Conveying your "voice" in writing.

Beginning when we learn to write our names, the way we write is dictated by a set of rules conjured up by "The Man."

• Do not use contractions.
• Do not write in the second person.
• If you begin a paragraph with a number, you must write out the number.
• The period goes inside the quotation marks (in America).
• The full stop goes outside the quotation marks (in the United Kingdom).
• Put a comma before a quotation mark if you're quoting someone, but not if you're using quotes to signify a theory, conjecture, or the name of a magazine, newspaper, or academic paper.
• Never curse.
• Do not use the following words: that, actually, get, got, great deal, big, small, really, very, or any sort of abbreviation.
• Everyday is an adjective. Every day is an adjective (every) describing a noun (day) See also: Maybe/May be, awhile/a while.

Ok, I'll cut myself off.  You get the point. (I just broke rule #2.)

My issue with these never-ending rules is they erode our personalities in writing.  Young children enter school as rough diamonds and exit college thoroughly polished to the point they all look the same. Then, we stick them under a microscope to look for flaws.  That's why "grammar Nazis" exist and we have an ingrained fear of misspelling anything on a cover letter, resume, or, god forbid, Facebook. Life should not be a non-stop English exam.

I recently received an email from a friend of a friend who is looking to come work in Sihanoukville.  He's a lovely chap (as Lee would say), and he sent the most professional email I've seen in six years.  I replied, "Whoa. Calm down, Dwight Schrute. This isn't that kind of place."

Over the last few years, I've noticed job descriptions want candidates to have "strong" and "unique" voices in their writing. Some ask for a sense of humor, and others simply want applicants to "tell us about yourself."  

Tangent: interviewers who say, "So, tell me about yourself," is a very bad, inexperienced interviewer. Just walk out immediately.

How do we do this without 1) sounding like a machine or 2) sounding like a maniac?

The answer is language and anecdotes.

Language

This is where reading books helps.  Granted, I found myself speaking like a Game of Thrones  character after powering through all five books in a month, so have self-awareness and reign-in the flowery language according to your audience.

I can't quote the article or time period, but at one point in my adult life I read a study saying women talk more than men because they have more expansive vocabularies. It's analogous to talented rappers. If they know more words, they're cleverer in their writing. It's easier to convey exactly what you're thinking if you know the right word to use. 

Here's a basic example:

He was really mean in that article.

That sentence isn't descriptive and you may be asked to elaborate.

His tone was caustic which alienated the readers.
 
 See? He wasn't necessarily "mean" like he pulled your hair and pushed you in the dirt.  Improving your vocabulary helps with specificity and shines a light on the opinion you want conveyed.

(Note: I had to Google the word "caustic" when my dad used it to describe my tone in an email. I didn't read it in a book.)

Additional tip: don't refer to yourself.  Just state something as fact so you don't create a passive statement with phrases like "In my opinion" or "I feel like."  Quite frankly, there's no reason why anyone should care about my or your opinion, and beginning a sentence with a personal sentiment detracts from the real point. Writing in the third person shouldn't take away your voice.  If anything, it will make it more authoritative.

I was sad to see her go.

Vs.

It's difficult to cope when a friend moves away.

Anecdotes

Storytelling is the most effective way to engage someone in both writing and conversation.  The only rules here are it must be 1) pertinent to the subject, 2) have a clear beginning, middle, and end, and 3) if you need to end it with, "and then I found $5" to make it more interesting, then just keep it to yourself.

This is a bad anecdote:

I worked in a museum for five years.

This is a good anecdote:

I was the "dinosaur lady" at the museum for five years. Children would recognize me on the street and ask for a selfie.

Not only does it tell people how long you worked at the museum, it insinuates you were good at your job because children remembered you and thought of you as a celebrity. 

I created a filing system.

Blah blah blah


I introduced Microsoft Access to the office, which my supervisor implemented company-wide.

If you must talk about something boring, at least turn it into an accomplishment.

I went to Thailand.

Bangkok is the most visited city in the world.  This is a non-story.
 

We went to Soi Cowboy in Bangkok and saw a ping pong show.  I thought it was a ping pong tournament, but it was definitely not.

 

Now this story is going somewhere. I can't write the rest of it, because it belongs to Lee and is horrendously inappropriate and shouldn't exist anywhere on the internet.

 

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Look, I haven't made it my life's mission to fix the entire internet's writing.  I'm not Ira Glass, who delivers his words like he's been planning to say them since he spawned onto our planet. However, I'm a decent writer who has received at least one compliment from a non-relative who had no reason to flatter me.

