Missing the Mark

What does it mean to speak with your voice? To use the authentic self to tell your story and share your experience?

Spatial Awareness

The world is full of writing on just about every imaginable subject out there. Persuasive, authoritative, informative, so on and so forth. Blah, blah, blah.

Increasingly, it would seem to me, the world is full of sanitized writing. I’m not saying it has been censored, just “purified” of all the personal internal indicators of who and what the original writer actually thinks. This sanitation of personality makes writing boring and lackluster.

When you are reading a piece from a human, it really should contain the makings of the internal workings of that human. Rarely have I met a human who strode forth from their hovel with overbearing confidence and left me thinking, “Boy, that guy is such a peach.” I prefer the conflicted person, the one who waffles on a decision to be made, the one who is so fascinated by a rock they might miss the forest it is in. Humans, when you interact with them, are full of contradiction. I believe authentic writing should reflect this.

Who cares?

We all have a mission. Get through the day. Sell the bauble to the plebe. Go home and stare into the light-producing square on the wall. Once the brain has achieved the proper mushiness, TikTok until complete and then slip into the void. Rinse and repeat.

Noticeably, when you break the cycle of the banal through fixation on details, things get much more interesting. For example, I listen to a podcast called Bilingual News, and I love both Michael and Mami to pieces. Do I agree with everything Michael says? No. Do I have the same emotional responses Mami does over certain subjects? Also no. I love that they are, and have forever been, themselves. They have perspectives that grow and change and are a reflection of their personalities and interests. Writing should be the same.

Fundamentally, you could categorize this piece as a rant. Kiel, standing on a milk crate, screaming into the void. Who cares? Why are you making such a big deal out of nothing? Well, because I don’t think it’s “nothing.”

When left to its own devices, commercialism will boil us all down and turn us into smooth leather to sell if we allow it. Writing from your true self carries something with it. It comes through. It shines through and provides something mentally and emotionally that increasingly gets sanitized out for expedience. To appeal to a wider audience.

Contextual Culture

We, as humans, share a great deal of information with each other through implicit statements and contextual clues. We say one thing, then do something contrary to what we have said. On the surface you might judge that person for the apparent contradiction, but if you know the person, your understanding of what that person actually said may shift to line up with their actions.

This happens because we don’t always say what we mean directly. We imply it. People who understand the context then understand the implied reference and apply that information to the communication.

Why didn’t Marge just tell me she wasn’t happy? I asked her how she was doing and she said she was fine.

Fine.

Social interactions are chock full of little things like this. It is what builds up layers of meaning without direct statement. In writing, we don’t have all the body language, subtle visual cues, and tone to imply what we really want to say. So we use different devices.

Over time, voice itself becomes part of that context. If you read enough of someone’s writing, you begin to understand the little contradictions, habits, jokes, fixations, and turns of phrase that belong to that person. Meaning starts to exist not only in what is written, but in what you have come to understand about the person writing it.

Reasoning Beyond Concise Points

I would implore a person who decides to write to do the following: stop editing yourself out of your writing.

Throw all your thoughts out there, however they come out. You may need to clean them up afterward. You may need to clarify a sentence, fix the grammar, or untangle whatever strange knot your brain managed to tie. But the result should still feel like a true reflection of yourself.

Edit your writing. Don’t edit yourself out of it.

You may need to do some personal reflection about what you are writing about, but in the end the result is yours. Not some stylized, highly professional prose that has distanced the human from the words.

Reasoning with your words through your authentic self seldom has concise and concrete points. You are debating internally. Even when you decidedly hate catfish, surely there might be some version out there that might be tasty, right? I mean, if you deep fry it and dip it in enough sauce, it’s delicious.

Sometimes what is born out of that internal argument is clarity you didn’t know you needed.

Perhaps that is what voice really is.

Not something you add to your writing, but what remains when you stop removing yourself from it.