Losing Your Voice
Being ill and losing your voice is incredibly frustrating, it makes it hard to speak, to be heard, to get your point across. Not to mention the pain.
It's the same with writing.
We are told to find our voice, to find our natural rhythm and phrasing rather than trying to force a particular style. Once we find it writing becomes easier, we get into a flow and are able to write from the heart.
But when we lose our writing voice it is just as frustrating as losing our spoken one. Only being able to communicate in snippets; trying to get your points across when the words won't flow, when all you can manage is broken sentences before your throat catches and the coughing takes over.
The slow road to recovery
I started this post a couple of months ago when ill and unable to utter little more than a squeak but the parallels between talking and writing were obvious.
Over the past year or so, I feel that I have lost my writing voice or, more accurately, become deaf to it. I think I got tired of “listening” to it day in, day out and chose to ignore it, block it out.
Just as it took a while to recover from the illness that made me lose my talking voice so it takes time to reconnect to the writing voice; to be willing to listen to it again and truly hear what it has to say.
It is almost like translating a foreign language - grasping words and sentence fragments here and there, snatches of meaning until the understanding grows allowing for a passable translation.
There is no Rosetta Stone and I am by no means fluent, not yet, but I recognise the voice more as my own.
