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It’s what everyone zeroes in on, what all “mature” writers advise aspiring ones: “find your voice!”!!

All those who seem to have found theirs preach “ Let your true voice EMERGE!”…..or my favorite: from every workshop participant who’s just as clueless as you are lounging around with laptops open judging that what you just took great pleasure in writing just “doesn’t sound like you!”….i mean come on!!!!!!!!

Really?

Capturing even the true meaning
of one’s writerly voice is the entire
point of even pretending to be a
writer, even though it takes time, effort, selling an article or two, and maybe even psychotherapy to even know one has what is blithely referred to as a “voice”!

And then, the utter (at times rude) awakening to the blessed realization that what one thought of as one’s voice is actually a false thing that’s a defense against one’s true voice! That’ll shake you quite productively, though painfully, if you’re up to it! The elusive chase for “ voice” CAN have a pot of gold at the finish line….. and it is , after all , the entire point, isn’t it? A writer wants to show up on the page with as much power and truth as possible, and there is true power in authentic voice….indisputably.

But like for every true creative impulse in every art form, one’s voice is like a fingerprint, unique, useful and impossible to steal, though that doesn’t stop the lazy ones from trying to steal it…. That’s how powerful an artists true “voice” is: people want to steal it!

I used to tell my acting students at NYU: don’t go into any audition trying to be like someone else, attempting to copy or act or sing like anyone else you admire…there is only one unique you and that is what you have as your genuine strength! There’s only one of you in all of time ( I think that’s a Martha Graham quote actually) and if you can comfortably own that true thing, all power is yours!
Be YOU….etc.

BUT…..and here’s “the rub” as the Bard once voiced: how do you allow yourself to even find the true YOU??? Well, for children it’s easy since they’ve not had time to build defenses…and for ripe old timers, it is hopefully easier too, since we’ve had time and experience to learn the defenses we’ve built don’t work!

So it’s in the middle part of life where the journey is required to go toward or stumble into the truth of what you need to be and say! The middle years are our time to discover, build, tear down, rebuild, learn , own who we most truly are, and sometimes that is an easy thing to do while at other times it is shrouded in mystery.
The “ sweet mystery of life”, to borrow librettist Victor Herbert’s voice! Keep living and, at last, if you stay open and willing to relax and release your fears, one day you will find it: your voice….the “magical mystery tour” toward genuine voice and full creative expression! A journey essential and worth taking, for sure.