Shhh! Creator trying to think...

How to find and let your creative voice be heard

I do love finding two seemingly conflicting opinions on one topic. It makes me sit up and think about the issue in more detail and is an opportunity to figure out what my perspective is. This week I read two differing views about the effect of being creatively influenced by others.

First an artist shared her actions based on her wisdom about her own needs in a provate Facebook group. She was unsusbcribing from a number of newsletters from other artists because she knew she needed to sit with her own creative intentions and eliminate any sense of ‘I should’ that came from observing other artists. Comments echoed her views with others also saying they felt the need to quieten the influences around them so that they could trust and rely on their own voices.

The other came from Michah Bay Gault writing in the Jan/Feb edition of Poets and Writers. From her perspective as a teacher of creative writing she wrote about the importance of the quality of teachability and the ‘openness, curiosity and humility that unlocks the possibility of learning and inspiration’. She speaks to writers in particular but I believe that her words apply equally to creators of all stripes:

This quality is so important for a writer’s development, but I’ve found that some writers starting along their paths resist it. Particularly they resist the guidance of mentors, either in person or as models on the page. Sometimes this stems from the worry that an abundance of influence might overwhem a distinctness of voice. You needn’t fret here, a great mentor will work to illimunate a new writer’s voice not change it, but even a medicore mentor can’t erase the core personality that makes one writer’s perspective distinct from another. A writer can be simultaneously open to influence while remaining steadfastly individual in style and voice…

…You will stay you even as you explore. And just as water takes the shape of the container - a reservoir, a champagne glass, a cupped palm - you can let youself be shaped by influence knowing that your identity as a writer is irrepressable and, like the reservoir stands ready to surge with formidable power.

So which is it? Are we best advised to retreat inwards to find our voice, banning the influence of others for a time until we hear ourselves loud and clear? Or do we find our voice more quickly, more surely by taking advantage of the example of others, by being open to learn from them? Let’s start to answer that by considering what we mean by finding our voice.

The Struggle, Ambleside. So named for the 13 degtee gradient down from the lofty and isolated Kirkstone Pass. This was taken on the drive I took on New Year’s Day. Alone. Thinking. Quietly.

This quest is a common struggle amongst creators. Whether we want a commercial advantage by standing out in the crowd or simply desire to express our core selves in our limited time on earth, this search for an individual voice is a lasting preoccupation for many of us. There is a perception that we need to find our unique set of vibrations, the stable way we resonate in the world, and keep it pure and unadulterated. If we push the analogy between the results of our art form and the sounds our physical voice boxes make, however, we might see that this is not quite how it works.

Our physical voices change as we age. Our spines lose flexibity affecting how the larymx is suspended from the skull. Gravity increases the distance from the larynx to the mouth, increasing resonance and lowering voice tone. Natural loss of muscle tone affects the larengeal muscles around the voice box as much as it results in batwing upper arms. Menopause causes the vocal folds to stiffen and swell. Glands produce less lubricating mucus (in the voice, ladies, I’m talking about the voice right now!) causing dryness, while the mucus that is produced is thicker and harder to clear. As a result the voice lowers in pitch and becomes rougher and breathier.

I don’t think it’s any different with our creative voices. As we move through the world, taking on experiences, we change and our voices change as a result. Gravity however does not have the same inexorable drag effect. The second half of life can be a time when we lighten. It’s when finally have time to play and to express the fact that we know not only how to survive, but how to thrive. Once we see that most of what we took seriously earlier in life really doesn’t matter very much, or needn’t matter right now, we can relax and our voice opens to new possiblities unfettered by the restrictions of fear. Yet, even as we float higher, we deepen with wisdom. Our whole range expands. There is much more available to us in our creative expression than there could have been when we were stumbling towards adulthood.

The idea of finding your creative voice turns out to be a somewhat slippery one because your voice today will be the same as yesterday but different. It will be recognisably you, but the you of today is different to the you of yesterday and the years that came before that.

I’m working on a book at the moment. I didn’t think it would be too hard because I wrote a few of these kinds of books before in my twenties and early thirties, just with a different subject matter. Then it was law, now it’s about creativty. Specifically this one is about how to have your creatve practice take off in a non-commercial sense. How to soar as a creative individual. Oh how the Universe laughs. This book is proving an absolute bugger and is doing anything but soaring (yet) and for a while I couldn’t figure out why.

I sent it to a carefully chosen developmental editor and received back a report full of most helpful advice. The book is now on its way to a better structure and the rewriting is having a clarifying effect, making me more aware of not just what I want to say but why this book is an important part of my own process and what writing it is teaching me about my own future. And yet the writing is now dead. Cold, stiff and waxy.

An accidental side effect of listening to the editor was that I began to mimic an Everyman voice, a safe, received pronunciation that smoothed out my unconscious quirks so much I was ironed into blandness. Much of my unhappiness with the text is the way the experience of writing it contrasts with how I feel when I write here.

I am so painfully aware that if you know my voice from this Substack you would not easily recognise me in the draft book at all. It is me and it is not me. It is the me from years ago. The text is full of hestitancy about my authority, anxiety to fit in and please, a need for professional acceptance, a willingness to take on board advice on form without also asserting my uniqueness. If you had known the twenty- three year old me on the day the editor from Lion Publishing came and sat with me in Poppalino’s pizzeria directly under my law office and offered me my first book contract, then you would recognise me in this manuscipt. It is the voice of a baby lawyer writing a book based on her academic work at Cambridge, itself based on secondary sources. She lives in me of course, like one of the smallest Russian dolls in a set and always will, but she is not me today.

