Voice February 15, 2005 ~ 12:56 pm
Posted by Julie in : Daily Grind , trackbackI’ve been thinking about this post for over a month, and since I’m trying to settle down from dealing with idiots at work, I figured I would finally write it. Blogging as therapy, who knew?
When I was a kid, I had a friend named Dana. Dana’s mom swore she could tell who Dana had been hanging out with by the way Dana talked when she came home. She was probably right. I think humans in general tend to absorb and adopt the speech mannerisms of people around them - that’s how we get regional dialects. It’s also how many of us have started talking like characters from Friends in the past ten years, from Chandler’s inflections to Monica’s “I know!”. I do it, and you know you do, too. Just admit it.
I have a tendency to do the same thing with my writing. No, I don’t ape Hemingway or Fitzgerald, I’m not that good. Instead, I write short little blurbs like Dooce after I visit her site. Or I might write stories from my past after reading Lois Lane’s stuff, or Michael’s, or Gooch’s. Or a sex post after visiting Regan’s. Or…well, you get the picture. I have my own voice, but sometimes it gets a little distorted if I post after reading everyone else’s stuff. So I struggle to get my own writing style out there, and some days I’m still not sure if I’ve done it successfully.
Then there are the things that I wonder if I can share with you all. Have you gotten so used to my humorous Chandler-esque ramblings that you would find something serious completely out of place? Could I tell you about the strange moment of deja-vu I had on Saturday while I was getting my hair cut, when the stylist curled the hair on either side of my face, and I realized that I knew that hairstyle went with my face, but in another lifetime? Can I talk about the rambling garden path of thoughts on reincarnation that moment led me down? Would you listen if I wondered aloud about whether we have the same face from life to life? Or would you totally disregard that post and hope for something funny to replace it so you could forget about the awkward blog moment, leaving it a commentless redheaded stepchild of a post? See, all of that goes into the voice I put out on this blog, too, I just don’t show it very often. Should I?
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