Voice

Ever read something and know immediately who wrote it?

Most of us have a clear voice in our casual writing. Our blog posts and e-mails tend to reflect our speaking style. And yet when it comes to creative writing, many find it a struggle to develop a unique voice.

I've been using the internet since the very earliest days, before it was the WWW. Back then, we all knew each other. No, I'm serious.

It was Usenet, in 1989 or 90. I learned how distinct my voice was in my casual writing in the early days of online interaction when I tried to post anonymously to a group. I was trying to be anonymous (did I mention we all knew each other?,) and consciously changed my capitalization and punctuation style to hide who I was...and said a couple of snarky things about an acquaintance. When he confronted me, it was clear he didn't even realize I'd been trying to hide. This made me wonder what it was that constituted my voice.

(note: I've also since come to realize that our casual writing voice and our creative voice is not the same thing - the former comes more naturally, while the latter takes time to nurture)

Stephen King says that a writer must pen a million words before they develop their voice. (I always wonder - do re-writes count?) When I started asking people about my "voice" as a writer, several said that I had a strong one as a poet. Of course, poetry is distilled writing. Like greek yogurt, the watery stuff drained out and intensified. (Yes, it's a goofy metaphor, but it fits and I didn't sleep well last night.) Perhaps writing in that form honed my voice earlier. Then again, most critics consider a poet under 40 to be young. Of course, I'd been writing poetry regularly for about ten years, so maybe I had hit my million words.

Reading voraciously helped. Having read nearly all the works of Shakespeare (plays and sonnets) before I was 17. Most of the work of the Romantics, plus ee cummings and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Not to mention fantasy novels. Scary stories. Mysteries. And by the time I was doing this investigation into voice (at age 19 or 20,) a great deal of postmodern literature and criticism. In fact, at that point I was so into Derrida and Foucault and Hakim Bey that I'm sure their influence came out even in my most casual writing.

That year, my third year of college, I was in a poetry workshop. Some of the young writers disdained reading other poets, for fear they would dilute or corrupt their own voice. One week, an outspoken champions of this idea objected to the reading assignments and passed around his work prefaced by a speech on the subject. I read his poem. Then I asked him if he'd read any novels lately. He said, of course. I then asked whether that might be Bret Easton Ellis he was reading. He seemed surprised - but his work sounded like a bad imitation of Ellis, broken into verse on the page.

What we read influences us. What we hear and see. There's no way around it. On Star Trek, when Data is trying to learn to play the violin, he struggles to find his voice as a musician. He consciously makes the choices we all make subconsciously - assembling his performance out of pieces of the masters' performances. Someone points out to him that this assemblage is his voice. That the particular combination in his knowledge base, and his choices about how to combine them became something new and unique. The best choice to make is to seek out an array of influences. To bombard ourselves with so many voices that no single one stands out when we sit to write.

So, other than reading a lot and writing a lot - what else can we do to develop and strengthen our voice? Some suggestions:

Trust your instincts. Your internal voice will come out in your creative writing, if you let it. (If it doesn't work, that's what rewrites are for.)

Enjoy what you're doing. If you allow your imagination to play with language, you will make more creative choices.

Know the rules. Having a strong grasp of the basics of grammar and storytelling will free you to stop thinking about those things, and focus your attention on the story, and the telling of it.

Go ahead and borrow. One of my favorite exercises for a developing writer, and one I still use when I'm studying someone, is to consciously imitate them. Try writing 5 pages in the style of Minghella, or Shane Black - and it will make you think about the choices they made, and what makes their style distinctive.

Listen. Your influences are all around you. Your family, friends and neighbors contribute to your voice as much as who you read and try to emulate.

Get rid of your favorite tricks. Like "murder your darlings," this points out the difference between what we think works for us and what does. If you have any consciously adopted stylistic tricks or flourishes, try writing without them. You may find (as I did with my anonymous Usenet post) that your voice shines through even more clearly.

Finally - after you've done all that: stop trying. Ultimately, your voice is you. How hard can that be to express?


Now, this is (primarily) a screenwriting blog. Screenplays are minimalist, blueprints. They're about story and character, not style. So is there even a place for voice in them? I'd say, yes. Absolutely. If you have any doubt - go back and read the work of three of your favorite screenwriters.

