Something I observe a lot in myself is that when I sit down with a blank sheet in front of me, I worry that I have nothing to say. Everything I think about regularly is obvious to me, and chances are good that someone has been where I am already, or is already saying what I want to say, but better.
Is this such a tragedy, though?
Think about it: writing gives you the opportunity to make your thoughts concrete; to roll them around in your mouth a little bit and see if they take a useful shape.
"Useful" is vague and hand-wavey, though. What makes something useful?
There are a couple ways that my voice is useful, from my perspective:
- Looking back on my own thoughts, and looking at the date they were written (you do date all your work, don't you, anon?) to see where I have already been
- Firming up vague thoughts into something more manipulable
- Finding others who think the same way
- Convincing others to think like you
- Discovering flaws in your own thoughts
But before delving too far into those things, I think it's important to talk about how you find your voice.
How do you find your voice?
if you read a lot, you will eventually discover writers you admire. For whatever reason, they way they write things, and the things they choose to write about, resonate with you.
Feeling inspired, you decide to write something, yourself. But what, and how?
It would be a mistake to try to copy how they speak. Their voice is not yours, and at best you could provide only a lame imitation of whatever it is that makes them special to you.
Who knows how they write, what in particular makes them special.
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Maybe they sit down each morning, bang out whatever is on their mind in the way that feels natural to them, hit publish, and walk away.
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Maybe they outline extensively, write multiple drafts, run them by beta readers, and only after weeks of deliberation, arrive at something that meets their standards.
Those are their voices, and while you might be able to copy their processes (at least to try them on for size), they are their processes for getting their voice out into the world.
Think about times you're with friends out and about. Assuming your friends enjoy your company, what is it about you that they like? That you're at ease, that you have your way of looking at the world, that you have your way of expressing yourself? Or that you copy someone else's mannerisms and beliefs?
So, the way to find your voice is this: relax, let go, and write.
What you write will probably suck at first, but that's largely mechanical, and can improve with practice; what can't be fixed as easily are either a) not writing, not producing at all (fixing your hangups) or b) convincing yourself that you need to sound like someone else; that your particular voice has no value.
Your voice is valuable because it's yours. It may never get the reach that the same thing, said differently, will, but:
- You will never get better if you never try
- You probably won't get better by trying to sound like someone else
- Maybe, maybe, with enough practice, someone else will aspire to speak the way you do.
Responses to common arguments
Just write.
More serious responses to common arguments
If you're nervous about putting your writing in front of people, write privately. Keep a private blog, or use a Knowledge Graph (obsidian; roam; shoebox full of notebooks) to practice writing.
Write things to completion, just to get in the habit.
Write without editing; tell yourself that "nothing on this page matters," or "quantity has a quality of its own" or "this is just practice."
Write fast; get up to speed; your typing speed should be by far the most limiting factor in what you're able to produce. You should start having thoughts about practicing typing; about ramping up your speed; about maybe learning how to type from the home row, but for real this time.
If it helps, write without deleting, even for typos. If you need to, get a special writing keyboard that doesn't have a delete key, or an app that bars use of the delete key, only allowing you to swim forward, like a shark.
Write. WRITE.
After a while, you will discover layers of affectation falling alway; that your voice emerges naturally. Depending on how many layers of self-consciousness you're working through, this may take some time, but the act of putting as much to paper as you can in as short a time as possible will eventually wear away all the pretensions that have been holding you back.
Why your voice matters
Number 1: As a record of who you've been
Since high school, I have been an intermittent journaler. When I look back on those old journal entries, memories come bubbling up that lay hidden for years: how I felt, what I did, what that formative experience was really like in the moment. (You are dating everything your write, aren't you, anon?)
Memory is not trustworthy, but writing tells us things about our ways of thinking in a particular time and place; things that get lost if you try to be too clever.
My old "darlings" are not so dear to me now. On re-reading stuff from my past lives, I can remember feelings of self-satisfaction from coming up with cute phrasings (&c), but now they seem... juvenile?
Meanwhile, when I wrote with my voice, those old diary entries provide a window into my soul that the present me can still peer through.
Number 2: As a way of discovering what you believe
The more you write, the more quickly your intellectual desire paths will make themselves known. What you choose to speak about, and how, will surface the worn grooves in your essence. And the existence of intellectual desire paths will prove the absence of other interests, and should lead to you learning about where you should focus your efforts.
Over time, having written about the same topics over and over, you should start seeing gaps in your thinking. What more do I need to learn? What follow-on actions do I need to take to improve my thinking here?
If you spend your time parroting others' ideas or voices, on the other hand, you will never get to your own truth, and may trick yourself into caring about what other people value. You can't fake attraction.
Number 3: Finding your people
Once you find your voice, and the things you care about, you can start putting what you think out into the world. So what if it's not necessarily original? If you find others that resonate at the same frequency as you, you can multiply your own results by learning from them, and maybe even convince them to join you on your path, or convince them to let you join them on theirs.
Maybe this will involve getting a job you never could have imagined working; maybe this will turn into a new friendship that you never would have had without learning to speak aloud.
Number 4: Convincing others
I think a lot of people fail to appreciate this aspect sufficiently.
If you know your voice, and the things you know and care about, it's easy to trick yourself into thinking that others naturally think and believe what you do. But they don't have the same inputs and experiences as you! So speaking naturally, convincingly, about the things you know thoroughly, might provide the nudge of information that convinces others to see a small part of the world the same way you do.
Number 5: Discovering flaws in your own thoughts
By contrast, many people find their own beliefs so self-evident, that they're gobsmacked when others believe things at odds with these beliefs.
This is how the world has always worked, and will always work.
Some people will believe what they want to believe no matter what anyone says to them. Some have their self-respect tied up in a particular belief system; some have values that will never accommodate the thing you care about; sometimes you and someone else are talking about vastly different things using very similar words, and so what amounts to two equally valid ways of viewing different portions of the world appears to be an irreconcilable difference.
And sometimes you're just wrong.
In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill advocated for free speech because, among other reasons, saying things in public gives people the opportunity to fairly compare ideas against each other. If speech is banned, or if you never show up in the world with your ideas, you or others might never get the chance to see if your ideas hold water.
Sometimes you're right, and sometimes others are; more often, there's some kernel of truth in multiple viewpoints, and our only hope of synthesizing them into anything resembling the big-T Truth is seeing all ideas laid bare in the public sphere.
If truth-seeking is at all valuable to you, you should be eager to voice your ideas in public, if only to gain the opportunity to be yelled at by who either shake up your beliefs, or cause them to anneal and become stronger.
(It is fun, at times, to go in public and say "middle!" and have two equally strident parts of the audience say "no, up!" and "no, down!" What do you really believe, anon?)
What are you doing with your life?
This essay might not resonate with a lot of people. That's fine; not everything need be for everyone.
My voice, the things that I choose to say, matter to me, and maybe in time they will find their way to the sorts of people, like me when I was younger (or as recently as a month ago), who need to hear them.
For people who have ambition, who don't want to simply sleepwalk though existence, but who aren't confident in their current path, I hope that my words might point to something you can do, today, that will lead to you being a better and more confident you every day from now on.