sometimes I've done nothing but given myself and one other person a quick laugh for the day. It feels like a kind of success.

Answer to the second question: Uh, none really. I signed up for daily writing prompts from Sarah Selecky. They come to my inbox every day and I dutifully open them up and look at them and stick them in a folder. I think of NaBloPoMo as kind of a good technique to encourage my voice, in the same way that drinking half a bottle of vodka is a good technique to encourage my head into the toilet; sometimes you just have to force yourself to do it.

Answer to the third question: Overuse of dashes, undue reliance on the word 'totally' and a lot of swearing - I like to throw in a little unanticipated repetition, e.g. 'jesus jesus fuck' or "son of a bitching bitching bitch", or maybe mix it up a little with an unusual combination like 'rabbit-humping whore-douche' or 'jack-bitching anus-hat'. 

Sorry. I felt like things were getting a little earnest there. 

What We Have Here...

Angus has been bugging us for a few weeks to make him an appointment with Matt's university friend who is now an Ottawa dermatologist, for his face (which we don't think is that bad, but whatever). She had given us her office number and said she'd fit us in, but then SQUIRREL, and now it's a few months later and I couldn't find it. I emailed Zarah, who's in more frequent contact with her than we are, and asked if she had Jen's contact information. The next morning, I opened my ipad upstairs when I woke up and there was an email from Zarah with the pertinent details. I emailed back "Thank-you!" and went to shower. When I got downstairs and opened my computer, there was an email from Zarah that said this:

Um...huh? So I looked at my original email below, and instead of "Thank-you!" it said:

Oops! But still, what? Then I looked back at HER original email and saw this:

So she thought I was correcting her than/then use. But then MY email should have, at the VERY least, said "Than, you!" So not only did she think I was a big enough douche to correct her grammar when she was doing me a favour, but she thought I was doing it USING IMPROPER GRAMMAR.

So I emailed back:

And she said:

And also:

And finally:

And I said, well I know who I can share it with, who will TOTALLY get the awesomeness. And I didn't even point out this part to her:

Well, until  now. Because I'm an asshole. And it's the icing on the fabulous story cake. And Zarah can take it. 

Mondays on the Margins: Words and Friends

I don't play Angry Birds. Or Fruit Ninja. Or Zombies vs. Watermelons or whatever. My ipad has tons of game apps on it because of my kids, but it's just not something that activates my pleasure centers. When I'm stuck waiting for my kids in the car or outside dance class I generally read or, if I don't have a book, clean out my purse or something - my phone doesn't even have games, or the internet.

But every now and then I get hooked on a word game on Facebook. The one where you use the letters to make up as many words as possible, or the other one where you... uh, do the same thing but in a grid? I was addicted to these for a while but it was a long time ago, they sort of catch fire for a bit and then everyone moves on.

But I kept hearing about Words With Friends, and I kept thinking hey! I like words! I like friends! I really need to check this game out sometime. So this past week-end I became probably the last person in the Western World to start playing Words With Friends. Which name is a VICIOUS LIE, let me tell you, because it's SCRABBLE.

I FUCKING HATE SCRABBLE. As my friend Collette says, Scrabble is NOT about vocabulary. it's about strategy. Vocabulary I have. Strong skills on the strategy front? Not so much.

Why should it matter, right? It's just a fun game between friends. Except I can't just have fun. No fun exists without subtext. When my friends all beat me, and they do all beat me, because I'm busy spelling 'it' and adding an 's' to 'car' and figuring out that I can spell STEAMIER with all my letters, but not anywhere on the actual board, I think that they're secretly revising their opinion of me as an intelligent person, and feeling really embarrassed for me, and wondering what the respectable length of time is before they can quietly unfriend me and pretend this horrible unpleasantness never happened. I'd probably be less mortified if I'd thrown up on their sofa while their mother-in-law was visiting. Not to mention the fact that when Sarah Piazza said on Facebook that she "needed more partners for Words With Friends" she neglected to add "to chew up and spit out". Quaids? What the fuck are quaids? She's brilliant, and articulate, and she knows words AND STRATEGY. And yet I keep going back for even more humiliation and wordish carnage.

While I was crawling away from a WWF debate in ignominious defeat, I stumbled across another app called  94 seconds. In this one, you have 94 seconds to give as many answers as you can for things like "mammals that begin with the letter T", "flowers that begin with the letter R" or "auto manufacturers that begin with the letter W".

It's really hard. Especially for someone like me, who tends to go: Uh, a mammal. DOG. No, that doesn't start with a T. Uh...TOG. No, come on, a mammal that starts with T, this is easy....I suspect the whole point is that the mind isn't flexible about things like this, it tends to fixate on one result and can't easily find another one, although some people probably are naturally better than others.

There's a fish category. I kept not being able to come up with anything, so at one point I just started typing a random word and putting 'fish' after it. Zebrafish! And then I was surprised as hell when it was right, so I kept doing it. Railfish! Thornfish! Razorfish! Penisfish! (I think I made that last one up, but honestly it's hard to be sure). I'm not entirely sure what the point of the game is, since the same question tends to come up in subsequent games so your result gets better by default because you start being able to memorize some answers, although just when I think I've really got it figured out I forget that the 'M' element from the periodic table is Mercury, or that Drum is a pretty freaking obvious answer for musical instrument that starts with D, or I get "Country that starts with C" and don't automatically put THE ONE I LIVE IN. But I can't stop playing it anyway. I'm probably creating some very specific and odd new neuronal pathways. I might start craving razorfish on toast any moment now.

