Speaking of Writing

A version of this paper was first given at the National Association of Writers in Education conference held in York in November 2004.

Intuitively speaking, the idea of finding a voice makes sense. Nevertheless, when it comes down to asking ourselves what this voice actually is, and how on earth we might go about finding it, then things become a bit more shadowy, a bit more obscure. Although one might think that one’s own voice should be the most simple of things, the most natural of things, this naturalness does not seem to come naturally to us. It is well known that many writers do not find writing easy. The apparent naturalness of their work is often attained, sometimes by the most unnatural means: and writing, let us admit it, is itself a pretty unnatural means.
Italo Calvino is a good example of the labour required to attain this naturalness. Whether one calls it his ‘voice’, his ‘signature’ or something else, there is something about Calvino that is highly distinctive. But when one reads the posthumous collection Numbers in the Dark, a posthumous collection of pieces not intended for publication, it is evident that Calvino was a writer who did not write with ease. There are glimmers of greatness in this collection, but there is also an awkwardness, as if he was working towards something that remained out of reach. Some of the pieces are, to putty simply, quite bad. They have about them none of the scintillating brilliance of Invisible Cities or the extravagant play and comedy of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Calvino was one of those who wrote every day; struggling for the naturalness that breathes from every page of his greatest books. He struggled like this until the end of his life. We talk too glibly, I suspect, of finding a voice. It is also a question of sustaining it: for a single sentence, for a paragraph, for a chapter, even for a whole book.
But, the questions remain. What is this voice, this thing that makes a writer who they are and not somebody else? And, if there is such a thing, where can it be found? To try to throw some more light on these problems here, I will call upon the twentieth century German philosopher Franz Rosenzweig. In his essay The New Thinking, Rosenzweig draws a distinction between thought thinking (or logical thinking) and speech thinking (or grammatical thinking). Thought thinking, Rosenzweig tells us, is essentially timeless, it is that kind of thinking in which ‘the last, the goal, is for it the first,’ which, ‘is always solitary, even if it should happen in common.’ It is a kind of thinking in which ‘the thinker plainly knows his thoughts in advance.’ It is a thinking ‘for no one and speaking to no one (‘for which you can substitute “everyone”, the so-called “general public,” if you think it sounds better’).

Thought thinking – or logical thinking – is a kind of thinking without novelty, which is to say without time. It knows where it is heading, it knows the trajectory that it is to follow. Whilst being isolated, the thinking of an individual subject, it is a kind of thinking that is removed from the life and biography of the thinker, that rises about this life and this biography: a good description of the kind of thinking required in the exam room, the kind of thinking that you need to solve quadratic equations. What you had for breakfast may affect your ability to solve a quadratic equation (and such an ability can be useful), but it will not influence your solution. On the other hand, what you had for breakfast may directly influence the direction of the poem you are writing.

In contrast thought thinking, grammatical thinking, or speech thinking, ‘is bound to time, is nourished by time, and it neither can nor wants to abandon this ground of nourishment; it does not know beforehand where it will emerge; it lets itself be given its cues from others; it actually lives by another’s life, whether that other is the one who listens to a story, or is the respondent in a dialogue, or the participant in a chorus…’ The difference between these two kinds of thinking, ‘does not lie in sound and silence, but in the need of an other and, what is the same thing, in the taking of time seriously.’

It seems to me that this is useful in throwing light upon this rather obscure idea that we have of ‘finding a voice’. This voice we seek is not something that is solitary and isolated. It is not our merely a neutral, abstract relationship to language. Nor is it something timeless that we are seeking. Instead when writing a story, a poem, a novel, we move stage by stage, uncertain of what is to come: even in the most well-planned of novels or poems, it is not that the whole thing is there in the mind at the outset, complete, only to be downloaded onto the page. The taking time of the writing is essential to the writing itself. There are no shortcuts. It is not as if, had we the technology, we might be able to download from the mind to the page more quickly. The act of writing, the time that writing takes, the movement of the pen on the page, the pauses in the writing process when you sit and stare out of the window, unsure of what you are thinking about or whether you are thinking at all: all these are essential to the process of writing. When I myself write I begin with a sense of trajectory, an impulse perhaps, a mood. I write the first word. Writing the first word, I do not know when I shall write the last nor do I know what this last word shall be. It is time that leads me the ending, time and the web of relationships that I explore through the writing, relationships that are cloudy and in shadow until I begin to follow their many threads. This is not a return to solitude, to some dark core of uniqueness that is my own possession, but to the fact that I am formed, uniquely formed, of innumerable specific relationships to others, innumerable voices—whether these others and these voices be people, places, things, ideas, books, dreams, circumstances. I discover that I am, not so much a unity, but a community. And I must confess: I have never found my voice and suspect I never will, because it simply doesn’t exist; but writing is a way of finding the many voices through which I can explore the many relationships I have with the world. And because they are many, these relationships and these voices, I never know where this attentive exploration will finish up.

