Finding a Voice

Here's a work by Wolf Kahn to brighten up the winter.

I found a voice for my novel, and it's weird. But it’s much more interesting than the monotone I was using before. I’m sorry I can’t give examples; I’m not ready. Now that I have a voice, an angle, though, I find that the writing isn’t so tedious and that it’s much more fluid. Hurray!

The voice just came to me while I was trying to fall asleep one night. Actually, I think subconciously I was thinking of the movie Out of Africa ("I had a farm in Africa..."). I had been feeling for sometime that the novel just wasn’t interesting. Something was missing. Though it’s a fantasy (minus the supernatural) I’d wanted it to encapsulate natural history and something primeval. In fact, I wanted it to have the same mood as my ideal garden (in my second or third posting). The voice is quirky, anachronistic, and very much longing for a sense of place and past.

Even if the voice isn’t brilliant, it will have gotten some words down on paper, words that I can wrestle with later. It’s all about those philosophical lenses. Some lenses may not be true, but sometimes they're needed to get the job done.