I had a very strange start to the year — I lost my voice. I don’t mean I lost my ability to sing or declaim from the stage. I mean I lost the ability to make any sound using my vocal cords. (Aphonia) Never happened to me before and was, frankly, scary. Here’s how.
- I couldn’t call for help. If I fell in a ditch, I couldn’t cry out. I had to attract attention by banging things, or throwing things, or physically assaulting my hearers. Not an efficient way to get help quickly.
- By the same token, I couldn’t sound a warning. When I saw danger approaching someone else, I could not call out an alarm. It made me feel helpless and culpable in another’s misfortune.
- My sense of identity suffered. I am a singer, my voice has always been an important part of my make-up. To suddenly be silenced struck at the core of my self-confidence.
- I was isolated. I could not carry on a conversation. Meeting with friends left me feeling left out since I could not participate in the exchange of news and ideas.
- I couldn’t use the telephone. When my brother called from 2000 miles away, I couldn’t even say hello. How disappointing is that?
Writers often study body language as a means of making their words on the page more powerful. Well, being mute for three days, I had lots of time to practice body language! I got a stiff neck from all the nodding and head-shaking. My eyeballs rolled up and down so often they needed a massage. My mother told me it was impolite to point, but I pointed at everything, big, stabbing, forefinger pointing. How else could I tell my husband to feed the cat?
Surprises
I referenced surprises in the title of this post.
- Here is the first one. As a writer I’m familiar with the importance of body language in our fiction. On the page, we use things like “pursed lips” or “clenched fists” or “narrowed eyes” to convey mood or emotion. In real life, those cues are too small to make up for the lack of words. If no one is looking, pulling your lips into a prune shape accomplishes nothing but to create facial lines. Maggie Lawson talks about “amplifying” important moments in a novel. She adds metaphor and cadence to amplify those pursed lips. i.e. “She pursed her lips so tightly I thought she might choke.”
- Voice is elusive. We are born able to make sound, even if it is just a wail. Every day of my life, I have had a voice — until I didn’t. In writing, the author’s “voice” is just as necessary and just as hard to define. It is that indefinable something that marks a passage as unique to that particular writer. Stephen Sondheim and Oscar Hammerstein II used the same notes of the scale, but the music – voice – they produced was entirely different. It is that distinction that marks an author’s voice.
- Characters have voice. Here the possibilities for a writer are endless. We can speak of specific characteristics like a “gravelly voice” or a “breathless whisper” or “as shrill as nails on a chalkboard.” But once we have decided on a defining trait for our character’s voice, we need to stick to it. Just as a baby can recognize his mother’s voice, we want our readers to recognize the voice of a character without having to use dialogue tags. What a protagonist says and how he says it, should identify him. If the hero and the villain sound the same, the story needs a rewrite.
- Authors can use speech, or lack of it, to advance the plot. When I was mute, I was easily overlooked in group settings. Just like the servants in a Regency novel, I was invisible, discounted. If you write a story about a woman who struggles with self-confidence, make her silent in a crowd. She’ll have plenty of time to observe and won’t be seen as a threat to anyone. Think Miss Marple.
- Life experience is a marvellous teacher. Until I lost my voice I’d never considered the implications of being mute. I expect life experiences used in fiction to be huge–earth-shattering, monumental –things like life and death and love. But small things have consequences. Those small things just might be the trigger to lift your writing to the next level.
Life is full of lessons. As authors we can use every experience to enhance our writing. We need to train ourselves to be aware and take note of all the moments, big or small, that make up our own backstory. That is the well from which we draw when creating compelling characters.
Please share in the comments any surprising discoveries from small events in your own life.
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