Finding Your Voice Week Day Two: Developing the Capacity for Original Thought

If you want to develop an original voice, you must develop the capacity for original thought. The latter might seem well-nigh impossible, but it’s not something one conjures out of nothingness. You must develop it like a muscle. That requires a lot of exercise before you grow strong, and cliches are the wheelchair you use to get places because you’re too comfortable to walk.

You don’t develop muscles in a wheelchair. You don’t develop the capacity for original thought by regurgitating phrases and metaphors you’ve heard before. Expected phrasing will prevent you from growing strong, so be suspicious of anything that’s too easy to say. You must occasionally annihilate everything you’ve heard before and develop your own turn of phrase, your own imagery, your own symbolism and rhythm.

Writers must invent. They must innovate. They must forge ahead to places none have been before. They must redefine the world in which we live, and the only way to learn to do those things is by throwing the cliches away. Give your inner writer the opportunity to grow stronger. Get out of the wheelchair.

Maybe you’re a genius. You just haven’t given yourself the opportunity to become the best you can be because you’re always writing the first words that come to mind.

Antjie Krog has a long list of awards to her name, and in Body Bereft, she spoke about the process of ageing. She wrote:

How do you say this
I truly don’t know how to say this
your seasoned neatly clipped beard is perhaps
too here, too close for language, too grey with grit

I really don’t know how to write your ageing body
without using words like ‘loss’ or ‘fatal.’ I don’t know
I don’t know why the word ‘wrinkle’ sounds so banal
I simply do not know how ageing should sound in language

In the meantime the irises of your infamous blue eyes
have over the years buckled under green
more stuttering now but two enduring sincere

shadows that have loved me a whole life long.

Each line is wholly original. This has impact. As a reader, you are fully engaged, and each idea reverberates in a still, small place inside you.

No poet begins writing like that. This is something you must grow into, and the only way to grow is to try.

If you’re using cliches, you're removing your capacity to try.

Prompt

Write a poem or piece of flash fiction about ageing. Some of you are young, some not so young. That's fine. Write about your own experience of ageing thus far.