So yeah. If you need me, I'll be over here wondering if I can close the hundred-and-forty-seven-point gap between me and Sarah, or trying to desperately to think of a foreign capital of a sovereign nation. That starts with a V.

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. 

Scintilla Day 2: Instructions

Prompt 2: Tell a story about something interesting (anything!) that happened to you, but tell it in the form of an instruction manual.

*****************

Step 1: Find yourself living in Toronto with your husband of a few months, working for a cool little independent bookstore, finally getting treatment for depression which will surely solve all of those problems in short order and forever (insert slightly bitter snort).

Step 2: Figure things are going pretty well and it would be a good thing to find a way to give back to the community.

Step 3: See an ad for PAL-Reading Services in the paper.

Step 4: Feel struck to the core with the conviction that this was Meant To Be in every possible way - Blind People who are Tragically Denied the Joys of the Written Word (because you don't know Braille, or there aren't enough books in Braille, or something!), LET ME BE YOUR READER!

Step 5: Go in for a short test. Be accepted with alacrity and praise despite a slight quibble over the pronunciation of the word 'eschew'.

Step 6: Take the subway to that part of town a few times a month. Enjoy being ensconced in your own tiny room with a window, a counter, a tape recorder and a book. Resist the temptation to add editorial comments or introduce yourself ("Hi, I'm Allison and I'll be your reader today").

Step 7. Marvel at the range and variety of material you're asked to read. Biology textbooks. Historical treatises. Inspirational memoirs that make it necessary to remove all traces of eye-rolling from your voice.

Step 8: Encounter issues such as: How do I read the word 'deftness' without making it apt to be mistaken for 'deafness' and yet still maintain the flow of the narrative?; Should I vary my voice to indicate when different people are speaking?; Have I really been pronouncing 'detritus' wrongly my whole life?

Step 9: Show up as usual one day and enter your little room.

Step 10: Find a volume of poetry for the first time and think that this will be interesting.

Step 11: Get set up and scan the first poem.

Step 12: Realize in short order that the book is, in fact, a volume of African-American lesbian erotic poetry.

Step 13: Check the room reflexively for hidden cameras -

Step 13a: not hidden microphones because THEY DON'T HAVE TO HIDE THE MICROPHONE, IT'S RIGHT THERE ON THE COUNTER.

Step 14: Wonder if you're being punk'd, except Punk'd doesn't actually exist yet.

Step 15: Decide that perhaps you're being silly.

Step 16: But then think, are you really? It's Toronto, for crying out loud - centre of multiculturalism and diversity and difference. And if you're not the straightest, whitest straight white girl they could have given this to, you have to be close.

Step 17: Look around more carefully for hidden cameras.

Step 18: Decide that you're probably just being silly. Who knows what kind of roster of readers they have? And hey, blind African-Canadian lesbians deserve their sexy poems as much as anyone else. And you haven't been Catholic, strictly speaking, for quite a while.

Step 19: Become involved in the work at hand.

Step 20: Do a pretty damned good job, if you do say so yourself, including reading out the phrase "To the woman who makes my clit dance" without exclaiming 'okay, seriously?' afterwards.

Step 21: Turn in the book and tape recorder and give some pretty serious side-eye to the chick at the front desk on your way out. Be unable to decide whether her expression is a little TOO suspiciously deadpan.

Step 22: Spend the subway ride home alternately blushing and giggling like an idiot.

Step 23: Resolve to become less naive and easily embarrassed.

Step 24: Take a second, many years later, to be fervently grateful that you weren't doing this kind of volunteer work when Fifty Shades of Grey was published.

Stuff

I very determinedly mooched around for much of today. This was the first day the kids were in school since Matt got back home and I figured I was going to be tired and out of sorts so I decided I wouldn't really try to get too much done before picking the kids up, taking them to piano, getting groceries and making dinner. I have this bad habit of thinking I'm going to have a relaxing day and then letting my stupid Catholic guilt wreck it, which totally defeats the purpose of being lazy. So I mooched. Even though I don't really like the word mooch. Or nibble -- why does anything ever need to be nibbled? Eck, the very sound of it makes my shoulders creep up and my nose all wrinkly. And snippets. I hate snippets of anything. Little pieces? Fine. Wee bits? Grand. No snippets.

 

While we were having supper Angus asked Matt if he'd been everywhere in the world yet. No, I did not put him up to this. Matt said the list of places he hasn't been in still much longer than the list of places he has been. Then we decided to figure out which continents he hasn't visited (Africa, Antarctica and South America, but I've been to Africa so between the two of us we've nearly got them covered). Eve was trying to talk about Asia but kept saying it in French which she and Angus found hilarious. Then Angus asked what the biggest country was and I started singing the song I always sing to help me remember this because I suck at geography and love the Arrogant Worms. So then we played this while we were finishing supper -- hilarious AND educational. 

After supper I had a mini freak-out because I remembered that my assignment is due on Friday and HOLY CRAP WHAT THE HELL WAS I DOING MOOCHING WHEN PUTTING SEARCH STRINGS TOGETHER AND COMBING DATABASES FOR facts on fibromyalgia and new cars and the 1911 census MUST BE DONE? Then I sat down and finished one question and decided it wasn't so bad. Then I ate some candy cane kisses and then became annoyed by all the stupid little wrappers that had to be hidden when I heard my husband coming downstairs. The stupid little snippets are hardly nibble-able.

BUT let us all celebrate the fact that for the first time in weeks I DON'T have a zit of gargantuan proportions camping out on one corner of my chin or the other or both. No? Okay, maybe just me. "I'm the second...largest country..."