Creativity and Decisions

So, I have an idea. I think it's a really good idea. It falls into a sub-genre of thrillers I think of as daddy-daughter flicks, in which a father must rescue or revenge his little (often teenage) girl.

The problem I'm having is that I have an abundance of ideas about how to approach it.

I know who the main character is. I know who his antagonist and con-tagonists are. I know what the ending is, and I know everyone's motivations.

That still leaves me with a HUGE range of creative choices. I could write two or three complete screenplays based on these characters in this situation and have them be distinctly different.

The first dillemma: how much backstory do I front-load?
I could open with the scene of what happened to this man's daughter, showing just enough but leaving out some details that would be revealed later. The main character has suppressed parts of this event, but is also driven by it.
Or, flash back to it a few times as he encounters the individuals he's seeking revenge on, and as he remembers more. A little of this will happen regardless, because of the memory issue, but flashbacks are so tricky, perhaps they are best left alone. They seem natural to this storyline, but perhaps the audience will be more involved, and the structure will be simpler if I go with the first option.
Another approach: only hint at the event, dropping information through conversations and confrontations, without ever really showing it. I *could* even do this combined with the first option - showing very little in the opening scene, through the protag's faulty memory, and then hinting through the reactions of others that there was much more to the story

None of those are bad choices. Honestly, I love the third approach - not even showing the event, but teasing information about it through each scene, until we have a good idea - but never a 100% complete one...I'm just not sure my craft is strong enough to make that work on the page without being confusing. It's a problem I've had before.


The other major dramatic choice I'm making is between two basic approaches to the story. Make it a standard thriller-hunt type film like Taken? Or a mostly-single location psychological drama like The Negotiator and Albino Alligator?

The hunt has terrific possibilities for chase scenes, big set pieces, and lots of great cathartic torture them for info then blow them away moments. Basically, he knows where one of the people he's hunting for is, and uses them to get to the next one, leaving a trail of carnage and attracting the attention of the police. The pacing would be fast, and the story would be visceral.

The second option - have most of the people he's hunting gathered in one location, where he secures them and isolates them, then confronts each of them for information about the "truth" and the location/identity of the person who is really responsible for the bad thing that happened. Again, I lean toward this, but it's trickier to keep it interesting and tense.

Of course, I could actually write two screenplays...but since I've not written any (feature-length) scripts in a while, I think I'd better focus on just one!

Freedom, Structure & Creativity

Recently, I stumbled on "another bored college student" blogging that she "really want(s) to write a screenplay," but she is

so used to free writing which is a better fit for novel writing. Screenplay writing is very specific and every scene needs to have a purpose and function to the pace and story as a whole. So by definition it's more of a formulaic writing than free flow writing. It sucks the creativity out of it.

There's the popular-with-youngsters idea that free writing is truly creative, because it's free. If I read a novel and there are chapters that don't serve the overall purpose in some way, I get frustrated. In poetry, each stanza (each word) should be relevant and appropriate. Free writing is useful only in diaries and exercises - not for anything intended to be communicated to others.

But more than that is the complaint I came across often among poets when I was studying writing in college: that form and structure, that limits in general, were antithetical to creativity. In fact, the opposite is true. Limits engender creativity.

Interesting and original art typically comes from the streets, the poor, the oppressed. The people who have the most limits. People whose time, resources, and even daily activities are the most circumscribed.

Interesting and original art creates it's own form, where a form did not exist.

In grad school, I found that wrestling an unformed thought into the bindings of a sonnet, villanelle, or pantoum forced me to exercise my mind in a way that free form poetry does not. Giving it those limits forced me to be more careful with my phrases, and allowed me to play the language against the structure in ways that created meaning that is not possible in free verse. The form allows you to draw attention to specific words by their placement, and to tie one word or stanza to another - through the form - and create layers of meaning. You build layers, like a good wall (or a cake!), and repetition gives it strength. Or like passes of ink over a silkscreen, the color intensifying each time it's pushed through the form.

If you really want to write a screenplay, you want to write something that is identifiable as a movie. Movies have certain specific limits, and the limits of narrative in that medium also create opportunities for creativity. Where else can you have image and reaction? Where you have the complexities of visual storytelling possible in painting paired with the dynamism of movement? Where you can contrast an image or action with sound and create meaning from that? And yet, yes, it has to have a story. It has to have a beginning, middle, and an end. It has to make sense to others. And there's no point in having scenes that, well, don't have a point.