Finally, I have the urge to tell you why this post even materialized.  I'm a big Pinterest user (or "pinner" to use the appropriate lingo).  There is a surprising number of fan fiction blurbs about celebrities like One Direction, Tom Hiddleston, Benedict Cumberbatch, and other men who can make a young lady's (or man's) heart palpatate with a low-res black and white photo.  Obviously, I googled more fan fiction. Some have chapters -- CHAPTERS! I had never read fan fiction until two weeks ago, and it opened up a new world, I soon realized, I don't like.

Here's why:

 

It's impossible to thoughtfully write about a real human being you don't actually know. If that human being is a celebrity, then you're writing about your personal perception of a person which could be different than someone else's, and open yourself to a lot of criticism.  It's one thing to declare your love at the top of your lungs from a mountain top, but the mountain doesn't yell back with the ferocity of teen Twitter.

You have a story.  You have pieced together, arguably, a work of literature that is sentimental and creative. It's easy to turn yourself into the protagonist and find the right language to convey your perspective because you're writing about the one subject in the world you know everything about. Keep that story, but replace the celebrity with your own character who you know inside and out.  The greatest part of making something up is you can eschew trite, non-descriptive language that keeps you safe from being wrong because you, simply, cannot be wrong. 

 

Instead of describing how Harry Styles was "clearly emotional when he walked his daughter down the aisle," maybe create Jonathan who...

...watched Stella affix her grandmother's veil to her hair, which she wore unstyled with her brown curls falling over her shoulders like a blanket -- a trait she inherited from Jonathan. She had spent her teenage years battling her hair with chemicals and a straightening iron, so for just a split-second, his heart jumped, pushing out all of the regrets and fears he had collected for the last twenty-eight years.  His eyes welled-up as she turned from the mirror to face him, smiled her mother's smile, and shrugged as she took her bouquet from the vase and looped her arm under his. She asked, "Ready?"

YEAH. I can turn on the cheese.  Maybe I should write fan fiction.

Runaway Imagination

I've only written about my mother once.  It was for a class at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, called "Intro to the Personal Narrative." When I wrote the essay, I wasn't thinking about Mom.  It was supposed to be about me and the beginning of a long journey that ended where I was at the point in my life. Mom was a character I had created to help the narrative.

Yesterday, we were at lunch and Mom told us a story about her little brother's death that I wasn't prepared for.  She said it nonchalantly as part of our conversation. Throughout my life, I've gotten small details of what happened to her family during the Khmer Rouge, but I hadn't heard any graphic details since I was six.

When I read my essay again, I saw that it wasn't about my millennial need to give myself some validation for my personal and academic meandering, but rather about Mom.  It's about her sacrifices and everything she went through that ended with raising my sister and me.

I'm not ready to talk about that lunch conversation, but I wanted to share this essay, which I found among hundreds of forgotten documents on my Google Drive account. Consider it an introduction to a deeply personal subject that will take me a lifetime to understand.

I woke up because my throat hurt and I was sweating. Mom always worried Amanda and I would get cold at night so she'd sneak a few extra blankets on our beds. In her mind, death by dehydration took a backseat to hypothermia. In the morning, she would wake us up for school and assume I had a fever because I was always soaked in sweat. My thirst may have saved me from the ten extra minutes it took for her to take my temperature and decide not to make me stay home.

The blurry light creeping through the mini blinds was bright enough that I didn't need to grope around for my glasses. By now, I could expertly navigate the trails that Mom plowed through our mountains of Barbies. I pushed the covers to the end of the bed, and tiptoed to the bathroom so I didn't wake Amanda. Then, out of nowhere, I stepped on a rogue Barbie shoe. I jumped up and down, muffling my cries of pain, knowing that Amanda would throw something at me in a drowsy stupor if I woke her up. After gathering my composure, I limped the rest of the way to the bathroom and closed the door behind me.

I turned on the light. Big mistake. I immediately turned it off. Once that big white flash went away, I grabbed a Dixie cup from the dispenser next to the sink and turned on the faucet. I held my hand underneath the running water until it was ice cold, dipped the cup under the water, lifted it to my lips, and gulped it down in one breath. I repeated this action until I replaced all of the fluids that were now soaked into my flannel bed sheets.

After a dramatic, satisfying sigh of relief, I opened the medicine cabinet and reached for a pair of tiny scissors. I cut into the side of the Dixie cup. I was carefully edging around the bottom of the cup when the hallway light turned on and Mom opened the door.

"TAVE! AGAIN?! You're not thirsty, you're just wasting our cups!" Her eyes were tired, and I knew that she had just finished a long night of sewing doctors’ scrubs in our basement. I knew that it had to be at least midnight.

"No, Mom, I'm really thirsty!" I was still working on pronouncing my R's.

