I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been told the importance of finding one’s voice as a writer.

Find your voice

they say.

then people will really hear you.

or beat down your door.

or will see the authentic you.

I’ve always taken these instructions to heart. I’ve always tried. Always writing in my voice. In fact, I really do write like I speak. Which says much more about my speaking, I think, than my writing, to be honest.

I’ve taken this lesson to heart so often, that it has become a rule to follow. A restriction. Like grammar. Like writing “smart”. Like writing to SEO. Like writing to be shared. Like creating content. So many rules.

Find your voice!

they say. Like

Be yourself!

Oh, such help! What the hell am I doing if not using my voice and being myself. How did authenticity–just writing–become a rule? A rule that often is at odds with all of those other rules.

Then it changed.

What changed

I realized that most of my life has been about learning the rules, learning how to do things “the right way”. And every time I feel the pull to jump headlong into the normal way of doing things, my heart tickles the inside of my chest, rumbling up my guts, to remind me of what I really want. What I want more than anything.

To create.

More than I want to communicate. More than I want to inspire. More than anything. I want to create. I want to make new things.

Writing a blog post about the “5 steps to true happiness” or “How to know he’s really into you” isn’t creative. Obsessing about getting keywords into the text isn’t creative. Obsessing about the “shareability” of my “content” is not creative.

Neither is writing for an academic audience that doesn’t read my work or a young audience that never would. And I certainly am not writing for my 7th grade english teacher.

I write because it brings such joy to create something. To make something that wasn’t there and now it is. And then declare that it is done.

These 10 Days

A few days ago, I started working on a workshop: “10 Days to a Better Blog” by John Saddington. You should check it out, if it interests you. Today is my day 4. And already things are different for me. Different because I’ve taken his directions and worked on them. But more than that, it coincided with what I was already discovering in myself. This need to be creative; this need to get rid of all of those voices that fight for space in my meager mind. Voices trying to tell me how to do this “right”.

There is no right.

There never is.

“Right” is the fiction we tell ourselves so we don’t have to think. Like the right way to load the dishwasher or the right way to light the candles before a service. There is no right. Just creating order out of chaos.

What we have is conviction and training and skill and imagination and hope, so that when we dream our big dreams, we are able to make them real somehow. We can put them into words or pictures or sculptures or legislation or buildings or flower arrangements and we can step back and say

That is really close. Really close. But I like it anyway.

So when I was writing these exercises, an exercise of freedom from fear, an exercise in why we write, an exercise in where we write, I found myself taking all of this stuff,

not the stuff all the experts have tried to teach me

but this stuff I’ve learned about myself

and with the simple direction, I found something. I found something I didn’t know I didn’t have. Something missing or never owned.

My voice.

Tricky Voices

Do you know when you’ve found your voice? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe its about a time and a place. Like this is my voice for now in this place. Maybe I’ll find another voice later. Maybe we don’t get only one voice in the end.

But here’s the thing. We’re supposed to find our voice. We aren’t supposed to just know where it is and go about using it. We’re supposed to search; to go out looking for it.

Some of us have to go to the edge of the continent in search of only GOD really knows what. And we have to come home and toil through moments of poverty (real and emotional). And we have to give up and do something else, but never really give up, just searching in a new place, another country, another school, another career, and we keep at it. And after hours and hours of work and ten years of blogging, you discover that you aren’t being true to yourself. It takes more time. More experts, more advice, until you come to a point when you throw it all away and say

what if I just do it this way?

And there it is. The search is over.

For now. It’ll move again. I will too.

You may be wondering about your voice. I can’t speak to that. You may be using it already. You may have long ago found it. Maybe it wasn’t hidden as well as mine, buried in the insecurity of high school and college. Or maybe you are still searching, or just realizing you need to find it.

We have to search for our voice. It doesn’t just open up. We don’t just use it. It is out there or in here [points at chest] but either way, you can’t find it without looking. I think that is pretty much true about everything.

Peace,

Drew

P.S. Thanks, John Saddington, for the great questions. I’m loving this!