If you really want to write a screenplay, you also have to want to write something that reads well on the page. That does not ramble, that does not turn inward, and that does not waste time on anything that is not the movie. That is tight, and neat, with lots of white space.

If you really want to write a screenplay, you want to write something that moves, on the page. That the reading of it takes you on the journey - whether it's a stroll, a dance, or a hard run. The structure of the segments and scenes, of the short dialogue and brief descriptions are kinetic. Good screenplays use the limits of the medium to create an experience on the page that moves.

Creativity does not end with formula and structure. Creativity rejoices - because like water flowing in a river, it only gets to sing when it passes over the stones.

Write What You Know

Imagination is a powerful tool. It can carry us into areas that no one before has ever conceived of, it can solve problems, it can pull beauty from nearly nothing. Imagination is essential to a writer. So why then, are new writers so often admonished to "write what you know?"

The truth is, for a writer who knows themselves, there is no contradiction.

Our imaginings are the product, just as everything else about us, of a combination of genetics and instinct with experience. It serves a function in our personal cognitive and social development (and in our development as a society, allowing humanity the diversity and adaptability that makes us so distinct from other species...even our ability to communicate with one another through language involves a level of abstraction that's greater than most species and thus an imagination to interpret - but that's another topic.)

In short, even the most grandiose or unusual imaginings are founded on things we know. But for most writers, imagination is not a problem. Those of us who are driven to create are more likely to have an active imagination that tends to wheel off in its own direction, that becomes it's own incentive to create. Thus, the admonition "write what you know" is a way to help ground our work.

It can function in the basic sense of knowing your material. Do research, character background studies, and know the reality behind the story.

It can function to encourage writers to experience life, to have a broader range to draw from.

But I think that the most useful and powerful function of writing what you know is specificity. The more specific and personal a work, the greater the likelihood that it will transcend itself and become universal.

It becomes "real" in ways we can't anticipate when we know that a brand of tennis shoes that were popular in a time a place our characters occupy, when we know that a certain carpet color is common to cheap motels built in the 80's, when we know how you hold a fishing line and how much room you need to cast a fly. Because when we know these things, our audience has a point of reference, and it becomes real to them.

Humans are social. We desire belonging, we are constantly (usually unconsciously) searching for connection. When a writer provides points of connection by giving specific, clear details, then the audience will join them.

It becomes "real" in ways that are surprising when we talk about our bi-racial friend who buys giant dubs to prove he's black while bragging about "sounding" white on the phone. Or about the dweeb who tells us for weeks how beautiful and sexy we are, turning up when we're out for coffee or at the grocery store, but the minute we say clearly that we're not interested pointedly calls us a fat bitch, and then whines because being a "nice guy" gets them nowhere. And the feeling of helplessness as we watch our mother on life support, surrounded by plastic tubes and wires that seem to hold a once-dynamic woman in stasis. The more specific you are about your experiences, the more likely you are to have people tell you they understand, and that it's "just like" something they've gone through.

So that feeling of helplessness gets attached to an image of an astronaut, so dependent on the tubes that connect her to life. Or the dweeb backs up their aggressive response to rejection with a knife. And bi-racial guy becomes a human raised in an alien environment. Focus on the specifics, and these situations will become familiar not only to us, but to an audience.

Thus, a writer must know themselves, so that when they do imagine flying, they can place the sensation of the rush as they dive through the air as something akin to riding a roller coaster. So that when feel a rush as they ride a roller coaster, they can think: this is what superman feels like when he's flying.

Know yourself. Pay attention. And then write what you know.

Depression and Creativity

The death of Heath Ledger, whether or not it's actually attributable in any way to his depression, sparked a few conversations about the connection between creativity and depression.

This is a subject I've given a lot of thought to, because for most of my life I've based a large portion of my identity on being a poet - and poets are so frequently associated with this romanticized view of depression.

Does an artist need to suffer? Do they need it in order to have the material to produce art? To have the impetus? The insight?

Does being mentally ill provide an advantage to an artist? Does it allow them to step outside normal boundaries and access greater creativity? Does it inspire them? Drive them?

Over the years, I've had different answers to these questions for myself. I do think that it's hard to produce art if your life has always been easy, if your challenges have been small and easily overcome, if you've lived inside the "norm" comfortably.

