Claire Fullerton's Blog: A Writing Life - Posts Tagged "writing"

I’ve heard it said the first important step in writing is finding ones voice. I’ve also heard authors confess that when they write, they don’t read another author for fear of voice influence, however deep within the subconscious another’s voice may land. Perhaps some writers think another’s voice may outshine their own, tempt them to compare themselves with some imagined standard of excellence, throw them into self-doubt where they fear their own voice doesn’t measure up to the lofty mark of a more firmly established writer.
I believe all writers are on a forward momentum, ever-evolving path. Writing is an unending learning curve, a growth process of trial and error which often involves a weeding out process of that which does not work in the pursuit of fine tuning the craft.
All writers have the same aim: they seek more clarity, more ways of being unique, more ways of being succinct, more ways of commanding the English language, and it is an individual process contingent upon the myriad elements that make up the specific writer.
As for me, I write from the voice in my head—the voice with the inner-monologue running rampant whether I like it or not. I think it is born from my thought process; it is personal, it is intimate; it stands outside of judgment; it depicts my view of the world, it is unapologetically who I am. Another’s voice may have more bells and whistles, but they are not mine, so emulating another would therefore be a falsehood.
There is every reason to believe that in the literary world, there is room for us all. Writers should not doubt this. They should honor their voice with a devil-may-care attitude then get about the business of learning the craft to give them the forum in which to contribute to the world in their blessedly unique way.

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I have cause to travel up and down the California coast on a regular basis - a five hour journey through vineyards and far reaching hills on either side of the 101 freeway that is surprisingly rural in all directions. While my husband drives, our two German shepherds sleep in the back. I stare out the window where my imagination climbs every verdant incline and taps out a cadence along every golden path. I pretend I’m a part of all I survey, that I belong to the vista in a way that is so personal it colors my emotions with nostalgia as I sail through a moving parallel reality.
Sooner or later, I put in my earphones and scroll through my musical playlist, which turns the trip into an audio/visual experience, but I noticed just yesterday that once I do, the songwriter takes over completely.
I am in awe of good songwriters and here’s why: they can give me an entire experience in under five minutes. With finely crafted brevity, they establish a premise, set a scene, and evoke an emotion that my entire being accepts without question. For an instant, the lines become blurred between the songwriter’s range of experience and my own. Good songwriters write in a way that is so accurate and truthful, it makes the human experience uncomplicated by virtue of the fact they encapsulate it so simply. They don’t need to be wordy or superfluous, they get right to the point and call things by name with well-appointed clarity. They are urgent in their cards on the table concision, and this teaches me all I need to know about writing in general. I’ve been shown from songwriters that writing is about the right words in the right place without the distraction of bells and whistles. When I write, I keep this in mind as a principle and it gives me guidelines that are naturally resonant, which helps me stick to my point and say what I have to say.

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A writer’s life is a build, a constant state of becoming that begins with the secret, intuitive assumption that one must take a leap of faith and begin. There is no there to get to, only an unquenchable need that compels and drives on with inexplicable fervor. For me, it began with keeping a journal. I was young and fearful of admitting my internal mechanisms and uncertain of who would care to hear. But I felt the need to document my life in the hope that the singular act of private articulation would reveal to me who I was in the grand scheme of my self-involved adolescence. This is the prompting that leads a writer to the table; the need to explain oneself to oneself. Keeping a journal discredits all thoughts of life’s arbitrariness and puts the pendulum of cause and effect into clear perspective. One can keep current while they create a framework, then look back years later and chart the incremental construction of their personal history.
But what happens when one evolves from journal keeping to writing as a way of life? Certainly it’s an insular existence that cannot be shared. It’s like taking that running monologue we all have in our head and laying it down on purpose for no other reason than it seems the thing to do. The form of the dissertation is entirely incidental; some writers aim to inform, and others seek to enlighten or entertain. To me, it’s all the same thing: a way of communicating, and for this to happen, it takes time. And isolation. And commitment to following through no matter the length of the project.
I’ve heard it said that writers don’t write because they want to; they write because they must. What’s imperative for writers is the ability to write then throw caution to the wind. All that’s required is to say what you have to say, and then get out of the way to make room for the possibility that the devil may care after all.

