Portrait of Virginia Woolf by Roger Fry, circa 1917, cropped

Day 19: Channeling Voices

Write in Someone Else’s Voice

Nadine JL
Nadine JL
Sep 2, 2018 · 7 min read

Day 19: Write in Someone Else’s Voice: Borrow the style of your favorite novelist or create an alter ego version of your own voice. Get creative, and have fun.” — Jeff Goins, My 500 Words

“Me-in-the-Morning” is unpretentious, quite shy and self-derogatory, definitely timid, afraid of waking anyone as she attempts to silently roll out of bed to place her feet on the floor, half-wishing she were instead of a less compulsive nature, that she would instead choose to remain sensibly in bed, where it is said good people belong when it is still dark outside, but also half glad for this compulsion, because without it she would still be in the psychological place she was in three years ago, before she began it, and that place was a less contented one than this one. So Me-in-the-Morning lies awake for some time, contemplating the softness of the bed and wishing she could continue to relax in it without any care in the world, but the fact is she can’t, once she has awoken, for she has a busy mind and the busy mind wants purging, and if she does not purge the excess thought from her mind onto the page, she is sure to blurt it aloud to the air and to anyone within unfortunate earshot. Here she is, I present her to you now, Ms. Me-in-the-Morning.

Hello, it’s me, here now: Ms. Me-in-the-Morning. I will tell you about this morning. This particular morning I have the privilege of being in yet another vacation home, the second one this summer, this time one a couple’s getaway with my husband, a getaway we’ve had each year for the past while, thanks to the kindness of my parents, who agree to look after our four children during this time. The vacation home I’ve chosen is very tiny and very beautiful, a tall and narrow stone building with a peaked roof, two stories tall, the top story with sloped ceiling, under which we sleep in a downy, flower-scented bed, with a view out to the misty valleys of Auvergne, looking south toward the puys, which are a north-south oriented chain of cinder cones, lava domes, and maars in the Massif Central of France. Last year we slept in our van, for free, on a strip of land near the Mediterranean sea.

But instead of relaxing in bed, as one should do on vacation, especially from four o’clock to six-thirty in the morning, I’ve been sitting in the lower story of the building for the past two and a half hours, with the goal of fulfilling this commitment I made, of writing some words and then hitting publish, a commitment which has helped me learn a number of things about myself; the principal one being that it seems I am not capable of writing to an undefined audience. (I was going to say “not capable of writing to an audience,” period, however that wouldn’t be altogether true, since I have written for a defined audience many times, for work, in writing policies or contracts, for example, or in ghost-writing a children’s book, or in personal writing, such as in long letters to friends.)

I am also not very good at “sticking” to one genre, subject or type of writing, but that I do continue to delight in the act of writing, itself, and reading the writing of others.

So on this morning, I came down with the intention of fulfilling this commitment I’ve made to hitting publish each day, for 31 days, but as always, I’ve allowed the strangeness of writing to an undefined audience to block me. (For I have not taken that much-repeated advice of so many business and writing gurus, which says it is prudent to decide upon a target audience; instead I’ve chosen to simply write, and allow each piece of writing to attract its destined readers).

Yesterday, while hoping to alleviate my block, I’d finally read an article that had been repeatedly placed in my view by Medium’s editors and algorithms, entitled My Affair With the Intellectual Dark Web, by Meghan Daum, which I had not wanted to read due to its disturbing cover image and its clickbait-type title, but decided to read because upon finally clicking, noticed that its Uniform Resource Locator was more nuanced, showing the original title as being “Nuance: A Love Story,” and further examination of the disturbing image revealing that what looked to be a distorted face was in fact a painting of two weeping eyes, above the head of a woman sitting at her computer screen. And though reading this article did nothing, unfortunately, to alleviate my block (being such good writing, as it was, that it caused me great pain and suffering to even ponder pounding out my own pathetic writing), it did introduce me to this new-to-me, nuanced author, and some new and nuanced vocabulary that I was delighted to get to know.

