A more accurate word to describe the attempt to articulate myself in writing might be “cacophony.” There is always a clamorous chorus of competing voices inside my skull, each maneuvering for the lead singer role. Some are brash, some wry, some contrived, some disingenuous, some thrasonical (okay that word happens to be the “word of the day” on the online dictionary I happen to be using), some dark, some cryptic, some ambiguous, some insolent, some eloquent, some nearly mute… on and on. Always there seem to be innumerable choices on one’s linguistic palette. I would like to improve my ability to pare down my writing to minimalist essences.
As Italo Calvino (to borrow another voice to address questions of voice) writes in If on a Winter’s Night A Traveller, “the world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it with any clarity you must prune and prune.” Much like proofreading, cutting and editing the gang of voices in my head. So perhaps voice is as much a question of narrowing as anything.
Some memoirs and autobiographical stories entail the juxtaposing of two or more distinct chronologies that are mediated through narrative (each event dialectically affecting the other) and memory to create a provisional sense of history. I have noticed in some of the stories I have written about my own life this chronological interaction to construct a sense of history is missing; often there is simply a border between two nothings, in which previous events offer little or no aid in interpreting the present.