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I have an eighteen year old niece named Sara. She is long of limb and long of hair, with angel-blue eyes so reminiscent of my brother that they haunt me. She is in her freshman year at a liberal arts college in Oregon, and I heard about her curriculum yesterday over the phone. She has yet to decide on her major and is therefore taking courses aimed at a well-rounded education: physics and math classes I can’t even pronounce; chorus; and a creative writing class to balance the score. And I, being unqualified to discuss any of her classes beyond one, grasped the subject of her creative writing class and said, “Tell me about it.” She said that after all the papers she is expected to write for her other classes, she finds it hard to employ her “creative side.” It was there I combed the hair of my advanced years and dove in with a life jacket.
I don’t think people have a creative side; I think people are creative by virtue of their existence. Writers need only do two things: open the door within, and give themselves permission to write. The way I experience it, writing is not any different than thinking. It seems to me we all have a voice that resides within like divinity’s spark, and what writers seek to do is express this in the hopes that they are understood. Nobody can tell a writer exactly how to do it, because it is a personal, individual process. In my mind, telling someone how to write is like saying, “Let me tell you about how to be you.” Mind you, people can hand you tried and true craft and form, but they are only guidelines aimed at reining in creativity and putting it in a manageable place. And because I’m convinced we all have so much spinning around internally without a rudder, it seems to me writing takes that tangled ball of yarn and gives a person the first thread to straighten it out. It charts a course for linear thinking, for organized expression, and is ultimately an outlet for individual truth.
But writers have to see themselves as creative first. They have to understand that they fundamentally are, and see it as a gift. If they do, they can take pen to paper, as it were, and let it shine.
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I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. Now that my book, ‘’Dancing to Irish Reel” is out, I’m being asked the inevitable question, “How much of the story is true?” Everyone who knows me personally knows I picked up and moved to the west coast of Ireland without much of a plan, and that I stayed for a year. Add that to the fact that the book is written in the first person, that the narrator’s interior monologues in the story are unabashedly confessional to the point of unnecessary risk. I’ve been told the book reads like a memoir, and for that, I can only say I’m glad because this was my intention. I can see why readers might think the entire story is true.
But writers make a choice in how to lay out a story, and in my case, I wrote the book based on the kind of books I like to read. I’m a one-trick pony kind of a reader. I want an intimate narrator’s voice with which I can connect. I want to know exactly whom I’m listening to so that I can align with a premise that makes the story’s swinging pendulum of cause and effect plausible. The way I see it, there are always bread crumbs along the path to the chaotic predicaments people find themselves in, and although many are blind to their own contributions, when I read a book, I want to be the one who divines how the character got there.
What fascinates me about people are their backstories. Oh, people will tell you their highlights, alright, but they rarely reveal their churning cauldron of attendant emotions; they rarely confess to carrying acquired fears. We all want to appear bigger than our own confusion, and the key word here is “appear,” because when it comes to faces, most people like to save theirs. This is the point I wanted to make in the story, but I also wanted “Dancing to an Irish Reel,” to be about discovery, so I started with a narrator who is a fish out of water: a twenty-five year old American ensconced in a specific culture she uncovers like the dance of seven veils. In the midst of this there enters an Irish traditional musician named Liam Hennessey. He is from the region, of the region, and therefore it can only be said he is because of the region in a way that is emblematic. From a writer’s point of view, the supposition offers the gift of built-in conflict, most poignantly being the clash of the male-female dynamic set upon the stage of differing cultures trying to find a bridge. And I can think of no better culture clash than America and Ireland. I say this because I happen to know to the Irish, we Americans are a bit brazen, we have the annoying habit of being direct. But the Irish are a discreet lot, culled from a set of delicate social manners that seem to dance around everything, leaving an American such as I with much guesswork.
No matter how they shake it, writers write about what they know, even if it has to be extracted from varying quadrants that have no good reason for being congealed. “Dancing to an Irish Reel” is a good example of this: it came to me as a strategy for commenting on the complexities of human beings inherent longing to connect—the way we do and say things that are at variance with how we really feel in the interest of appearances, and how this quandary sometimes dictates how we handle opportunities in life. In my opinion, there is no better playing field on which to illustrate this point than the arena of new found attraction. I’m convinced the ambiguity of new love is a universal experience, and since the universe is a big wide place, and since ‘”Dancing to an Irish Reel” has something to say about hope and fear and the uncertainty of attraction, it occurred to me that I might as well make my point set upon the verdant fields of Ireland because everything about the land fascinated me, and I wanted to take every reader that would have me to the region I experienced as cacophonous and proud: that mysterious, constant, quirky, soul-infused island that lays in the middle of the Atlantic, covered in a blanket of green, misty velvet.