On this morning, to alleviate my block, I read from some of the e-books I have in my possession, including the opening to George Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion, and also the opening to Viriginia Woolf’s essay A Room of Her Own, which in fact did much to inspire me, but also did much, unfortunately, to increase the size and shape of my writers’ block, because the writing was so witty and ingenuous and self-aware in both cases, so artful and self-satirical and yet also plumbing the depths of consciousness of the reader as well, asking the reader to wake up and suspend contemporary beliefs, and instead attune the bones of the inner ear to the ideas presented in the texts, and this was done in both cases with a kind of hypnotically repetitive prose, and, in the case of George Bernard Shaw, also with a good bit of purposefully constructed overstatement and double negative.

Though I should have been inspired to write something equally great, from having consumed such genius works, in the moment that I should have been writing, I instead found myself destitute when facing the blank page, for I knew that never ever could I hope to successfully mimic the mockery nor the white-woke witticisms of either of the two historical greats whose works I’d just consumed. It was as though I were an Eliza Doolittle and I’d bitten into two gilded apples in a paradisical garden, such as the non-metaphorical one which I have the privilege of looking upon just now, if I stand, for a moment, rising from this very ladylike nineteenth-century sitting-room chair (or perhaps it is even eighteenth century, how am I to know, I know nothing of such things, Doolittle-type as I am), as I do now, to look out the tiny square window above the tiny writing desk, and gaze upon the misty, lavender-lighted morning that envelops the dying garden, with its seed-headed flowers, which the owner says she shall not deadhead this year, since she wishes their seeds to fall to the earth, to re-propagate the plants from which they came.

And the reason I cannot hope to successfully mimic the mockery and eloquent descriptive passages of either of the afore-mentioned two greats, is that I, privileged though I may be, (though in a slightly less privileged way, but more of a so-called self-made way) is quite simply that I am not English, but rather Canadian, a product of the colonies, which are a product of colonialism, which is a product of supremacy, but not a supreme kind of supremacy but a rather disappointing one historically, in which the supremists made supreme nothing except the exertion of their own power, in wanting to cultivate and own and transform a land very much like this one I may now look upon, develop it and exploit it and tax it for their own use, and my ancestors, working class as they were, were encouraged to go there to populate the land for them, there where there was plenty of land available, under the wide ragged sky, a sky much wilder and heavier in its wideness than the one here in Europe.

Of course my own ancestors knew not much of supremacy or oppression except that which they themselves had suffered in their own homeland, and so, when they arrived in the new land in the beginning of the twentieth century, only knew to settle upon the empty land they were offered and which they paid for, and to try to make a living on it, and that’s all they did, in an honest way, and helping others as much as they could as they did so.

But, meagre apparently waspish descendant of colonists that I am, from humble ancestors, I opened my notebook computer anyway, privileged as I am to own it, and started to type anyway, thinking I may as well get this self-directed task complete, so that I may at last enjoy this last day of our two-day holiday, before it has properly begun nor ended. Perhaps then, later, and after this task is complete, I shall rest upon the softly tended grasses of the garden, and look upon the late-summer flower seed heads, and contemplate the life cycles of bees, and also of wasps, as they hum near the wilting blossoms of this garden’s cyclical demise.

Love,

xo N

— —

Notes/refs:

  • This is Day 19 of a self-imposed 31-day “Write AND hit Publish” challenge, mostly using Jeff Goins’ “My 500 Words” prompts.

Nadine inhales & exhales words & images from current vantage point in Zone of Emptiness, France. If you wish to contribute and/or show appreciation, please recommend/like and/or comment. Thank you for reading. ❤︎

The Hermit Crab Files

A crabby hermit commits to writing 500 words and hitting "Publish," for 31 days.

Nadine JL

Written by

Nadine JL

Inhaling & exhaling words & images from current vantage point in Zone of Emptiness, France.- ̶T̶a̶g̶l̶i̶n̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶m̶e̶l̶e̶o̶n̶.̶- Moved to bloomwords.com

The Hermit Crab Files

A crabby hermit commits to writing 500 words and hitting "Publish," for 31 days.

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