My job now is to do with the manuscript what we have to do with ourselves when we try to find our creative voice. I need to find a way to listen to advice and influence without mimicking it. I need to stop writing about what I have learned and write from that experience. I need to stop being who I was and start becoming who I might be. I need to use my voice to talk not primarily to the abstract concept of ‘the market’ but to myself, to write the book I need to read. I need to listen to my own cadences, to the resonance of how I sound right now. I must stop doing a karaoke impression of the early first-career me and must not perform a pastiche of what others are doing right now. I need to use my own voice to bring myself back to life.

In this world of constant noise, acts of self-reclamation can require times of solitude and quiet, times to hum to yourself, to catch the repeated refrains that bubble up when no-one else is in the room. Space to mumble and babble to yourself provides an environment to listen to an undaulterated voice, a voice that is pure and natural. Whether its the hour you take to write a Substack, allowing words to come as they come, the week it takes to dissect and re-stitch a book chapter, or whether its a full blown wandering into the desert for forty days and forty nights, claiming a space of solitude will give space for a voice to emerge. But then what? How will you manage the re-entry into the world that is waiting to hear you? How do you know if these new sounds are truly you and not some deeply buried copy you took into the desert with you?

Temporary withdrawal can be a necesary time of refreshment and clarification and yet even on silent meditation retreats, there is huge power in compatriotism. There is a reason that creative retreat resorts host more than one creator at a time. We are meant for connection. We have a voice so that we can go beyond mere internal thoughts. If we shut our ears permanently to the influence of others we will merely be shouting from a hill top, remote from community, our creativity lost on the wind. We are built to give and receive support, to exchange ideas and inspiration, to commune. A part of a creative practice is not just taking up the space to put work into the world, it is creating the space to receive the gifts of others. Yet if we are porous we risk drowning our own voice with the influence sponged up from others.

There is an alternative to the extreme yo-yoing between social retreat and soaking up influence, between listening only to yourself and spending too much time listening to others. It is to enter into conversation with those other artists. Rather then mimicking them, simply reflecting back their voice, we can respond. We can agree, disagree, spin their points, weaving together their ideas with ours. We can restate, debate, riff off, challenge, adapt, translate, amplify. Even cover versions can transform and rejuvinate the original work.

You don’t always need to avoid the crowd of influential voices because influence is a spur to growth. But if you need to find a quiet place for while, a haven while you learn to distinguish between yourself and that influence, so you know where the water and the cupped hand each start and and begin, then that has merit. In the middle though is where the creativity actually takes place.

And so inevitably I come to a position of synthesis and in doing so I bring myself to a point of understanding something new which I then form into an essay. Because that’s what my voice is. As a lawyer I specialised in a field that focused on resolution of conflicts by taking what both opposing parties needed and finding a way to meet both. As an artist I started with combining fabric strips, making a cohesive whole out of varying patterns and hues. In my posts for paid Substack readers this year I am finding the place where meaning occurs at the intersection of cultural festivals and the practice of creativity. In my personal practice I am slowly finding the synthesis between all the skills and ways of working I have learned over the years.

Did I know this before I read the Facebook post and the magazine article? I knew the facts, of course I did. But did I see their implication in the precise way I do today? No. It took being under the influence of multiple strangers and sorting through them to attune my ear more precisely to my own voice and realise that I can stand alone in a different place to those influences. To borrow a judical phrase. I do not seek to overturn their opinion, but I do distinguish them.

This realisation has implications not just for my decisions about who to listen to and how much time to dedicate to the voices of others, which was the primary concern of the Facebookers. It takes me towards thinking about what influence is and what my opportunities and responsiblities are in that regard.

Influence is not always about being a formal mentor. That is a role which requires a level of experience and expertise, and too often a gaining of a coveted position in a crowded professional world, be that via an academic position, publication or acceptance by other gatekeeper institutions. It is not necesarily about selling products, giving advice, peddling proprietorial information or having curated social media feeds. Influence is equally about standing up in the world as a reflector for other people. It can be as simple as a willingess to share the simplest of actions and thoughts so that others can have something to bounce off, something to discover themselves by. It can be as much about giving someone something to disagree with as it is persuading them to your viewpoint.

Likewise, being influenced is not necesarily about following or buying or becoming like. It is not always even about changing shape like water in a glass. Sometimes it is about being brought to clarity about what your own form looks like or being given encouragement to continue to run your own course. It can be the experience of looking at someone elses choices and realising how dry and desert like they feel to you compared to the sensation of flow when you create on your own terms. Being influenced can be about being all the more able to trust your own voice for the very reason that it sounds so different to those of others around you.

That being so, can we ever avoid being influenced by others? Surely there is a beautiful paradox in the loudness of the crowd being the stimulus to embrace quiet. Is that avoidance of influence via isolation or it accepting the (probably unintentional) prod of others to go deeper internally? If we cannot avoid being influenced, then the corollary must be true, that we cannot avoid influencing others even if unwittingly. And then the only question becomes: what kind of influence will we be?

My voice also likes to speak in questions. It may have jettsioned the cross examination style (Mostly. My husband may disagree!) but it embraces very much my training in asking coaching questions and also cannot help but reflect my over-thinking, curious traits. I do not have all the answers but I am always happy to provoke enquiry. What do you think about all this? If I have not prompted you to hide away from me for a while, I’d love to hear your voice and receive the benefit of your influence.

Shalom,

Helen