How to Let Your Voice Out

So let’s assume you have a voice yodeling inside that compels story telling. Agreed? Then you want to be a writer, a dancer with verbs, or maybe one who checks into a beltway motel with a dictionary, a yellow pad and a bottle of name-your-poison.

The voice wants out and will plumb your thoughts and springboard through your emotions as it burrows a hole straight up.

Now don’t go gopher on me. Instead, work your imagination into a fertile field and aerate the soil of your soul. Get it right and we all breathe better.

Last century, I’d read The Paris Review of interviews with authors. I wanted to know how they worked, the tools, the body position, how they tuned in and found the channel. It was all short wave to me. Recently I found more threads of this weave in a 1986 column by William F. Buckley, once editor of the National Review. Trust me, he used to be famous. Here’s what I learned. Yes, I’m plagiarizing.

Anthony Trollope rose at 5 every morning, drank his tea, performed his toilette and looked at the work done the preceding day. He would then begin to write at 6. He set himself the task of writing 250 words every 15 minutes for three and one-half hours. Indeed it is somewhere recorded that if he had not, at the end of 15 minutes, written the required 250 words he would simply ''speed up'' the next quarter-hour, because he was most emphatic in his insistence on his personally imposed daily quota: 3,500 words.

Erle Stanley Gardner dictated his detective novels nonstop to a series of secretaries, having previously pasted about in his studio 3-by-5 cards reminding him at exactly what hour the dog barked, the telephone rang, the murderer coughed. He knew where he was going, the plot was framed in his mind, and it became now only an act of extrusion.

Margaret Coit wrote in her biography of John C. Calhoun that his memorable speeches were composed not in his study but while he was outdoors, plowing the fields on his plantation. He would return to his study and write out what he had framed in his mind. His writing was an act of transcription.

Albert Jay Nock's book on Thomas Jefferson proved that he made fewer corrections on an average page than Buckley would write into a typical 600-word column. Clearly Nock knew exactly what he wished to say and how to say it; prodigious rewriting was, accordingly, unnecessary.

Buckley Jewels:
1) It is not necessary to know how your protagonist will get out of a jam into which you put him. It requires only that you have confidence that you will be able to get him out of that jam.
2) You are, while writing, drawing on huge reserves: of opinion, prejudice, priorities, presumptions, data, ironies, drama, and histrionics. And these reserves you enhance during practically the entire course of the day, and it doesn't matter all that much if a particular hour is not devoted to considering problems of your work-in-progress.
3) You can spend an hour playing the piano and develop your capacity to think, even to create; and certainly you can grasp more keenly, while doing so, your feel for the priorities of your storytelling.

So, there you have it. So, have at it.

You might want to follow along behind you beast with a bucket of soil, some seeds and a strip of typing white-out in your pocket. Life is worth living, and now that summer is here, worth living with bare feet.

My Kindle is open and begging to see how your voice sails through my imagination, spinnaker billowing like the America’s Cup races on San Francisco Bay, the carbon fiber pontoons groaning, sail lines slapping the mast. I want to be up on a rail with you, going flat-fast with contrails of ocean spray in our wake. Happy summer.

On’Ya, dear readers & writers.

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