Even though the wear of working for sixteen hours was visible on her face and body, Mom noticed I had been sweating and put her hand on my forehead. Her frustrated scowl quickly turned into one of panic. She took me back to bed and pulled the covers back over me. Very quietly, she trekked through our room, stepping on the same Barbie shoe I had earlier. Unlike me, however, she gave a small wince and carried on to her bedroom, carefully closing the door.

I threw off the covers and opened the top drawer of my nightstand. I had been clutching the bottom circle of the Dixie cup and excitedly threw it into the drawer. There was the distinct sound of plastic shuffling around. I slowly and silently closed the drawer, turned over, and fell asleep.

The next morning I woke up to a dull blow to my thigh. I could barely open my eyes, but saw Amanda’s blurry figure sitting upright in her bed. As I made a move to find my glasses, the bean bag she threw at me fell off the bed.

“Manda! Why?” I sat up then fell forward on my bed, causing my glasses to fall off the bed and get lost among the Barbie dolls. A moment passed and I almost fell back asleep until THUD. “WHAT WAS THAT?!”

She had thrown her favorite doll at me. It was ragged pieces of cloth with stuffing poking out of the stitches that has been constantly replaced by Mom. It’s name was Amanda. Our father had given it to her when she was too young to know there were more names in the world besides Amanda. After it hit me in the head, there was a weak tinkering sound from the wind-up music box inside – the only part of that doll that still functioned as it did on day one.

“GET UP!” Even as a ten-year-old, Amanda was uptight about being early for school. I didn’t care as much, so I sat there for a few more seconds, then pushed my feet to the ground and dragged them to the bathroom. I brushed my teeth and gulped down a few Dixie cups of water, then proceeded to cut up both my and Amanda’s cups and taking the bottoms to my top nightstand drawer. Amanda raised her eyebrow, but didn’t stop to ask me what I was doing. Her curiosity about my new hobby faded over the weeks and became nothing more than a way to waste precious moments that could be spent getting ready for school.

Each morning, Amanda would be downstairs, already on the couch watching Power Rangers, when I finally clamored down the stairs fully dressed. Our backpacks were in the exact same corner of the entryway from the day before. Mine was pink, hers was purple. Together, we’d take them to the kitchen where mom had our lunches packed in brown bags with our names scrolled in her curly handwriting, with a small heart underneath them. She used to draw a pair of lips as a “kiss,” but stopped after we told her it was embarrassing. Amanda’s lunch always had a peanut butter sandwich, an orange, and a Snicker’s bar. Mine had a jelly sandwich, an apple, and a Milky Way bar. Once, Mom switched our names and we ended up going hungry that day. Now, we’re ready for school.

Colorow Elementary had recently implemented a “reading block.” Someone in a suit decided that pretending to stare at a page of a book was more productive than the teacher teaching, so we always had to have reading material in our desk. I bent the rules and brought National Geographic. Mom had a subscription and would keep all of the volumes in a magazine rack by “my” loveseat. No one else sat in that loveseat, so I had constant access to these magazines and would flip through the pages thousands of times until I memorized all of the pictures. I couldn’t read most of them, but I refused to get a subscription to National Geographic Kids.

Before we left for school, I grabbed an issue that had a long article about Pompeii. It was old and after months of sounding out words and memorizing pictures, I had finally finished the article, with a lot of help from Mom. Even though she was fluent in English, she still wasn’t a native speaker and there were some words that would stump both of us. Sometimes, she would have to pause for a few minutes because the images of the skeletons – the people -- who died embracing each other made her cry.

So I sat there in class, with my National Geographic open. My teacher, Ms. Whitworth, had stopped questioning whether I was actually reading the material or just looking at pictures. She learned her lesson one day when she took it away from me, asked me what Pompeii was, and listened to my three-minute summary of the article. Now she was focused on getting me to read something new, but something about this dead city was very much alive to me.

Weeks before this article came out, there was a Discovery Channel documentary about Pompeii. At first, I walked into our small living room and wondered what happened to Nickelodeon. I sat on my loveseat, scowling, until the talking head disappeared and the camera slowly crawled in and out of these buildings that were once homes, but now graves. Like, a frozen moment in time, these people were entombed with their rings still on their fingers, with their bread still in the oven, and with their children crouching near them, probably frightened. Briefly pulling my attention from the TV, I looked at Mom who had a tissue in her hand, wiping her eyes. Then she went to the basement and I could hear the familiar buzz of the sewing machine.

Though we weren’t doing it as often, Amanda and I would get sick of TV and follow Mom to the basement. She kept a black garbage bag of scrap fabric for us to play with. We learned to use these industrial machines at an early age, but Amanda was scared of them and would leave most of the sewing to me. Even now, her ironing skills greatly surpass mine, but asks me to make things like aprons or bedspreads. This was one side of the basement. The other side was a different world that Mom had created just for us.