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I was tired of living in Los Angeles. I’d moved out to the big city with stars in my eyes from my hometown on the Mississippi river to work in the music business. At the age of twenty-six, it was stimulating and thrilling, but after four years, L.A. lost its glitter: the bohemian quality I once loved in my West Hollywood neighborhood began to fade, and all I could see were the cracks in the sidewalk on the seedy side of town.
Turning thirty was an awakening, that’s when it occurred to me the music business is best populated by the youth of the day, and I began to evaluate the course of my life. I kept thinking if I didn’t make a change, I’d wake up one day to find myself with permanent roots in the cacophonous city, where it seemed everyone jockeyed for position in one form or another. I was uninspired. I was tired. I wanted serenity; I needed to get a plan.
I resigned from my job in the music business and took a position in client services at a thriving post production facility in Santa Monica, where I was one of twelve assistants to the clients from major movie studios that came to the cluster of recording studios to synchronize audio with film. It was a unique job, something new and different, but I was still living in Los Angeles. A sensitive friend addressed my discontent by asking two simple questions: “If you could live anywhere, where would it be, and what would you be doing?”
Ireland was my answer. I saw myself in a best case scenario living upon verdant fields partitioned by grey-stone walls on the way to the sea, writing poetry and novels—whichever came spilling from the resources of creativity suited me fine. “There’s only one way to do this,” I said to my friend, “and it starts with a plane ticket.”
It seemed once I’d made the decision, the powers that be aligned in support. After I gave my resignation to the managing director, uncanny things transpired: I’d be standing on a Los Angeles street corner just as a stranger approached to exchange pleasantries in an unmistakable Irish accent. I received useful information repeatedly from surprising quarters and it gave me a feeling of being in tune with destiny. I was certain I’d made the right decision by following my bliss.
And there I was a year later: living by the sea on the west coast of Ireland and employed in the music business because everything had fallen into place. I was living a life imagined: I had friends, a rented home, a schedule, a purpose, all from a start-up business dedicated to the careers of Irish musicians. My life had certainty and security. I grew accustomed to Ireland and its cultural nuances and truly believed I’d found my place in the world.
But the rhythm of life has an ebb and flow. By the end of that year, the tides started to turn so subtly they were imperceptible, up until the moment there was no recourse. My non-profit place of employment lost its funding, and there I was in a foreign country without a job. I was baffled and bewildered. What had seemed like destiny became ambiguity, and I was indecisive and riddled with doubt over every option I weighed. I was not ready to leave Ireland; I hadn’t exhausted her charms and it seemed all was lost, that fate had conspired against me.
I’m the kind of person that possesses an optimistic faith in the goodness of things, that life has meaning and God has a plan. The quandary was I couldn’t see anything beyond the roads that appeared blocked (and two weeks of feeling this way is two weeks too many.) I prayed, I meditated, I believed, and I vacillated between hope and despair. Then a letter arrived at my door.
One of the things I had to accept about living in rural Ireland was it took ten days for a letter to arrive from California. I lived way out in the countryside where there were no mailboxes, so the post master would leave my mail at my door. One day during my quandary, I leaned down to inspect a letter at my doorstep, recognizing right away it came from the United States. I tore open the envelope to discover an offer from the post production facility in Santa Monica, reviewing it twice in complete surprise. “The woman who hired you in client services is leaving to have a baby,” the letter began, and by the time I got to the managing director’s signature, I realized he had offered me her job. My first reaction was complete resistance. No way in the world I’d ever go back to L.A. I put the letter back in its envelope and threw it on the kitchen counter until my disbelief compelled me to read it once more. It was then I noticed the letter’s post mark. Squinting my eyes, I brought into focus the postdated stamp, which was only three days before. “What is this?” I said out loud, “divine intervention?” I considered and weighed until I arrived at the conclusion I didn’t have a choice. Yet all the while, a voice in my head whispered “Follow this, you don’t have to know why.”
“Follow this to Los Angeles?” my petulance screamed, but that is exactly what I did. I talked myself into returning to Los Angeles by holding to faith, by deciding this may be a stepping stone along a bigger path, that perhaps someone or something would be waiting where I least expected.
Today, I am married to the man who wrote that letter. In March of 2015, "Dancing to an Irish Reel," the novel I wrote inspired by my year in Ireland was published. I now have a way of deciphering life’s supposed ambiguities, which is to say I now see life’s quandary’s as full of potential. When in doubt, I don’t fall into despair, instead, I look for a bigger picture, and if I keep my faith and narrow my eyes, I swear I can see divinity.

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