In terms of suffering due to external causes (as opposed to mental illness, there's a saying that it's impossible to create art when you're starving, or the idea that art is a luxury... yet I've witnessed some of the most inspired work from people in duress, people on the edge.

I'm reminded of a singer I saw on the streets of Prague when I was homeless. I was begging for spare change in one of the main squares, it was early winter, and the first real snow had fallen. A pale, thin woman in a cheap quilted coat stood near one of the churches, a man beside her with a little tape player. He set the player down, pushed play and the tinny sound barely reached a few feet... and then she began to sing. Not simply sing, but reach up to heaven with her voice, the purest and most passionate soprano I have ever heard. It was simply transcendent.

A few months later, in the early spring - I saw the woman again. She had a better coat, more color in her cheeks, and the weather was turning warmer - and her voice, though still accomplished and beautiful, lacked that extra dimension.

On the other hand, being too far outside society for too long is more often a disadvantage - "outsider art" has it's own appellation because it's simply not as accomplished as other forms. Being pushed to extremes is more often a distraction, or can wear down an artist until they haven't the energy to produce anything.

And what about mental illness?

This article mentions the "creative fire," and associates mild mania (specifically with bipolar disorder) with creative intensity - but is that an accurate association? the specific characteristics they describe are, indeed, also components of what is sometimes called the "creative trance" which many artists enter when they create. A hyper-sensitivity to stimuli, especially emotional stimuli; lowered inhibitions; and the tendency to become intensely focused while working. I find that those are actually part of the reason I sometimes avoid writing - especially the absorption. When I get into a project I have to allow things to effect me more deeply, to drop my inhibitions, and I become intensely absorbed...and it can interfere with my ability to function. During my most creative periods I have trouble keeping a job, embarrassed myself and done damage to professional and personal relationships by simply saying too much because I lose my sense of what's socially appropriate, and I had difficulty relating to others in a rational manner. So yes, I would agree that there is some level of social dysfunction associated with intense creativity... but is it an advantage, and is it necessary?

Most people who have bipolar disorder or major depression do not become great artists - so it's not as though these illnesses automatically will make you a genius.

An article on the APA website suggests that part of the connection may be self-reflection. Both creative persons and people with depression exhibit a higher degree of introspection than average. So it may be that the conditions which encourage and develop creativity also tend to encourage the development of depression or manic-depression.

Another factor, as mentioned here, is that creativity can be stifled. It's dismissed, or put down, or set aside for "real" problems. And that stifling of potential can lead to depression. Another article discusses this in a more complex manner, and even suggests that some of the characteristics of creativity can be mistaken for mania.

Mary Rocamora, who counsels gifted people, and heads The Rocamora School in Los Angeles school, which provides awareness training classes for gifted and talented adults, says those "who are passionately engaged with their talent but are constantly separated from the creative experience by relentless self-criticism, self-doubt, and feelings of inferiority often suffer from depression and the periodic shutting down of their spontaneous creative impulses. The drive to express their inner creativity is heightened in many gifted individuals, and when the drive to create meets the wall of shame, it implodes into numbness, rage, depression, and hopelessness." She also notes that it is well known among researchers of the gifted, talented and creative that these individuals "exhibit greater intensity and increased levels of emotional, imaginational, intellectual, sensual and psychomotor excitability, and that this is a normal pattern of development." Dr. Linda Silverman, Director of the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development in Denver, has also cautioned that this higher level of excitability and intensity may be perceived and misdiagnosed as manic depression.


But the article I found most helpful was this one: An interview with a doctor who did an empirical study on creativity and mental illness, and so is speaking from facts rather than supposition. In his study, around 70% of the writers had depression, which is just massive. However, he noted that during a depressive or manic phase, an individual is not motivated or organized enough to actually create. It is only after they emerge from that state that they are able to use those experiences as fuel. He addresses the fear that some have of medication stifling their creativity with examples, and states that creative people are more functional and more able to actually produce work while their illness is under control. He also notes that besides major Depression and Bipolar disorder, schizophrenia has a link to creativity - but once again, not when it is out of control.

Which makes me optimistic.

Does an artists need to suffer? I would say that yes, they do - they need it as fuel. But who, in their life, has never suffered? And that suffering, like branches gathered in the woods during a storm, is only useful to light the creative fires once it has cured and dried, after the rain is gone.