For several years now, I’ve been trying to redevelop my writing voice. I’ve written endless pages of garbage trying to discard the words and phrases that became stuck in my throat after 10 years of academia. Academic writing, for those of you that have never done it relentlessly, is conventional, in every sense of the word. You present papers at conventions (okay, conferences, but not that dissimilar). You are harangued by editors (and peers) whose ideas of punctuation were formed by reading Romantic novels (meaning novels from the early to mid 1800s, not novels from Harlequin). You cannot be creative with academic writing. Well, you can, but there will invariably be someone who marks out all the good stuff until you’re left with a dry, academic paper, and all of your conversational grammar has been wrought into a wooden, prescriptive grammar that no one in their right mind would speak aloud.
This is not to say that there aren’t excellent academic writers. There are, and I know several of them. But for me, writing academically was like putting on a suit and a starchy, ironed, button-up shirt. Sure, I could do it, but it never felt comfortable. I’d much rather wear jeans and a sweatshirt. I like to start sentences with “And.” I like to treat commas like rainbow sprinkles. I like to string words together simply because they sound pretty. Sound, I think, is essential to writing, even more essential than, say, whether or not you use “you” in a sentence. Everything I do when I write connects to sound. And the sounds of academia are frequently, it seems, the sounds of asses braying on an Orwellian farm. I’d much rather listen to the sounds of Billie Holiday and T’ai Freedom Ford, thank you very much.
It’s not that I regret academia, or ever being an academic. I don’t. Not really. I regret not following creative writing the way I wanted to, of being too afraid of being poor(er), of being too excited that my dad finally took an interest in my life when he advised me to write on the side, and pursue something else as a career. I tried, but when I went to grad school, I chose English, because I couldn’t imagine doing anything else with my life, and by that point, also couldn’t imagine writing for a living. Hencely, I became an academic. (Yes, I made that word up. You can only make up words in academia if they begin with “post” and end with “ism.” Here, I do what I want!) And I liked teaching, and reading, and losing myself in ideas, but I never got to create the way I wanted to. I never got to write, really write, in my jeans and sweatshirt, fully at home in my skin. And I sorta got used to the suit and the starchy shirt, ill-fitting as it was.
Post-academia, I kept trying to put on the starchy shirt and make it fit, even though it never got more comfortable. Eventually, I started writing for me, and it was painful to see how awkward and strange my voice had become. So I wrote every day, trying to find my voice again. It’s still different. It’s still feels strange sometimes to hear myself on the page. And god knows, I miss the lightning speed of my former voice, when I could write 10 or 20 pages in a matter of hours.
But I like this newer voice, too. It’s not done yet, but the jeans are broken in and the sweatshirt is oversized and comfortable. There’s a lot I’m still test driving. But test driving is the nature of writing, too. And it’s one of the parts I really like.