I once read some advice from an author that said, “Writers are too busy writing, what they need to do is just write as they speak.” I think it was an attempt at helping writers find a more ‘natural’ voice, one that wasn’t shaped necessarily by the ‘idea’ of ‘writing’. You know, using words you’d never speak because they sound smarter and make you look more like a writer who has a command over vocabulary or something. I’ve always been told that I’ve got a natural tone to my writing, but it wasn’t until I attempted to speak my own writing that I learned a lot more about the unconscious bias between my brain, mouth, and fingertips.
What’s with writing?
I journal weekly because I’ve found that the practice of writing helps to clarify my thinking or consolidate some ephemeral ideas I’ve had floating around my head. Journal writing is different from creative writing, of course. Where creative writing, or writing fiction, requires that I entertain and ‘bring a reader along a journey’, the audience for journal writing is me, mainly. I publish it publicly in the off-chance that someone may find something I write helpful, but it’s not the goal.
As an experiment, I’ve recently started audio-transcribing my journal. Again, this isn’t for anyone but me, really, because if people don’t read my writing, they’re even more unlikely to enjoy the sound of my voice. No, I started this speaking-practice to see whether, like writing, it contributes to clarifying my thinking. The short answer is yes, it does.
Write like you speak?
In fact, what I’ve realised by speaking my work is that any act of consumption or creation of art and literature has a similar effect. I love reading and watching films – the consumption bit – because they pose questions, wrapped in narrative, about important things to the makers of those films. Princess Kaguya, for example, one of my favourite films ever, grapples with concepts of control, life, death, and patriarchy. The Memory Police, a book by Yoko Ogawa, unpacks the value of memory and what it really means to remember. These ideas sit and swirl in my brain, helping me understand my own view on these things and, more abstractly, my place in the world.
Like writing this journal, drawing, as it turns out, is critical in helping me think through problems. Whether that’s drawing boxes and flowcharts in my work as a software designer, or inventing characters that act as a medium to explore things I never even thought to explore until I see them emerge on a page in the form of a tenacious echidna. It turns out that if I then try to speak the words I’ve written in this journal (like very recently), I re-interpret my own words and find new connections I never knew existed. It’s exposed the difference between the way I write and speak, which, according to the unnamed writer above, should make me a better writer.
Those four things – Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Drawing – is a very privileged set of skills and each begets the other as a way to unpack and examine the world in which we exist today, and the actions we can take to shape the one we want to exist tomorrow. Using them together, consciously, is not something I’ve ever noticed the power of before, but here I am, writing about it, so I suppose it worked.