Tag Archives: Grace Paley

20 Ways to Make it Better (#2)

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#2. Write in your own voice

Remember Eddie Haskell on the old television program, “Leave it to Beaver”?

“How are you today, Mrs. Cleaver? You certainly look lovely.” “Isn’t it a lovely day today, Mrs. Cleaver?” He had this way of speaking to June Cleaver that was so fake, so phony. Not at all the way he spoke with Wally and The Beav. June didn’t believe him and neither did we.

Do you ever talk that way in your public voice? “Unaccustomed as I am…” “May I inquire…” Does it ever seep over into your writing?

Sometimes if we go for what we think of as proper or educated or smart, instead of sounding smart, we wind up sounding stilted. The natural rhythms and cadences of our real voices are absent and we don’t sound like ourselves or even anyone we know.

Here’s the thing: your own voice is the place and people you come from, the language you learned at the kitchen table and in the back yard. Your own voice comes naturally. Grace Paley said, “If you say what’s on your mind in the language that comes to you from your parents and your street and friends, you’ll probably say something beautiful.”

If you’re having difficulty getting words down on the page, if you feel like you’re arm-wrestling with your pen, if you scratch out and rewrite, if you think instead of writing, especially first-draft writing, then you can bet you’re not writing in your own natural, authentic voice.

Brenda Euland advises, ” Try to discover your true, honest, untheoretical self.”

How to do it? Just get a prompt, set the timer and let ‘er rip. You’ll clean it up later, but what you might discover in that messy draft on the page is your own beautiful, authentic, original voice.

Make Your Own Joyful Noise

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Everyone has at least one strong, beautiful, perfectly learned voice and if you use that voice with utter abandon and confidence, good writing happens. Why? Because it’s authentic. Writing in this voice is not something you have to learn. Your voice is already there and it’s unique because you are unique.

This voice is the place you come from, the language you learned at the kitchen table, in the back yard and surrounded by family. Your authentic voice is attitude, geography and history. Grace Paley said, “If you say what’s on your mind in the language that comes to you from your parents and your street and friends, you’ll probably say something beautiful.”

Sometimes it may seem the more we learn about the craft of writing, the more difficult the act becomes. In trying to get it “right,” we lose the lovely, imaginative voice that comes naturally and write in a voice that is not our own. Writing becomes work. This is where so many writers become discouraged and quit.

Please don’t do that.

Come back to your own native voice. No one knows that language as perfectly as you know it. Allow it to take over and talk through you and onto your page. “Write freely, recklessly, in first drafts,” Brenda Ueland told us.

Our aim as writers is to refine and strengthen our voice, to explore the terrain of our natural language, to discover its peaks and valleys, its sounds and the silence between sounds. Our job is to write and rewrite until what we have written resonates with what is authentic and true.

Remember as you go to your writing, no one else can tell the stories you have to tell and no one else can write them in the voice that is uniquely and authentically your own.

This piece was written for UCSD Extension’s “Enrich Yourself” brochure. I’ll be teaching three workshops at Extension this fall. Find out more here.