Only in retrospect does this most contingent and, in some ways, artificial of things—the story, the poem the novel— seem natural and necessary, as if it had to be. And it only appears necessary to the extent that I have managed, in the labour of writing, to constantly rediscover and to sustain a gaggle of voices that can speak truly of these multiple relationships

It is not so much a matter of finding a voice, then, as developing the sensitivity whereby, whilst adrift on the lurching seas of word and image, one knows how to move the hand upon the tiller to steer a course through the many voices and relationships by which we are constituted.

For me, teaching creative writing is the teaching of a kind of thinking. Essentially, the teaching of creative writing is the teaching of speech thinking. This is a kind of thinking that requires an attentiveness, a relaxation of the restless urge to know in advance. It is the kind of thinking that requires a surrender to the thinking itself, in which thought thinks us and not vice versa: we do not weave thoughts, but we are woven and unwoven by the thoughts that are taking place. This is never a kind of thinking that can be mastered, because here the order of priority is entirely wrong: I am convinced that to be master storyteller, a master poet, a master musician, one must be mastered by the story, by the poem or by the melody. For Rosenzweig, there are profound ethical implications here: speech thinking is a kind of thinking that is attentive to others, that remains in relationship. The idea of ‘finding a voice’ can sound precariously close to a preening self-obsession, but seen as the exploration of speech-thinking, it becomes instead a step to a deeper relatedness.

What are the implications here for the teaching of creative writing? We currently have an educational climate that is profoundly lopsided. As good thought-thinkers, we demand that we should know everything at the outset. We explain (or, fashionably, we negotiate) what were are going to do. Then we do it. And, having done it, we ask ourselves whether we have done it well. Then, if it is found that we have diverged from this prearranged trajectory, or that any trace of novelty has entered into the process, it is deemed that we have failed. It is not that there is not a place for the kind of learning that seeks to assimilate information. Of course there is. There is a value, for example, to getting to grips with dramatic structure by working through parts of Aristotle’s Poetics. There is a value to being able to say, ‘By the end of the session, you will have understood the role of desire in giving unity to a story and how this might allow you to sharpen up your own fiction.’ All such assimilation is a way of enriching the store of voices that clamour inside us. But this is only one side of the picture, this is only one kind of thinking. These things should be learned and then they should be forgotten, so that we can set out afresh without any clear idea of where we are going, without a learning goal, without the certainty of being able to rehearse what we have learned at the end, without, even, being certain that we are going to gain anything at all from the exercise. If we are not willing to take risks such as this, then we are destined for blandness and mediocrity: in education, in writing and in life.

When I teach creative writing, this is the point towards which I try to propel my students, by fair means or foul: the point of risk, the point at which they give up the desire to know in advance, the point at which they surrender themselves to the clamour in the hope that out of this mess, something authentic and true might emerge. All of the other stuff—metrical forms in poetry, dramatic structure, the close attention to language—is subservient to this central aim. The thing about speech thinking is that whilst retrospectively, one can trace how one has arrived at the end point, in advance there is no possibility of predicting where you are going. A poem does not exist until it is written. Nor does a story. Because if it is a case of finding the voices that clamour inside us, shape-shifting voices that are never the same from one moment to the next, then we can never say what we are going to find, or whether we are going to find anything at all.

The culture of individual learning plans and negotiated learning outcomes is deeply antithetical to this process, a process that cannot be reduced down to some kind of training, or to the attempt to give our students yet another so-called ‘skill for life’. Indeed, such a culture threatens to stifle those who we claim to be helping. Here I think of a student I had when I was running a workshop with disaffected young people in Birmingham. He was tongue-tied, inarticulate and surly, and he had, it seemed, an absolute terror of writing. Yet one day he brought a cassette into the training room. ‘It’s me,’ he said, holding it up. ‘Can I play it?’ He turned it on, and I sat back astonished to hear him rapping freestyle with the kind of fluency, linguistic dexterity and imagination that made me genuinely envious. This was speech thinking in action, unaware of where it was going, not caring about outcomes, profoundly attentive to the beat, to the moment, to the unfolding rhythmic patterns, temporal, passing, exploring the many voices that spoke in and through him. But I was struck also by something else: the anger and resentment that came through every single phrase. Here was someone with an extraordinary talent and facility with words, who knew what it was to chart these many connections and relationships that made up the voices within him, but who had been stifled, dismissed, given no space, no time, to speak within the claustrophobic climate of goals and targets and outcomes and evaluations.

Faced by this resentment, I can only return to the conviction that genuinely creative writing teaching can, to some extent, act as an antidote to all this. Cherishing the many voices within us that express our relationships to others and to the worlds, listening to the voices of others, nurturing this speech thinking, deepening our relatedness and our attentiveness, holding to the conviction that education should be more than mere training, more than simply the acquisition of ‘skills for life’: this, I believe, is what we should be doing as creative writing teachers.

And to hell with measurable outcomes.