Monday, January 28, 2013

Letters from Garcia: Defing and Expanding One's Voice

Letters from Garcia: Defing and Expanding One's Voice: My trying to live/write one day at a time was suppose to eliminate the blues that I get when I am inbetween projects. So much for that idea....

Defing and Expanding One's Voice

My trying to live/write one day at a time was suppose to eliminate the blues that I get when I am inbetween projects. So much for that idea. Though, in all honesty, I am actually being crushed by the many projects I have. That won't change until I finally prioritize and line them up. At the same time, I will have to find a "new" workplace. I do this periodically--a Stephen King thing--so that my mind and writing soul can stay fresh. This time, I'm going into our large closet. It makes me feel like the aforementioned author who use to use a bunch of orange crates as a table to keep reminding himself where he came from, which was poverty. If it sounds like a gimmick, it is, but then to be a writer is to have gimmicks that put at bay writer's block, depression and provides you the notion "of a new beginning" which simply serves "to put at bay writer's block, depression..."

I got a "great" compliment this past week from someone who is reading my kindle novel Can Tho A Story of Love & War.  The reader remarked, "I'm about to finish the novel and I don't want it to end". A shameless plug, yes but one that I think is legitimate. The story is one that grows on you and you come to identify with the characters and eventually you want to read a little about them every day or every few days. In this, I think this novel is different from the blockbuster type that you don't want to put down until you've read it in one sitting. Those are usually about the action. My novel as most of my work--even the history books--is character driven. I find my voice in talking about people and getting the reader to empathize with them, to love them or even to truly dislike them but most important to focus on them. In the end, most fiction as most scholarship in my area is about people; without them much else is unimportant. One can write about trees, rivers, climate change, or many other things, but without people in the story most of that doesn't matter. After all we are not animals or inanimate objects writing about such others. We are humans talking about the human experience from a human perspective.

In my novel I talk about war but from the perspective not of a hero but of someone trying to survive while performing his "duty" in the best and most honest way he can. That he falls in love and is forced to be a crucial part of the battle--as a medic--is something that happens to him. He is literally dragged into situations and so he responds.

As I've mentioned before this novel is based on part of my experiences in Viet Nam, but the story is not created there, and it comes about only when I defined my voice. That is to say that I could not have written this novel right out of Viet Nam nor after my first couple of years in college. I needed to experience life, to begin to shape my long-term view of things, and to establish my personal philosophy. Once I knew how I wanted to live life and had developed a way to look back and assess, I was then ready to write my novel. While many things came out of my journal and my memory, and the main characters were based on real people and their personalities, the story itself comes out of my view of life. My voice then reflects what I think now even if what my characters in the novel say is different than what I, myself, would have said. A bit tortured prior sentence but I think the reader gets what I mean.

My voice was forged and continues to be refined by my experiences and by writing. The reason why writing is so crucial, aside from the practice and stories which in themselves help create a voice, is that writing forces me to confront rhetorical, grammatical and conceptual roadblocks, and those force me to reconsider ideas and actions. Most of us can see a little of ourselves in the work we do--in the case of my novel quite a bit of myself--and we often test our own character in the challenges our characters face. We might not be like the serial killer we write about, but no doubt he or she has something of us within them. That's because we can only write about what we have researched, experienced and integrated in our psychic. There is both an attachment to and a distance from characters we develop in our stories, even if those characters are real people in a scholarly or nonfiction work. One of my best works was about a man I deeply admired but whom I would have disliked had I interacted with him. My work then needed to bring out his best qualities while showing how they alienated many.

To successfully do this, I had to construct a voice that could speak to his contradictions. Do I mean that we have to have a different voice for different types of works? No and maybe slightly yes. No, in that our voice indicates how we think in most circumstances and how we resolve problems, contradictions, and how we either express hope or engage in lamentation about the things around us. But yes because the voices of good writers have philosophical intonations that get to matters that are difficult and complex and out of the ordinary for them.Sometimes our work--or our writing jobs--require that we alter our voice if only slightly or temporarily. Sometimes that alteration speaks to a view or conclusion that is not consistent with our regular voice. One example is that of a civil rights historian that finds him/herself writing about an instance when segregation actually worked for the benefit of the oppressed. For some the facts take them where they may, but for others, more ideological, it takes them where they don't want to go. The conclusion may come out of the facts and the analysis but it nonetheless challenges their voice.

Of course, this is complicated and for the good of our sanity it is usually best to avoid too many of these circumstances or they will shake our foundational voices and to survive we become chroniclers and not writers. Yet, these challenges can also expand our voice and makes us reassess the way we look at things and how we write about them. But expansion must have a purpose and must be consistent with who we are in one form or another, otherwise we simply dilute the way we think and write. Developing a voice is necessary early in our writing life but refining it is a life-long process.