I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
Today I’m thinking about how to express my voice in my Things Men Gave Me personal essays.
There’s a reason our earliest attempts at poems, stories, songs, and paintings don’t quite feel like they’re ours: We all start out as cover artists. When you start playing guitar, you learn other people’s songs first, before you start writing your own. You test your family’s patience with slightly off-key, poorly played renditions of your favorite songs.
When you start writing, your earliest poems are understandably covers of the writers you read most. My first poems were Sylvia Plath cover poems. But—but!—in time they sounded less like covers and more like originals. The influence started to recede, and I spoke more like myself, learning to use my own vocabulary, my own speech rhythms, my own sense of wit and wonder.
I love Mary Karr’s description of voice: “It’s the delivery system for the author’s experience—the big bandwidth cable that carries in lustrous clarity every pixel of someone’s inner and outer experiences.” When people ask about when they’ll start sounding like themselves, the question is really: When will I start writing my own poems and not knockoffs of my favorite writers? When will I know I’ve found my me-ness in my work?
Maggie Smith, Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life
My paintings more and more feel like my own. But my TMGM essays don’t. I’m not really “covering” anyone with the way I write. Yet I also haven’t found my voice there. I have a voice here, as a daily blogger. But it’s not translating into my TMGM essays, perhaps because they are such a different genre, essentially memoir.
In the 2000s, I blogged as both a mom blogger and a tech blogger. My writing gained a little bit of attention. As I wrote, I could feel that what I was writing was fresh and unique. I guess others thought that too, because the head of a tech blog network hired me to be a writer and editor on the basis of my tech blog. And I earned the attention of a book publisher editor, who offered me a book contract. I did write the book, but I didn’t feel proud of it. It wasn’t a great book but just a rehash of my blogging, as so many bloggers did in those days.
Side note: I remember thinking after that book came out, “someday I’ll write a book that is authentically mine, that I can fully stand behind and promote.” I think the TMGM work could turn into that book.
How do I tap into the freshness of my past writing, and of my current non-TMGM writing, and infuse it into my TMGM essays? Perhaps I ought to try to imitate myself. I don’t have any problem writing articles for my Greensborough Drive newsletter. And I felt very confident blogging in the 2000s.
Smith quotes from a letter she received from poet Stanley Plumly about getting through her difficulties writing her second book:
My theory is that you should always try to imitate yourself, because you’ll fail every time and come up with something new. But the more you try not to, the more you will resemble yourself or the more you will freeze up. So take the pressure off. Just write good poems; the rest will take care of itself.
Smith writes of this advice:
The idea of “imitating yourself” is such a powerful permission slip to double down on your own vision, to bet on yourself. As we grow in the art, we stay ourselves, but we don’t stay still. I think the trick is to change but also remain true to yourself, and to that ever elusive, hard-to-define “voice” we all talk so much about. When I feel my poems beginning to tug in a new direction, and when they start to split their seams and want to move differently, my job is to listen to the poems and help them get where they’re going.
I’m working on an essay titled “A Crash Course in Online Dating,” which is about one of the first men I connected with online, Sten.1 He was a 55-year-old oil-and-gas lobbyist, never married, no kids. At the time, I was 45, so he was ten years older than I was. I felt some attraction to him but at the time I was very much looking for a partner who was roughly my age and in my life stage. He didn’t qualify. I cut him loose, but in retrospect I might have been better off had I given him a better chance.
He certainly would have treated me better than the man I ended up with in a four-year on-and-off relationship. Was my picker broken?
Right now, the essay feels ponderous and also unfair to Sten, emphasizing as it does how he wasn’t as tall as his profile made me think he was, or as handome (he must have used old photos). I’m trying to rewrite it to focus on the online dating aspects±—how profiles don’t accurately portray people in their 3D wonderfulness (or terribleness) and how you have to date more than a few people before you can really understand the pool of prospects.
Is there a way to transform this essay so that it can better manifest my own voice? What would my voice say about him?
Is the idea of a “broken picker” something I could work with?
That actually could lead into a discussion of my broken decision making apparatus in general, the one that led me to blow up and leave my marriage two years before I met Sten.
But was my decision-making apparatus broken, or did I have some fated journey I was on? Had I somehow made a relationship with with Sten, there would likely be no Things Men Gave Me conceptual writing-and-abstract-art project.
Maybe I can use this first essay as an introduction to the entire project, make it less a commentary on online dating and more an introduction to who and where I was: 45 years old, recently divorced, also more recently out of the relationship that led to the divorce, looking for a romance that would overtake me like the affair overtook me, on a kind of heroine’s journey having received a call to adventure in the form of that first midlife romance.
This feels like it could be a much better starting place for the series. I’m thinking of reframing the first essay and titling it “An Introduction to Online Dating at Midlife,” with the subtitle:
Sten was one of the first men I met when I got online after my divorce. He might have been my perfect match, but I was dreaming of something entirely different.
This can help lay out the backstory of my divorce, my affair, how I wanted someone young and tall and in the same life stage as me (raising kids, building a career).
I am a little worried to introduce all that in the first essay, but, from Phillip Lopate’s tips to turn your “I” into a character, “show your mistakes” and “consider starting with remorse.” More on that latter tip:
There are hard choices to be made when a person is put under pressure. And it’s in having made the wrong choice, curiously enough, that we are made all the more aware of our freedom and potential for humanity. So it is that remorse is often the starting point for good personal essays, whose working-out brings the necessary self-forgiveness (not to mention self-amusement) to outgrow shame.
Phillip Lopate, Writing Personal Essays: On the Necessity of Turning Oneself Into a Character
Anyway my readers shouldn’t have to wonder, “why did she get a divorce?” and “what is this post-divorce relationship she keeps referencing?”
“It’s in having made the wrong choice”: not choosing Sten may have been the wrong choice, but it led me on the journey that TMGM will document. Maybe I can somehow express in that essay the beginning of the essential conflict: I choose poorly all along because I’m going after the wrong thing. I have a false goal of getting back to where I was by remarrying, and my focus was not on partners that would be good for me but rather partners who made me feel completely in love rather than working with me to build a jointly satisfying life.
- Not his real name. ↩︎