Developing Voice 

Post 1.0

Ira Glass once shared the following quote:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase; they quit. Most people I know who do interest, creative, work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know that it’s normal and the important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you finish one piece. It’s only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take awhile. You just gotta fight your way through.”

In other words, the creative agent can’t hold herself back in fear of writing unbearably awful shit. It may take years until what a writer produces actually matches her level of taste and her own vision of what it means to be a good writer. When I met Ira Glass at a book signing several years ago, I asked him just how long it took him to move beyond this stage of disappointment. According to him, it took a staggering six or seven years to bridge that gap between this refined taste and disappointing product. Six or seven years, can you believe it? It’s hard to imagine when you look at his work today, and you can only sense just how perfect his mastery of radio journalism is. I suppose it only makes me feel better, though — to know that my work, though unrefined and not nearly where I want it to be, is on its way there — but only if I continue to practice this art.

This brings me to my initial interest in Medium. I’ve long since searched for a platform that combines the public community of Tumblr (there is an incentive to write if there are readers, I suppose) with a more focused lens on the writing process. In an effort to enforce this practiced writing on a weekly basis, I will be setting a goal of two text posts a week. Eventually, I will graduate to three. Ideally, when I arrive at Post 100, my creative abilities to write prose will not only have significantly improved, but also come more readily than they did in Post 1.

Medium brings me to the beginning of a new adventure — one in which I’ll not only learn more about how I like to write, but also how I’ll break the rules of writing. I’m excited to further develop my literary voice.